[Aljazeera] The proposal that foreign powers acquire land in Africa to stem migration is nothing but 'hipster' colonialism.Listen to me! I'm telling you that shi* will simply not work here.
Last week, Germany's Africa Commissioner Gunter Nooke said that European countries should be allowed to lease land and to build and run cities in Africa as a means of stemming what he views as the unchecked expansion of migration from Africa to Europe. For Nooke, allowing the "free development" of these areas would stimulate African economies and create "growth and prosperity" and therefore, reduce the attractiveness of Europe as a destination for migration.
The proposal has elicited mixed reactions. Some have seen it as a novel economic proposition to stem a complex political challenge. Building on existing economic arrangements like Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Economic Processing Zones (EPZs), they argue that this would simply be the next stage in the evolution in the idea that economic exclaves that protect industries from the ravages of the open economy are the best way to stimulate growth. Now, instead of jeans and sneakers, we want to optimise people - or at least labour - by protecting them from the realities and ravages of their societies.
Understandably, there has also been considerable pushback. The word "colonialism" has been raised, with critics arguing that Germany, especially, with its history of violent colonialism and genocide in Namibia, Cameroon, Tanzania and Togo, has no moral authority to even table such an idea. More broadly, many African countries are still struggling to recover from the damage from European colonisation. In many African countries, land tenure is still irregular and skewed to wealthy and often white minorities, engendering generational economic exclusion.
Many African economies have failed to move beyond the extractive, labour intensive economies they inherited from their European counterparts. The violence of colonisation is still very present in Africa - should we really be talking about a new, trendy colonialism that only really hopes to address Europe's paranoia about a possible invasion by black bodies?
The easiest way to get to the heart of what's wrong with this proposal is to go back to basics - what is colonialism and why is it bad? The dictionary defines colonialism as "a policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically". Ultimately, it's about exploiting a power differential in order to reorganise one society for the economic and social benefit of another: saying that one society's economic and social imperatives are more important than the other's.