I was privileged to participate in a discussion about the motivations for African emigration to the West recently. As someone who scoffs at pedestrian, commonplace explanations and who appreciates iconoclastic, unconventional thinking, I was impressed by one participant, a professor, who dared to challenge the dominant perception of African emigration as a function of economic hardship. 

He was responding to another participant who was essentially rehashing, albeit in a sophisticated manner, the classic African migration tale of economic push and pull, advancing it as the major causal factor in the growing phenomenon of African professionals migrating to the West—what some lamentably call brain drain. 

The professor’s argument was interesting and refreshing. First he debunked the notion that African emigration was a novel phenomenon, a modern problem threatening the demographic and economic fates of both Europe and Africa. Voluntary emigration to areas within and outside the continent of Africa has always been a defining social characteristic of African societies, he argued.  

Secondly, and more importantly for our purpose here, he posited the thesis that such emigrations were not always for economic reasons, but that throughout African history, individuals and groups also migrated for psycho-social comforts. To put it crudely, Africans emigrated for the psychological and social benefits that adventure, discovery, travel, and sojourning provide.  

He didn’t quite make this point, but let me make it for him. The logical destination of his argument is simple: Africans are not very different other peoples in the world. They, like Europeans, Asians, and other peoples of the world, do not only migrate because of economic opportunity, or out of poverty, hardship, destitution, and helplessness. They also migrate because migration sometimes makes you feel better about yourself. Sometimes, migration is, to put it quite simply, its own justification--its own object. It satisfies an innate human psycho-social desire to explore the unfamiliar, the Other, the distant, and the different.  

I make this small addition to the professor’s thesis because I suspect that, like me, he sees that the excessive focus on the economic motivation for African migration, the concept of the African immigrant as an economic refugee, satisfies and reifies the patronizing rhetoric of African helplessness as well as the discourse of African deviation from the West. Let me briefly outline this rhetoric and its implications. Africans are said to be different from Westerners because they purportedly act on basic human instincts such as hunger, lack, and desperation, while Europeans act out of the spirit of curiosity, scientific inquiry, and a quest for knowledge. Africans are sentimental and reactive respecters of bodily instincts while Europeans are proactive pursuers of knowledge and scientific illumination. Africans do not explore; they exploit. Differential migratory impulses therefore contribute to, and express, the Europe-Africa divide. The differences in the motivations of Africans and Europeans who emigrate from their home locales therefore underline, once again, the fact that Africans are fundamentally different from—and inferior to—Europeans. 

To advance an alternate thesis of African emigration, especially one that veers from the well-worn narrative of economic motivation and embraces the “European” motivation for migration (the psycho-social factors) is therefore to make a larger argument against racial essentialism and against the notion that biological and genetic signatures confer innate, inescapable socio-behavioral propensities that differentiate Africans from Europeans in a fundamental way. 

With this insight in mind, let me posit a thesis of my own regarding the issue of African migration to the West. My thesis will attempt to synthesize the popular economic explanation of push and pull, and the refreshingly illuminating thesis of psycho-social relief. If we must account for the range of motivations for African migration to the West, we have to embrace an explanatory hybrid which recognizes the obvious economic motivations as well as the increasingly significant matter of convenient relocation. One does not have to discount one factor in order to stress the other. 

I do not believe that the psycho-social factors that influence migratory decisions are too removed from issues of poverty and economic (and political) alienation. In fact I think that one could formulate a thesis that unites the two explanations, one which sees psycho-social longings as co-extensive with poverty, albeit a different kind of poverty. 

We all know that poverty and economic desperation make people want to move to places of perceived economic opportunity. This is so straightforward that it should not be diluted by any psycho-social invocations.  But if we do not define poverty and hardship only in starkly economic terms but also in terms of what one may call “the quality of life,” then it is possible to see how a successful African professional in Africa, although not poor or desperate in the economic sense, could be poor and desperate in terms of the quality of his life. For analytical convenience, let me call this kind of poverty existential poverty. This kind of poverty is also an impetus for emigration out of Africa.

What I am positing here is what one may also call vicarious poverty, in which poverty is experienced not by the self but indirectly through the trauma of living in the midst of grinding poverty and of being assaulted daily by reminders and images of poverty, economic collapse, infrastructural problems, etc. The psychological torture and burden of such an environment is sometimes as depressing as personal poverty. 

There are two aspects of this phenomenon. The first one revolves around the fact that no matter how wealthy or successful one is in Africa, one still has to depend, to various degrees, on state-provided social services—electricity, water, roads, security, etc. Since as we all know, these services are either poor or non-existent, you are forced to participate in the broader experience of poverty and underdevelopment. Your economic success cannot insulate you from this. Your quality of life will therefore be poor and may motivate you to migrate to the West, where social services are delivered more efficiently. In other words, there is a limit to the amount of comfort that wealth and material success can bestow on you in Africa. 

The second aspect has to do with the ironical psycho-social trauma of being rich or successful in Africa. Being rich in Africa is not the same as being rich in the West. In Africa, the successful professional is confronted daily by acute poverty. He is surrounded and tortured by it. He sees it in his employees, junior colleagues, neighbors, relatives, friends, co-religionists, kinsmen, etc. On his daily commute to work, his sense of accomplishment is diluted and deflated by disturbing and haunting images of destitution and economic hopelessness. These images nibble at his edifice of success, filling him at once with anxieties about what might have been (or what might still be) and guilt. The images erode the joys of economic success and make lofty economic and professional perches seem less secure than they actually are. Insecurities, anxieties, guilt, alienation, dissatisfaction, and depression take a toll on the quality of one’s life. 

I have often wondered how legitimately rich and successful people in my country Nigeria enjoy their successes in the midst of such mind-numbing poverty. What does it feel like to be the big man of the neighborhood even as you behold images of misery around you daily? The intuitive answer is that it must feel great to be one of the few who made it—who “got out.” But I think that this is only one side of the coin. There must be a psycho-social ambivalence that comes with being a rare economic success in a place where people work so hard and still live in unspeakable poverty. Surely it must place some moral burdens on one’s conscience, a constant reminder that one is an aberration. There is, I believe, an unspoken existential turmoil that haunts the successful professional in Africa. 

On top of this emotional torture you have to deal with the envy, jealousy, and resentment of economically unsuccessful neighbors, junior colleagues, employees, and even relatives. The not-so-veiled insinuations, snide remarks, misplaced acts of provocation, mischievous gossips about possible illicit sources of one’s wealth, and other kinds of social ostracism from the majority of one’s countrymen makes one’s materially rich life socially barren.  

You can take refuge in social circles populated by other successful professionals, but this is at best an escape, not a natural social support system. The mutual validation and incestuous interactions of Africa’s small professional elites hardly substitute for unconditional social acceptance in one’s own society. It cannot make up for the inner peace that comes with knowing that you are not the stand-out object of misplaced anger in your poverty-ridden neighborhood.  And it certainly cannot insulate one from the pain of being held wrongly accountable for the misery of others, whose real victimizers are the succession of incompetent and corrupt governments that African countries have been saddled with throughout their post-colonial lives. 

It must therefore be tough and emotionally painful to be rich and successful in Africa, and this is the paradox that I am getting at. It is a different kind of poverty, which is both experiential (at the psycho-social level) and vicarious. It can be summarized as the quality of life dilemma. The quality of your life has little or nothing to do with your economic success; it is essentially a psycho-social effect. In this case, a poor quality of life and its psycho-social effects follow ironically from economic success. In other words, you are poor by being rich. And the quality of your life does not necessarily go up in tandem with your material success. 

Such a condition of economic success and low quality of life could motivate the economically successful African to emigrate to the West, not for further economic success, but in order to obtain some physical and mental distance from the rot back home. In the process, the immigrant hopes to improve the quality of his life, become happier in the psycho-social sense, and relieve himself of the sights, sounds, and experiences that frustrate him in Africa even in his economic success. The satisfaction that being far from the rot at home brings is seldom acknowledged by African migrants, but it is a realty.

What we are dealing with is therefore a migratory flow caused by psycho-social alienation and yearning as well as systemic poverty and infrastructural collapse, which are so ubiquitous that you cannot escape them no matter how materially successful you are. This migration phenomenon departs from the popular notion of Africans migrating to the West to seek economic opportunities that has eluded them at home. It is an aspect of the immigrant tale that has been marginalized and deserves to be told.
 

Robot  Villager

# 1 ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 07.08.2006 00:26

Naija for life  Villager

# 2 Maybe the reason Africans migrate to the west is because they do not realize that their people and cities are as beautiful as those featured in this link: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?p=6361101#post6361101 In all the years I have lived in the United States, I can count the number of women I have seen that can rival the enchanting beauty of those twin peaches and the alluring model from Nairobi. Man, I had forgotten how beautiful Africa is! Posted by Naija for life| 07.08.2006 00:44

cdimkpa  Villager

# 3 Among other reasons, Africans migrate to the West simply in search of better education, better living standards, not necessarily better security (what with the increasing physical attacks from racist elements in Russia and Germany, to mention a few). The currently-running documentary on illegal immigration on the CNN, covered by journalist Sorious from Sierra Leone says it all. Naija for Life, Your photos of African capitals are enchanting and compares to any other nice photos from the West. Perhaps you can also show us photos of the heaps of garbage on the streets of Lagos, Ibadan, Aba, Onitsha, etc etc. For your info also, Cameroun is not in West Africa. It is in Central Africa. Thanks for the photos though. I am already proudly showing them off to my colleagues, and when you do post the ugly garbage pictures, I will hide them from my Oyibo friends. lol Posted by cdimkpa| 07.08.2006 05:31

akuluouno  Villager

# 4 I do not agree that Mungo Park just dressed up one day, without a valid visa and travel documents and just canoed off to Onitsha just to discover River Niger. Omambala was always there and my grandfather told me before he died that he not only swam on Omambala but also fished on it before Mr Park came calling to discover it. Ditto the Royal NigerCompany. Neither did all these people call because they, out of curiosity were on a safari adventure and to meet the people of Onitsha and Asaba. The truth was that before Mr Park left Liverpool, it was already on the throes of economic collapse. Her Majesty then commissioned men like Park to go and source for virgin places where raw materials, labour and mineral sources could be found to feed Her Majesty's industries. Accordingly, any notion that they came to Afrrica on a low fare excursion holiday, not only turns logic upside down but looks like an attempt at revising history. Regarding the adventure by our bold young Africans. I do not think that there is any course for alarm. Europe and America are not only big enough but resource rich enough to take all of the them who are willing. With population fast falling in these areas of the world, nature cannot abhor vaccum. Moreover are we not the apostles of globalism, globalisation and the global village. It is by such migrations that the world would indeed become a global village to the glory of God. Mr Park started globalisation and is the first man with a world travel ticket and even without valid travel documents. Posted by akuluouno| 07.08.2006 07:16

Naija for life  Villager

# 5 =cdimkpa> Naija for Life, Your photos of African capitals are enchanting and compares to any other nice photos from the West. Perhaps you can also show us photos of the heaps of garbage on the streets of Lagos, Ibadan, Aba, Onitsha, etc etc. For your info also, Cameroun is not in West Africa. It is in Central Africa. Thanks for the photos though. I am already proudly showing them off to my colleagues, and when you do post the ugly garbage pictures, I will hide them from my Oyibo friends. lol I never said that Cameroun was in West Africa. I merely posted the link to the pictures to enable any villager interested in images of Africa contrary to the the stereotypical mud-hut-and-Masai-cattle-herder-beside-his-cattle variety, to slake his or her curiosity. As for photos of gabbage heaps, I believe I have already been anticipated in that regard by Uche Nworah's revealing photographs on the subject. I am however baffled by your desire to view unflattering images of Nigeria that would negate the beautiful images embodied by these photographs. The link is intended to inject an interlude of optimism amidst the abundance of articles and opinions in this forum concerning Africa's problems and future prospects. I am however heartened that you are showing the images to your colleagues. Pictures such as these depicting modernization, as well as Africans attending to their daily occasions, sorely deserve expression in the outside world. Just view and hopefully enjoy. Thanks. Posted by Naija for life| 07.08.2006 08:39

pappilo  Villager

# 6 This writer is very good and his article makes a lot of sense. I fall in his category of Africans who emigrated not for economic reasons but in search of a 'better quality' of life. I was offered a permanent job with the bank i did my NYSC in, with a very good salary, i had a car, still lived in my fathers house and i will confidently say i was very very comfortable. But having being a victim of armed robbery thrice in six months in the past and having a lot of near missses with hoodlums. I yearned for the west to seek a better quality of life as I had witnessed on my many visits to the UK. I sacrificed all i had on a plate back home and came to the UK, started as a security guard, got my papers and I am gradually moving up the 'ranks of society'. All i am saying is that the writer has a very valid point that not everyone migrates for economic reasons. Posted by pappilo| 07.08.2006 09:04

Rola  Villager

# 7 Nice article,very illuminating. It is rather ironic that many in Nigeria would rather prefer to be materially rich themselves than desire a good quality of life for the majority.Most of our 'big men and women' especially those in power don't really feel any sympathy with the vast underclass.They don't understand that their individual wealth cannot provide them with good roads,decent health care,regular electricity etc.I agree with you,no matter how rich you are in Nigeria you are still very very poor. Posted by Rola| 07.08.2006 09:25

Uche Nworah  Villager

# 8 Ebe Africans and the people world over migrate for different reasons, the usual reasons are to escape political persecution, to join spouses, to get western education or for economic reasons. It appears that these factors also apply to Nigerian immigrants according to the findings of my study conducted in 2005 amo.... What i rather find peculiar in the study is the way some Nigerians easily 'discard' their Nigerianness once they are in the west. This in a way robs Nigeria of the benefits of their talents, skills and resurces acquired in the west. Posted by Uche Nworah| 07.08.2006 09:51

N.A.R.  Villager

# 9 Ebe2, This article is a breath of fresh air! A nice read for a change! I have something similar in the works and will post it when time permits. Indeed there are a number of us who are outside Nigeria for reasons beyond economic considerations only. Posted by N.A.R.| 07.08.2006 11:48

EezeeBee  Villager

# 10 =uche nworah>Ebe Africans and the people world over migrate for different reasons, the usual reasons are to escape political persecution, to join spouses, to get western education or for economic reasons. It appears that these factors also apply to Nigerian immigrants according to the findings of my study conducted in 2005 amo.... What i rather find peculiar in the study is the way some Nigerians easily 'discard' their Nigerianness once they are in the west. This in a way robs Nigeria of the benefits of their talents, skills and resurces acquired in the west. Uche, It could be argued that many of the immigrants actually provide, on balance, an intellectual asset to the West as many of us put to use skills we 'acquired' (developed) in Nigeria BEFORE emigrating. Ebe, This article reminds me so much of a conversation I had about two years ago on the BBC's Have Your Say. The person before me (unfortunately) was a war refugee from Sierra Leone and had a long story about virtually walking across the Sahara etc. I have no reason to disbelieve him and as subsequent reports show, many people DO go through a great deal to get to the West. When I began to speak and it emerged that I merely emigrated out of curiosity, believe it or not, the lady couldn't wait to cut me off! I can only guess that I didn't have a sufficiently pathetic 'sob' story to relate! Good article with worthy food for thought! Posted by EezeeBee| 07.08.2006 12:32

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