People hold placards during a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, in September.Themba Hadebe/The Associated Press
Richard Poplak is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg and Toronto.
Once, not so long ago, Africa was a place to take stuff from. Now, it’s a place to dump stuff in. “The West,” whatever that means these days, doesn’t seem to see the continent as a place, or even as a market, so much as an idea.
The idea is that Africa is flat (in the Thomas Friedman-ian sense of the term), a tabula rasa that alternately maintains and threatens Western stability and supremacy. That there is no Western stability any longer means ominous things for Africa: It is, in the minds of European and North American policy makers, a garburator for the stuff the West doesn’t want.
Which is to say, foreign migrants.
By way of example, on Nov. 5, 19 West Africans deportees from the United States arrived in Ghana. They were placed in a hotel, and poof! – they disappeared. Their lawyers have lost track of them; most, if not all, were not Ghanaian nationals.
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This, by the way, was not an anomaly. It’s policy. The second Trump administration has scaled up a practice that has been enthusiastically embraced by far-right governments across the developed world. Many of these governments won office by running on an anti-immigration platform – from their perspective, they’re simply fulfilling their mandates. In doing so, they’re both submitting to and driving the fact that geopolitics has been entirely reshaped on the back of migrancy.
Brexit in the United Kingdom, which ushered in nearly 10 years of unmitigated political chaos, was entirely premised on England for the English. Following its adoption under the shambolic idiocy of Boris Johnson (remember him?), it found its apotheosis in a scheme to deport migrants to Rwanda, at a cost to the government of almost half-a-billion dollars before a single person was placed on a plane. (It’s worth noting here that in this case there was a willing seller and a willing buyer – Rwanda’s authoritarian President-for-eternity, Paul Kagame, but more on that in a moment.)
Unsurprisingly, in a 2023 ruling the U.K. Supreme Court found the entire program unlawful. Displaying uncharacteristic pluck, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government kept trying to devise a legal workaround. (As with most things, they failed.) Still, the Rwanda caper broke a taboo – it was now within the political vernacular to deport migrants to countries in which they had never been domiciled, and had never before visited.
The reasons for this are embedded in the exercise itself: In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and in an environment of constant inflation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, sentiment toward immigration has darkened. In 2022, just over a quarter of famously pro-immigration Canadians said there were “too many immigrants coming into the country.” Two years later, that number had risen to 58 per cent.
But hauling people off to Africa and leaving them in countries they can’t pronounce? That’s advanced, upgraded anti-immigrant sentiment, in which the meme-ified cruelty of MAGA is firmly embedded.
The practice of human dumping likely takes its inspiration from a phenomenon known as “waste (or plastic) colonialism.” The term is perhaps too prescriptive – once again, there is a willing buyer and a willing seller, at least at an elite level. But its meaning is obvious – millions of tons of garbage is shipped from the West and dumped in poorer countries every year.
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Beginning in the late 1970s, for two decades China accepted other countries’ rubbish, and in the 2000s backed away from the role of international garbage man. Currently, Ghana is one of the more enthusiastic importers of rubbish – a pollution mitigation scheme that is hardly embraced by the local population. It is thus no great shock that they were similarly amenable to accepting unwanted humans.
One of the most hideous incidents of waste colonialism must be attributed to the commodities trading multinational Trafigura, which was in 2006 was forbidden from dumping a tankerful of toxic-oil slops in Amsterdam and other major ports, and instead found a middleman in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. It was spread throughout the city, injuring thousands.
That said, until very recently, the notion of shoving people into unmarked vans and shipping them off to Africa was the stuff of a Margaret Atwood novel. Then, jogging alongside MAGA and other ethno-nationalist movements in the West, emerged the likes of Rwanda’s Mr. Kagame and other growth-first, ethics-last African pseudo-technocrats. In an unhappy historical confluence, America First could outsource its unwanted people problem. This found the backing of Donald Trump’s compliant Supreme Court, which in June ruled that the federal government could deport migrants to “countries other than their own, without allowing them to present evidence of possible harm they could face.”
This alliance – essentially an exchange of people for cash – mirrors the slave trade, a fact that seems to have escaped no one. There are many explicit and implicit links between the present and the past: In the recently published book The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery, Siddharth Kara vividly details how African elites assisted slave traders in shipping humans out of West Africa into the plantation system. This slimy symbiosis appears to have been revivified for a new era, during which the Western deportee system offers financial upsides to the African ruling class.
Consider some of the worst moments in the brief history of this sunrise industry. Since July, Eswatini, the minuscule kingdom nestled inside South Africa, has accepted 15 men from America, some convicted of offences ranging from murder to sexual assault. These were not men from Eswatini, but rather countries such as Yemen, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Jamaica. It was straight-up flesh for cash – King Mswati III and Eswatini Prime Minister Russell Dlamini, the ruling members of a violent autocracy, allegedly accepted about US$5-million from the Americans for the deal, which calls for the tiny country to accept up to 160 deportees.
South Africans were justifiably nervous that these dangerous offenders could easily escape their Liswati fetters, and filed a number of measures to try block the deal. Meanwhile, over the past month, hundreds of Palestinian refugees mysteriously arrived by charter flight to Johannesburg, sent by a shadowy NGO of no known providence. The South African authorities very literally didn’t know what to do with them.
Eswatini’s regent and his court see all foreign investment flowing into the kingdom as theirs, much the same way as Mr. Trump and his cabal does about American revenue – it’s all an extension of the family business. To a remarkable degree, there is an ideological alignment between far-right Western governments and African tyrannies, who see their objectives as aligned. King Mswati was recently exposed in the media for purchasing more than US$5-million worth of Ferraris for his kinfolk. His court is Mar-a-Lago, except with rhinoceroses.
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Then there is the war-torn fiefdom of South Sudan, one of the top five poorest countries in the world by any measure, a place ripped to pieces by a conflict between two warlords – President Salvo Kier and his long-time opponent, Riek Machar. In July, the country accepted eight deportees from the United States, with the hope that an extended exhange program would result in the removal of local officials from American sanctions lists. Once again, this was a one-on-one deal between elites, with no rational foreign policy engagement at play.
What’s obvious, however, is that we are in a new era of flesh exchange, one where depraved regimes in the West deal with middlemen and warlords in Africa, and every moral taboo is broken in the face of political or financial expediency. None of this makes logical sense – unlike the slave trade, there is no real economic system at work here. Instead, it’s performing the slave trade – meme-ifying it for political clout at home.
As deportations to third-party nations increases, new alliances will be built – between African governments who accept these deals, and Western populists. Mr. Trump and his allies have been determined to walk back the planet to an age of transactional mercantilism, shorn of woke human-rights rhetoric. What better way to do that than cosplay the Atlantic slave trade, for money, in reverse.