The Scramble for Europe

Young Africa on its way to the Old Continent

Stephen Smith

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509534579, 9781509534562
• eBook ISBN: 9781509534586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the harrowing situation of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean in rubber dinghies to the crisis on the US-Mexico border, mass migration is one of the most urgent issues facing our societies today. At the same time, viable solutions seem ever more remote, with the increasing polarization of public attitudes and political positions.

In this book, Stephen Smith focuses on 'young Africa' – 40 per cent of its population are under fifteen – anda dramatic demographic shift. Today, 510 million people live inside EU borders, and 1.25 billion people in Africa. In 2050, 450 million Europeans will face 2.5 billion Africans – five times their number. The demographics are implacable. The scramble for Europe will become as inexorable as the 'scramble for Africa' was at the end of the nineteenth century, when 275 million people lived north and only 100 million lived south of the Mediterranean. Then it was all about raw materials and national pride, now it is about young Africans seeking a better life on the Old Continent, the island of prosperity within their reach. If Africa's migratory patterns follow the historic precedents set by other less developed parts of the world, in thirty years a quarter of Europe's population will beAfro-Europeans. Addressingthe question of how Europe cancope with an influx of this magnitude, Smith argues for a path between the two extremes of today's debate. He advocatesmigratory policies of 'good neighbourhood' equidistant from guilt-ridden self-denial and nativist egoism.

This sobering analysis of the migration challenges we now face will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the great social and political questions of our time.

1
The Law of Large Numbers

Africa’s demography shifted profoundly between the two world wars. For one thing, the continent had finally surmounted the ‘microbial shock’ that was an attendant circumstance of its colonization towards the end of the nineteenth century – more on this in a moment. For another, Africa’s principal colonial powers, Great Britain and France, rushed to endow their overseas possessions with the infrastructure and public health services they had previously deemed unnecessary. Britain adopted the Colonial Development and Welfare Act in 1940, while France created its Fonds d’investissement pour le développement économique et social (FIDES) six years later. Although the concept of ‘development’ is widely viewed as a by-product of the Cold War – more realistically, it was a sort of ‘geopolitical rent’ paid to friendly regimes in the Third World – it actually has an older, colonial heritage. The American historian Frederick Cooper, who first wrote about this interwar shift and coined the expression ‘developmental colonialism’, argues that the turn taken in the 1930s aimed not only to increase exploitation, but to reframe Europe’s ‘civilizing mission’ (Cooper 2002). The dominion over populations presented as being ‘different’, if not ‘inferior’, was now justified by the stated purpose of leading them out of underdevelopment. The colonial powers were becoming defensive. In tilting their objective towards the well-being of their ‘subjects’, they were trying to re-legitimize their overseas presence. But this project had an unintended consequence: the newfound emphasis on development and public health would prompt the greatest demographic boom in human history.¹

In the 1930s, Africa’s population began its rapid rise. Clearly, there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ to that historical landmark. Before, as far back in history as we can reach, the continent’s population growth had been barely measurable, if not stagnant, heavily impacted by two demographic catastrophes: the slave trades and the epidemiological impact of the ‘colonial encounter’. After, Africa’s population experienced the most astounding growth ever known – if current trends continue, it will have increased by a factor of 17 between 1930 and 2050. By comparison, the equivalent multiplier for the United Kingdom, whose population was about 45 million in 1930 and will be an estimated 77 million in 2050, is a mere 1.7, or ten times less. If the United Kingdom’s population followed the African curve, the UK would have a population of some 725 million people by 2050, roughly half that of China today.

Before its demographic surge, the population of sub-Saharan Africa had grown by only 20 per cent between 1500 and 1900, from around 80 million to some 95 million inhabitants; during that same period the population of Europe, like that of China, had quintupled. Why this disparity? Sub-Saharan Africa’s low population density, rudimentary agricultural practices, tropical diseases, lack of hygiene, high infant and maternal mortality were all contributing factors. But only one explanation cuts across the longue durée pattern of demographic languor in a continent with such a diversity of ecosystems and political structures as Africa: the slave trades.

The deportation of some 28 million enslaved Africans between the seventh and nineteenth centuries – more than a millennium – amounts to a demographic trauma for Africa south of the Sahara. Men, and to a lesser extent women and children, were dragged from their homes and communities along four distinct trafficking routes: inside sub-Saharan Africa, mostly as a result of local warfare; across the Sahara to North Africa and the Mediterranean; across the Indian Ocean as part of the so-called ‘Arab’ slave trade; and finally, across the Atlantic as part of the triangular trading system. In the latter case, ships sailed from Europe for Africa with fabrics, metals, pearls, guns and ammunition. These goods were traded for slaves, who were then transported to America – the second leg of the triangle, known as the ‘Middle Passage’. In the New World, the human cargo was replaced by commodities from the region, above all sugar, which was then brought back and sold on the Old Continent, completing the triangle. Though the transatlantic trade had the shortest duration of all the slave trading schemes, lasting roughly from 1500 to about 1850, it was also the most intense, especially between 1650 and 1850. It was also the best organized and the best documented. It is estimated that about 12 million Africans were taken to the New World, most notably to the British and French West Indies (45 per cent), Brazil (30 per cent) and the Spanish-speaking Americas (10 per cent). The territory that is now the continental United States received fewer than 5 per cent of those sold into slavery (Knight 1996: 817). The main slave trading nations were Portugal and Great Britain, which respectively deported 4 and 3 million Africans from their continent. The long-term death rate during the Middle Passage was around 10 per cent, while the trek across the Sahara and towards the Mediterranean was the deadliest, costing the lives of one-fifth of those in captivity.

The mortality of the triangular slave trade has been calculated based on a comparison of the embarkation and disembarkation registries of some 3,000 transatlantic voyages. Taken together, there is documentation preserved for some 25,000 additional voyages, themselves a fraction of an unknown total number. So far, disembarkation records have been found for around 10,000 Middle Passage journeys, while there are only embarkation records for some additional 8,000 trips. Because sub-Saharan population estimates during the slave trade era are themselves extrapolations into the past – ‘retropolations’, so to speak – of censuses from the 1950s (the first with any reliability), it is easy to see how precarious any of these trafficking figures really are. Still, they are far more trustworthy than anything we can say about the impact of the ‘microbial shock’ that hit the continent in the late nineteenth century.

Beginning in 1492, the introduction of European pathogens into the Americas caused a demographic collapse so profound that an estimated nine-tenths of Amerindians perished in the next 100 years. To make up for the loss of the indigenous labour force and maintain the profitability of their plantations, particularly sugar cane, the Portuguese, soon followed by other European powers, turned to Africa for slaves. Africans were slightly less vulnerable to smallpox, influenza, measles or typhus epidemics, in part because they had built up some immunity since Europeans began to arrive on Africa’s West Coast in the fifteenth century (after the introduction of the caravel, a smaller, more agile ship that was able to sail against the prevailing trade winds). Yet the vast majority of Africans, especially in the interior, were utterly unprepared for the microbial and viral shock of the ‘colonial encounter’ in the second half of the nineteenth century. The geographer Sylvie Brunel believes that European colonization resulted in the deaths of ‘one quarter of the population of central Africa in the nineteenth century from disease, massacres and forced displacement, which stripped many Africans of their natural protection against malaria’ (2014: loc. 1236).² The historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch estimates that by 1921, French Equatorial Africa (AEF) – the federation of French colonies in central Africa – had lost one-third of its population (1985: 46–64). Adam Hochschild, the author of King Leopold’s Ghost, holds that half the population, not just in the former Belgian Congo, but across all of equatorial Africa, succumbed to widespread epidemics (1998: 273, 328–9). However, it is impossible to reach any verifiable conclusions. Whatever the extent of the human destruction, the data are simply not that reliable or detailed. It is generally believed that half of all Central Africans and a third of all West Africans perished between 1880 and 1930, a demographic catastrophe comparable to the bubonic plague in Europe: in the fourteenth century, the ‘Black Death’ killed between 30 and 50 per cent of Europe’s population.

Africa: The World’s Youth

After a millennium of demographic stagnation, Africa was faced with two cataclysms – the slave trades and colonization – all of this before the continent began its stupendous growth spurt starting in the 1930s. By then, some 150 million people lived in Africa, constituting about 13 per cent of the world’s population. In 1650, prior to the decimations of the slave trades and the microbial shock, some 100 million people lived on the continent, or about one person out of every five worldwide. Between those two periods, and especially after 1750 when Europe entered its industrial revolution, the world population began to increase more and more rapidly.³ Eighty-five per cent of the world’s population growth has occurred since 1800 – a mere 0.02 per cent of the time humans have walked the earth – and it was not until 1800 that the world’s population even reached 1 billion. It then took a mere 130 years to reach 2 billion; and a further thirty years, until 1960, to add another billion. From that 3 billion mark in 1960, the world’s population more than doubled in fifty years, reaching 7 billion inhabitants by 2010. By 2024, another billion people will have been added.

Despite this prodigious rise, global population decline is already underway. The world reached the zenith of its fertility at the end of the 1960s, having experienced the strongest surge in absolute numbers while that generation came of age in the 1980s. Every year, during the 1980s, 85 million newborns were added to the world’s population; within a dozen years another billion people had joined the planet. Since then, not only are the world’s most developed countries – with Japan in the lead – ageing rapidly, but Latin America and a large part of Asia are ‘greying’ in tandem. The pill and other modern contraceptives have accelerated this trend. In some cases, they have even contributed, along with other factors, to a drop in population growth below the statistical replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman of child-bearing age. Several developed countries – not only Japan but also Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain – have entered the historically uncharted territory of negative population growth in the absence of natural disasters or pandemics. They are now experiencing a demographic ‘paradox of plenty’: in the midst of material abundance, their inhabitants show a dwindling desire for children.

Conspicuously absent from the media-driven population debate, but perhaps even more important than the reproductive revolution, are the constant gains in longevity achieved since the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1900, life expectancy in both Europe and North America was forty-seven years; by 1950 it had leapt to seventy years. Today, that seventy is the worldwide average, and life in retirement – the ‘third age’, after youth and adulthood – is seen as a time of vitality and opportunity.

On a generally ‘greying’ planet, Africa is becoming the exception to the demographic rule. Its sub-Saharan share of global population is the most ‘youthful’ part of the world and the only region where the population will continue to increase between 2.5 and 3 per cent from now until 2050, a pace even more rapid than when the world was at the apex of its population growth. Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth jump from 150 million in 1930 to 300 million in 1960 – when the UN proclaimed a ‘Year of Africa’ as seventeen colonies south of the Sahara became independent – was followed by further growth: the population had doubled again by the time the Cold War ended in 1989. In 2010 it reached 1 billion. By 2050, Africa’s population is expected to reach 2.5 billion. By then, it will be roughly a quarter of the world’s population of 10 billion. By 2100, that proportion will have doubled once again, and Africans will represent some 40 per cent of the world’s anticipated population of 11 billion. Even more significantly, about 60 per cent of all people under the age of fifteen will live south of the Sahara: a solid majority of the world’s youth will be African.

The price of what is available in abundance depreciates, while scarcity increases value. That rule applies today for young people in a world predominantly populated by older adults, as it applied yesterday in Africa, a historically underpopulated continent of 30 million square kilometres, more than three times the size of Europe from Vladivostok to Gibraltar. In 1650, Africa’s population density averaged 3.3 inhabitants per square kilometre compared with forty-five per square kilometre today, and twice as many in 2050 if current trends prevail. Until the dawn of the twentieth century, the continent’s population was its most precious public good, while land was so abundant that it scarcely counted as a factor of production in comparison to human capital. As a result, ‘wealth-in-people’ hoarded by lineagebonded societies – which claim descent from a common ancestor – was the driving force of African history. With this in mind, the African participation in the slave trades could be seen as the functional equivalent of ‘scorched earth’ policies in Europe where, by contrast, the ownership of land – land tenure – has long been the motor of history. In Africa, as we have seen, this longue durée pattern came to an end in the 1930s due to a demographic reversal of fortunes. Cynically speaking, the value of human life has declined in inverse proportion to the continent’s unprecedented population growth (even though the population density of Africa is still low compared with other parts of the world⁴). Conversely, African land is more and more coveted.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, the effects of Africa’s demographic surge are often hidden in plain sight. This makes the perspicacity of a former British Governor of Nigeria – who predicted the consequences of exponential population growth and translated them into policy recommendations – all the more remarkable. In 1955, in a missive sent to London on the subject of universal primary education – the flagship programme that the metropolis wanted to put into place to help counteract the swelling pro-independence tide – he pointed out that the rapid population growth underway was going to make it too costly for the British government to finance free education for everyone. Bucking the strategy of ‘holding on’ to the colonies, the Governor recommended instead speeding up the date of Nigeria’s independence. ‘Inevitably, people will be disappointed’, he argued, ‘and it’s better they be disappointed by the failure of their own leaders than by our actions’ (quoted in Cooper 2002: 76).

A good half century later, the realpolitik inherent in this observation is rarely matched. Indeed, we spend our time evaluating and re-evaluating the legacy of African independence, focusing on the ‘corruption’ and ‘mismanagement’ of various governments, without adding that satisfying the need for public goods and infrastructure of an exponentially growing population wasn’t a viable proposition in the first place. Unlike the British Governor, we prefer moral lessons to insights. In a society where each new generation is more populous than the last, efforts to build enough housing, roads, schools and hospitals are bound to fail. What the French economist Alfred Sauvy called ‘demographic investments’ will inevitably fall short because, no matter how hard one tries, there will never be enough for everyone. In this context, to secure something for oneself, one’s kin or ethnic group – whether a minister seeking a kickback from a foreign investor or a policeman extorting a petty bribe at a roadblock – is merely a rational choice. In fact, it is the same rational choice that the entire population is making by grudgingly accepting this informal taxation as the price...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: A View from the Top of the Population Pyramid
• 1 The Law of Large Numbers
• 2 The Island-Continent of Peter Pan
• 3 Emerging Africa
• 4 A Cascade of Departures
• 5 Europe as Destination and Destiny
• By Way of Conclusion: Some Plausible Scenarios for the Future
• Bibliography
• End User License Agreement