Between the late 18th century and the late 19th century, Britain sent more than 160,000 convicts and others deemed undesirable to Australia as punishment. Today, the threat of being sent to Africa is being used by the US to deter migrants, and activists complain that the continent is being used as a “human dumping ground”.
Take the 1,100 Afghans who have been living at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar since 2021, after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Accompanied by their families, these are people who had worked with the Americans and left because they feared reprisals by the Taliban if they had stayed. They had expected to be allowed to settle in the US, but all asylum applications by Afghans have been frozen since last November, after an Afghan national shot two members of the National Guard near the White House, one of whom later died.
Now reports say they have been given a choice: go back home, or be sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo – a country that has suffered several humanitarian crises and where conflict has caused the deaths of six million people over the past 30 years.
Quite apart from the obligation the US clearly has to these people – who face death or other punishments if they went home, whatever the Afghan government says – trying to send them to one of the most war-torn and troubled countries on the planet is not a reasonable alternative.
The Afghans in the camp in Qatar agree. In a statement, they say: “The United States brought us to this place. The United States vetted us. The United States told us we were coming to America.”
“We do not want to go to the Democratic Republic of Congo. We have no family there. We have no language there. We have no legal status there. It is a country in its own war. We have been in enough war. We cannot take our children into another one. We also cannot return to Afghanistan. The Taliban will kill many of us for what we did for the United States. This is not a fear. This is a fact. We are not asking for charity. We are asking the United States to keep the promise it made to us.”
But Mr Trump announced a permanent pause on “migration from all Third World Countries”, as he put it, last November, and the following month he said he’d prefer “a few nice people” from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The choice apparently now being offered to the Afghans in Qatar has echoes of the UK’s Rwanda “solution”, which aimed to deter migrants from coming to Britain by relocating asylum-seekers and illegal entrants to the country for processing. (The scheme was eventually discarded when the current Labour government came to power in 2024.)
In both cases, there’s an implicit message of: you couldn’t possibly want to go there – not to Africa. That’s the deterrent part. The accusations of using the continent as a “human dumping ground” stem from the Trump administration deporting criminals to countries such as the Kingdom of Eswatini and South Sudan, while it has proposed so-called “third-country deportation deals” with other African states.
These practices are patronising, neo-colonialist in the assumption that wealthy countries have the right to outsource their problems to a developing continent, and frankly racist.
Now it may be that some countries have willingly agreed to be paid to take people in, although that still strikes me as exploitative. Developing countries have legally allowed themselves to be the recipients of much of the wealthy world’s waste for recycling or disposal, too: it is obviously not a choice anyone would rather make.
It also may be the case that going to Rwanda, which is often referred to as “the Singapore of Africa” for its high levels of cleanliness, economic growth, health care, education and stability, may be a happier destination than a UK plagued by political dysfunction, a stuttering economy and chronically failing institutions such as the National Health Service.
But we know what this is about, even if it is rarely spelled out explicitly – perhaps because no one could bear to articulate such an unpalatable attitude towards the continent of 1.6 billion people.
African countries deserve to be treated with far greater respect than this. They always did. This is the continent of the great civilisations of Ancient Egypt and the Mali Empire of Mansa Musa; of perhaps the most revered statesman of the 20th century, Nelson Mandela; of acclaimed writers such as the Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Abdulrazak Gurnah; and of huge varieties of arts, cultures and foods that have enriched the rest of the world.
This is not an attitude that can be considered anything other than shameful by this point in the 21st century. Let us hope that such practices and proposals are temporary aberrations, not least for the sakes of the countries that air them. For when African nations rise – and several are close to reaching the UN’s “very high human development” status – their new partners in Europe and North America will surely wish that this disdainful treatment of the continent is not fresh in their minds.
