Don't forget the human element in the migrant crisis

The predicament of African migrants has not only numbed our sensibilities, but has erected a barrier between their reality and our own, writes Alasdair Soussi

Migrants sit on the deck of the Belgian Navy vessel Godetia after they were saved at sea during a search and rescue mission in the Mediterranean. Gregorio Borgia / AP Photo

Earlier this month I was in Madrid for the second time in less than a year. The third largest city in the European Union, the Spanish capital manages to be bustling without being overwhelming and has become a favourite place of mine to visit.

Yet, take a closer look at the city and all is not what it seems. Amid the locals and the tourists are some of Europe’s foreign migrants, many escaping the shores of Africa in search of a better life.

That Europe’s African migrants have come to prominence on our TV screens perishing in the Mediterranean is a well-established fact, but what I witnessed at a Madrid park caused me to recoil.

Sadness was my gut reaction when I first spotted a group of American tourists approaching a young African man selling sunglasses.

Armed with a hand-held mirror and the hope of a sale, the man was bartered down to a measly five euros only to be rebuffed at the point of transaction. The tourist, who had tried on numerous sets of spectacles, seemed bored with the process, and appeared somewhat contemptuous of the man’s obvious desperation.

To me, this incident said everything to me about our relationship with those many thousands of people who have made headlines for attempting to cross from Africa to Europe.

Indeed, while charities do their best to help, feed and clothe undocumented migrants, there was a basic human disconnect between the comparatively rich westerners and the poor African looking to make ends meet that made me uneasy that day and suggested a wider concern.

For this writer at least, an “othering” of sorts was at play in that incident.

This concept may not be as grotesque as times past when crackpot science was used by some to “prove” white racial superiority, but is still evident in how we view – and are first introduced to – the likes of the African migrant in our modern age.

In recent months, images of migrants drowning in the sea have filled the public’s consciousness. Only the hardest of hearts could fail to be moved by their plight – but, as in far-off wars and famines – their predicament has not only numbed our sensibilities, but has erected a barrier between their reality and our own.

In witnessing such scenes, it has been necessary to remind ourselves of the pain and suffering of those fleeing war and poverty – but, in doing so, it has also reinforced a sense of “other” that sets us both apart.

For most of us, it is simply that we see ourselves as more fortunate than the boatloads of migrants heading to European shores – though in the case of British tabloid newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins, her references to the migrants as “cockroaches” indicate darker, more ugly sentiments.

There was a great chasm of life experience between the US tourists and the African vendor in that sun-kissed Madrid park, but was it so great that the western sightseers could not muster any semblance of human empathy?

Yet, how could they reasonably expect to understand what he almost certainly went through to get to one of Europe’s great capital cities?

And – as they turned away, and the man (spooked by the prospect of a police presence) melted into the nearby undergrowth – I too wondered, how could I?

Alasdair Soussi’s new book, In The Shadow Of The Cotton Tree, is out now

On Twitter: @AlasdairSoussi