“Can you imagine living in Ceuta and seeing your city like this?” begins her text on Instagram stories the influencer María Pombo (3.5 million followers).. Like this how? With people from outside fleeing poverty, misery, hopelessness or who simply want to improve their lives, since it is not enough that we only accept great calamities as a valid reason to migrate? In fact, the bulk of migrants living in Spain have arrived by air and mostly to Madrid, a city you and I share. They enter with a tourist visa and then stay. To understand the images of Ceuta before sending such a message, which millions of people can see, we should have the minimum responsibility to understand the reality we are talking about.
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However, I think it is important to remember that María Pombo has not been the only one to read an act of desperation as a revenge in which migrants are dehumanized and criminalized. This way of reading the world, which she shares with other influencers like Jessica Goicoechea, implies not just having closed eyes to reality but having decided to sew them shut so as not to see the reasons why it happens.
For Africans, no matter how much they ask, how many hours they queue day after day in front of the Spanish Embassy, it is much harder for them to get a visa. It is not that they are a bunch of idiotic masochists or that they want to experience strong emotions, like those who climb very tall buildings without a harness for the thrill of adrenaline. No. They are born being read as a threat to European well-being even though the blood of its makers runs through their veins.
And it is not that they do not meet the requirements to obtain a visa. In fact, many times, they are students who want to continue training in educational centers that, because they are in the West, issue degrees whose international credibility is much higher than those of their country. But in those lines, there are also people who want to join their relatives living here because the distance hurts or who want to come to work because the wages they earn there are too low to get ahead.
There are many more categories, but I will limit myself to citing three that are quite perverse: those who come because fishing, their modus vivendi passed down from generation to generation, has disappeared. The presence of large ships, against which no small boat could compete, leaves them without fish by taking everything in their path. Those ships, by the way, fly flags of rich northern or eastern nations.
The other would be those fleeing a desert that advances unstoppable as a consequence of climate change generated on the other side of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, with their CO2 emissions in abundance.
I close with those dictators collaborating with Europe and the US who are supported to come to or stay in power so that they leave raw materials at a good price. It does not matter if they mistreat their citizens. Human rights belong to a few.
So I can imagine the calamities they have gone through because I have traveled and migrated, but with a passport that opens doors and that, at most, requires getting an ETA, an ESTA or an online or airport visa at the destination.
What I cannot imagine is living on the B side of the world knowing that just a few kilometers away is the A side, right on the other side of that jagged border that separates territories and continents, even though Ceuta is in Africa. The A side is far from perfect, mind you, but there are minimums that are maximums on the other side of the fence.
Now, let it be clear that the fact that one side of the same coin is rich and the other is impoverished is not only due to poor management or the tendency to accumulate, to put it mildly, of the Alaouite monarchy, in this particular case. No, thinking like that is to leave aside historical inequalities, lose sight of colonialism, not recognize how Europe underdeveloped Africa, how it plundered it decades ago with the “full right” that several European nations had to divide a continent and take what was there, bring it here and invest that money in a lot of initiatives that served to make giant strides. However, they neglected what happened to the dispossessed who, because of the rapacious colonial action, also took big steps but backward. And with the mechanism well set up, a useful and sine die dependency was generated. Therefore, it is also plundered now, through agreements signed without media flashes and that serve to make multinational companies and expats filthy rich. The latter, by the way, are the rich and white migrants who have their name changed because they do not even want to share the signifier, in case they catch something, with blacks and browns.
Being afraid is disgusting. Mainly because, as far as we know, the only people who have died (67, so far) are migrants, who are the eternally dispensable, the collateral damage that nobody cares about except their families.
I understand from the words of these influencers that they are afraid of the Moors not because they are going to do anything but simply because they exist and also because they are poor. And I am not going to say that much-hated phrase “it’s not racism, it’s aporophobia” since in their case, and in many others, I am very clear that it is both.
Being afraid is disgusting. Mainly because, as far as we know, the only people who have died (67, so far) are migrants, who are the eternally dispensable, the collateral damage that nobody cares about except their families.
I really cannot believe that there are people who think that some migrate for pleasure when most would like to stay in their land and close to their families, but with decent conditions. And I say this as the daughter of an Equatoguinean man who arrived in ’66 from what was then a Spanish province and who missed every day the place where he was born.
Almost no one dies to come, what really happens is that because they are deprived of safe routes by the non-issuance of visas, there are people who die coming to a place where they are guilty until proven otherwise and we do not even take responsibility.
*Lucía Mbomío is a reporter, journalist, writer and co-creator of the Afromayores project.
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