Dire Straits

• Share

A modern African caravan can be seen these summer days winding south down the A7 motorway that enters Spain from France at La Jonquera. Instead of camels, these travelers drive what the Spanish who easily overtake them call furgonetas, small vans. Invariably they have roof racks piled so high that you wonder about springs and axles. At rest stops, it's common to see a driver pull out a rug and kneel toward Mecca. Before July ends, tens of thousands of these travelers will arrive at Algeciras on Spain's south coast for the short ferry ride to the continent they left in search of a better life.

This is the happy face of African migration, families who have made it in the rich north — Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland. They've learned a new language, found work or started a little business, placed their kids in school, put down delicate new roots. Many entered Europe illegally, but fate has put them among the chosen people: they have managed to get "papers." If they have a care in the world as they head "home" for summer holidays, it's that the traffic police will book them for being so overweight with goods and gifts for relatives in Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon or Sierra Leone.

But the caravan of success stories has, like Africa itself, a darker heart. A Spanish government spokesman recently speculated that 20,000 people will have traveled in the opposite direction by year's end. Not bearing gifts on car ferries but smuggled across those 15 or so kilometers of tricky waters, packed tight as anchovies in small boats the Spanish call pateras. Moroccan, Spanish and other mafias load the pateras on African beaches at night, hoping to dodge Spanish coastguards. Their passengers typically pay $1,000 or more to squat in a rubber boat with an outboard motor or in the hold of a trawler whose captain finds humans a more lucrative catch than fish.

Late last month, in one night alone police caught a record 240 Africans along the beaches around Tarifa, Spain's and Continental Europe's southernmost city. About three times as many probably got away, police say. One patera the coastguards intercepted was crammed with 44 people and adrift 10 km from Tarifa. It is common for the pateras to have engine failure or run out of fuel. They spring leaks, storms hit, or the smugglers, fearing police using night radar, make the cowering occupants jump for it a few hundred meters off the southern beaches, never mind if they can't swim. Each week Spanish papers print photos of sand-encrusted victims, teased even in death by gentle waves that rock their rigid bodies on the edge of the promised land.

Those caught are held in deportation camps. There is a disproportionate number of young women in the final weeks of pregnancy; to give birth on European soil makes expulsion less certain. Those who escape drowning and patrols are exploited as cheap farm workers or head for the safety in numbers of Europe's cities. If they can lie low long enough, they just might be blessed by an amnesty, what immigration ministers like to call periodic regularization of status.

These high and low human tides scare many European politicians. The furgoneta Africans — relatively poor by European standards, vastly rich by African — are easily characterized as harbingers of the dark deluge that will sweep away jobs if the floodgates are opened an inch. Economics has always been harder to sell than racism, but demographers know that the people ready to risk debt to loansharks, drowning or living hidden in squalor are less black peril than black gold. Africa offers a supply of worker bees to a Europe fast running out of drones because of its stagnant birthrates. Eventually, dire cultural fear and dire economic necessity must meet and be resolved.

I know only two such Africans, Mohammed and Ahmet, brothers who work in an intensive pig farm in northern Spain. They are now legal and speak fondly of their employer, a woman who lent Mohammed the money to buy the old Ford they drive down to visit their parents in southern Morocco. (I guess they can't yet afford the furgoneta.) Hardworking, nondrinking, they are keen to learn new customs while holding to their own. We laughed a lot as I tried to help them write basic Spanish, they to show me the right-to-left rigors of Arabic. Sitting with them and other Africans in a public hall one night, I thought we'd been hit by an earthquake. The walls shook and made cracking noises. I reckoned I was about to meet my Allah. Mohammed smiled and said: "I think this old hall has rats." He'd heard the noise before: local skinheads running past and banging the walls with sticks.

Our paths drifted apart, and I haven't seen the brothers for a while. But looking at so many pathetic patera photos, the darkskinned corpses slumped on sunny southern beaches, I think of Mohammed and Ahmet. I am relieved they "made it." Happy for them. Glad for Europe.