Fewer than 5% of
African migrants now want to reach Europe or America. They’re looking instead
to neighbouring countries, or the continent’s dreamland, South Africa. It’s a
long, hard way there, and they may be no better off if they reach it.
It’s noon, and
Etienne Bokoli, a Congolese translator, is getting impatient. Babasar, from
Senegal, has been inside the refugee reception centre since seven this morning.
The high winter sun is beating down on the tin roofs of Messina, a small South
African town near the border with Zimbabwe, and Babasar is still in there,
along with hundreds of other illegal immigrants. Bokoli explains: “He crossed
the border through the bush and turned up this morning at immigration services,
too frightened to be able to ask for asylum in English. I acted as his
interpreter.” He is waiting to be paid a few rand for his services.
“Thousands of illegal
immigrants from the north of sub-Saharan Africa come to Messina overland every
year,” says Mpilo Nkomo of the local office of the International Organization
for Migration (IOM). Like Babasar, they take a plane from Dakar to Kinshasa,
another to Lubumbashi, then wander around Zambia and Zimbabwe for a month.
Zimbabwean people smugglers charge a few hundred rand (1 rand is 11 US cents)
to cut through three barbed-wire fences and get them across the Limpopo. “Men,
women, children... they all swim across as soon as it gets dark,” says Nkomo.
“They’re lucky if they don’t get robbed in the bush by the people smugglers or
meet a crocodile or a black mamba.”
