Crossing African borders

The goal was to promote political pan-Africanism. We hosted two international conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, for which I helped coordinate international travel, and another conference in Durban, South Africa. Having grown up in Nigeria, I was already aware of the difficulties Nigerian visitors to the U.S. face in obtaining visas, but attempting to help conference […]

The goal was to promote political pan-Africanism. We hosted two international conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, for which I helped coordinate international travel, and another conference in Durban, South Africa. Having grown up in Nigeria, I was already aware of the difficulties Nigerian visitors to the U.S. face in obtaining visas, but attempting to help conference attendees, many of whose trips we were actually sponsoring, was even more eye opening. Many of those who planned to attend the conference were not able to procure visa appointments at their local U.S. embassy in time for the conference, even though they applied several months in advance. Other academics got appointments in time and arrived at the visa interview with their letter of invitation and proof of financial sponsorship from us, only to be turned down by embassy employees who told at least one university lecturer to his face that he was lying. This happened multiple times, not just in Nigeria but in other African countries as well.
As an American citizen, it is discouraging to hear so many stories of the difficulties Africans face travelling to the U.S. But what is even more discouraging is the difficulties Africans face crossing borders on the continent, even borders of contiguous countries with language and cultural communities separated by arbitrary colonial borders. The Economic Community of West Africa has made it easier for West Africa, but I know of a Cameroonian acquaintance who was recently deported from Nigeria back to Cameroon and other Cameroonian friends who pay outrageous visa fees to study at Nigerian universities because Cameroon, though bordering Nigeria, is not a part of ECOWAS. Other Nigerian friends have been denied visas to Morocco, Kenya, and South Africa, losing tickets paid in advance. Even ECOWAS members are sometimes hassled at borders.
Last December, I travelled to Damagaram, Niger, for a writer’s conference with a group of Nigerian writers and intellectuals. Without the border, the drive between Kano and Damagaram would have been about two hours, a shorter distance than from Kano to Jos or Kano to Abuja.  The border added at least an hour to the trip. The SSS representative at the border interrogated me for a while, asking multiple overlapping questions about where I lived, what I did, and when I had first come to Nigeria. Fair enough. I was surprised, however, when my friends from Kano were also each interrogated. The official told one civil servant from Kano that if he wrote down the wrong address, he would have him hunted down, and scolded another for saying she was a Kano indigene when her passport said “born in Jos.” He was especially harsh on one of us who had forgotten national id card at home.
I suppose he was just doing his job. Our taxi driver later asserted that “most people don’t have these problems because they don’t have passports.” The presentation of passports, it seems, lifts one from the realm of the informal to the bureaucratic.  But, doing his job, or not, the hassle these Nigerians experienced in re-entering Nigeria is evidence of a much larger problem, colonial borders that separate language and cultural communities, airfares that are cheaper to Europe than to other parts of Africa, visas to other African countries that are almost as hard for Nigerians to get as visas across oceans.
Recently a Nigerian childhood friend of mine, currently living in the U.S., and I decided to travel to Mali for a week, while she was back in Nigeria for a holiday. She is an architect and wanted to see the architectural sites in Bamako as well as Dogon country. I dutifully got my visa to Mali, but when we began searching for flights, we were horrified. First of all, it was nearly impossible to search online from Nigeria or the United States for intra-African flights. Whenever you searched for a trip from one African city to another, dozens of American travel search engines would pop up advertising the flights but then stating that “we could not find any airports that match your search” or “no matching results were found.” With a travel agent, we could find nothing less than $800 [N120,000]  from Lagos to Bamako. Advised to search flights from neighboring francophone countries, we found that from Niamey, Niger, we would still pay at least $700 [N105,000] round trip. Even on many African airlines, it seemed easier to connect through Europe than through another West African country. On Afriqiyah Airways, one could fly from the UK to Bamako for 425 pounds [N100,160], on Air Algerie, $703 [N105,450] from Paris to Bamako, about the same or less than flying from another African country. My friend and I couldn’t afford or stomach the idea of paying so much, especially when my friend had only paid $950 [N142,500] for her flight from New York to Abuja, so we cancelled our trip.
But, why? On the visa issue, why, when travelling outside to Europe and the Americas is already so difficult, do African countries continue imperialistic international policies that make it so hard for Africans to be tourists within the continent? Why should it be easier for me, as an American, to get a visa to Morocco or South Africa (where I don’t need a visa at all) or Kenya, or book an “experience-Africa” ticket on an American student website, than for those who have been born and live their whole lives on this continent? The second question, speaks to larger structural inequities. Why is it that it is still easier to find flights between Africa and Europe than it is countries within Africa. Why is it that American travel websites colonize the internet? Why is it that it is cheaper to fly to Bamako from London than from Lagos? Of course, the question is rhetorical. We all know why. Old colonial boundaries and privileges are still entrenched in the superstructures of international capitalism, encouraging Africans to be dependent on outside investors/products rather than building more connections across their own borders.  The real question, perhaps is what are we going to do about it?
In his 1961 book, I Speak of Freedom, the visionary Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah called for a union of African states, saying, ‘Divided we are weak; united, Africa could become one of the greatest forces for good in the world.” His vision was for Africa to “emerge not as just another world bloc to flaunt its wealth and strength, but as a Great Power whose greatness is indestructible because it is built not on fear, envy and suspicion, nor won at the expense of others, but founded on hope, trust, friendship and directed to the good of all mankind.’ Nearly fifty years later, it is easy for cynics to roll their eyes at Nkrumah’s dream. Even Nkrumah himself, warned that “we must act now. Tomorrow may be too late.” Yet, with the rise of Pan-African initiatives both formal, in telecommunications, and informal (such as the spread of Nollywood across the continent), perhaps it is time to revive Nkrumah’s vision. As he argued, “The emergence of such a mighty stabilising force in this strife-worn world should be regarded not as the shadowy dream of a visionary, but as a practical proposition, which the peoples of Africa can, and should, translate into reality.”
So, what’s the next step?