Survivors of the war at the neo-colonial borders: Moroccan accounts on the roads of demise
Introduction:
This article draws on the accounts of three Moroccan migrant survivors to explore some of the contemporary mechanisms that cause death at Europe’s borders. The survivors’ experiences serve as crucial empirical data for gaining insight into the impact and modes of operation associated with border violence. The aim, however, is not merely to document, through the survivors’ accounts, the ways in which people are intentionally abandoned to perish or exposed to injury and demise, but also to explore the psychological impact of such experiences on survivors. The article makes the case for moving beyond a long-standing analytical divide in some African and Afrocriticism (Afrocritique) literature. Specifically, it calls for a shift in the study of deadly border mechanisms, where the distinction between “Black Africans” and “North Africans” has been a sticking point. Such a distinction is implicitly perpetuated by the racial division established and sustained by the discourse and practices of the dominant governments of the Global North. This is occurring at a time when migration policies affecting non-European postcolonial populations are being implemented continuously, indiscriminately, and cumulatively across the African continent, irrespective of the ethnic, linguistic, or national affiliation of migrants who are denied visas, and thus the right to freedom of movement.
The three cited accounts specifically serve to reaffirm the material unity of African experiences in the face of border regimes. Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, Syrians, Sudanese, and Senegalese people face the same limitations on movement, deadly risks, dangerous and grueling journeys[1], and the same forms of postcolonial sorting and categorization that shape the Schengen Area. We aim to reconstruct the unity of this exhibition by tracing the stories of migrant survivors from Morocco and the Mediterranean, challenging the interpretative frameworks which have fragmented it. Survivors of these treacherous routes, particularly those who have survived accidents or shipwrecks and witnessed the deaths of other migrants during their journeys, carry with them unvarnished memories of border wars. Their profound physical experiences reveal the continuity of a policy that destroys, sifts through, and selects African bodies from the Maghreb to the Sahel and throughout areas where the Schengen Agreement and visa systems impede freedom of movement.
The presentation of these accounts in their unedited form, sometimes through excerpts from interviews rendered in their entirety, has the aim of reconstructing, fragment by fragment, a geographical map of death, injury, and disappearance, linking the shores of the Maghreb, the Sahel, other regions of Africa, and Europe. These experiences align with a spectrum of neocolonial violence that affects all African migrants in distinct yet interconnected ways, as they find themselves ensnared in a border-based coloniality undergoing a process of reconfiguration.
Our analysis will unfold in three stages.
Firstly, the study of communities affected by deaths at the border is contextualized by an ethnographic vignette based on observations conducted in Beni Mellal. These observations focused on families in the Middle Atlas region in Morocco dealing with the loss of loved ones. The observation of these families resulted in an encounter with a survivor, Ghali, an eyewitness to a shipwreck that resulted in the disappearance of forty-one migrants. His account of the tragedy provides insight into the devastation wrought by the border on Moroccan youth, among other age groups.
Secondly, Ghali’s experience will be enriched by Salah‘s. Salah is a Moroccan migrant whose visa applications were denied. He is a survivor of a shipwreck off the coast of Tan-Tan and a firsthand witness to the deaths of several migrants on another route to Europe; the Atlantic route. His account allows for a more thorough examination of the ways in which migrants encounter death and the subsequent impact on their migration projects.
Thirdly, we will undertake a meticulous examination of Fayez‘s testimony, whom we encountered in Tunisia among a cohort of Moroccan harraga (irregular migrants). His account of the perilous journey along the Balkan routes is replete with detail, offering perspicacity into the epistemology of migration as shaped by migrants themselves. This includes aspects such as route planning, diversifying routes to evade murderous police, circulating stories of survival, and accumulating knowledge necessary to navigate emigration and survive a border war.
[1] Indeed, the Sahara Desert serves as a death trap that primarily targets black migrants, a phenomenon that is exacerbated by the externalization of borders and the ban on direct travel from the capitals of sub-Saharan African countries.
