On August 5, Rwanda introduced it had agreed to just accept 250 migrants below the Trump administration’s increasing third-country deportation programme.
Talking from Kigali, authorities spokesperson Yolande Makolo mentioned Rwanda would retain the suitable to resolve which deportees to confess for “resettlement”. These accepted, she added, would obtain coaching, healthcare, and housing to assist them “rebuild their lives”.
The programme kinds a part of President Donald Trump’s controversial pledge to hold out “the most important deportation operation in American historical past.”
It additionally marks the third deportation settlement of its form on the African continent.
On July 16, the US despatched 5 convicted criminals from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba, and Yemen to Eswatini, previously often known as Swaziland.
Described as “barbaric and violent” and rejected by their nations of origin, they’re confined to remoted items on the Matsapha Correctional Advanced, close to the capital Mbabane, pending eventual repatriation.
Eleven days earlier, on July 5, eight males convicted of homicide, sexual assault, and theft have been deported to South Sudan. Studies differ on whether or not any deportee was South Sudanese.
The deportations have already provoked widespread outrage – from civil society teams in Eswatini, to attorneys in South Sudan, who denounce them as unlawful.
South Africa’s authorities has even lodged a proper protest with Eswatini.
Nigeria, in the meantime, has rebuffed US stress to just accept 300 Venezuelans, with International Minister Yusuf Tuggar saying the nation already has “sufficient issues” and “over 230 million folks” to look after.
These offers are unfair.
The US is strong-arming others on the expense of weak folks.
Trump’s established brutality is horrifying. His household separations in 2019 left youngsters terrified and alone, all within the identify of coverage.
The US is now sending folks to Rwanda, Eswatini, and South Sudan – nations already struggling to look after their very own residents.
This reality exposes Trump’s Victorian view of Africa: a desolate, irredeemable continent unworthy of respect or equal partnership. His imaginative and prescient echoes a Western custom, crystallised in Conrad’s Coronary heart of Darkness, the place Africa is portrayed as “darkish” and “primeval” – a land deemed oppressive and violent, its folks forged as incapable of understanding, feeling, or compassion.
That’s not who we’re.
Sure, Africa has challenges.
Nonetheless, we don’t flip the marginalised into pawns, nor will we disguise exile as coverage. Our humanity is unshakable and past reproach.
At present, Uganda hosts about 1.7 million refugees, making it Africa’s largest refugee-hosting nation. This determine exceeds the mixed refugee populations below UNHCR’s mandate within the UK, France, and Belgium right this moment.
Europe should assume a far larger share of duty for asylum seekers and refugees.
These third-country deportation offers usually are not credible coverage.
They’re colonialism reborn.
No self-respecting African chief ought to ever comply with take part in an organised atrocity – not when Africa nonetheless bleeds from the injuries inflicted by the West: Sudan’s civil struggle, civic unrest within the jap Democratic Republic of Congo, environmental devastation in Nigeria’s Delta, and the persevering with attain of French financial imperialism by means of the CFA.
“Uncle Sam” now plans to ship each convicted criminals and determined asylum seekers to Africa’s shores, as an alternative of the warships of previous. Each teams deserve assist at house within the US, with intensive rehabilitation for offenders and secure sanctuary for the weak.
If not, Europe will be the one various.
Let the architects of empire face the warmth.
Let the rich, politically obnoxious allies of Washington carry the burden for as soon as.
Rwanda, Eswatini, and South Sudan are among the many poorest nations on the earth, with per capita incomes only a tiny fraction of their former colonial rulers in Europe. Anticipating them to hold the burden of America’s deportees isn’t solely unjust – it’s absurd.
A Might 2025 examine, Unequal Trade and North-South Relations, undertaken by Gaston Nievas and Thomas Piketty, analysed international wealth accumulation over greater than two centuries. It exhibits that by 1914, European powers held internet international belongings approaching 140 p.c of GDP, underscoring how colonial transfers, artificially low commodity costs, compelled labour, and exploitation fuelled Europe’s enrichment.
From Juba to Kigali, colonial plunder nonetheless drives international inequality.
A return to the systemic brutalities unleashed after the disastrous Berlin Convention of 1885, when European powers carved up Africa, can’t be accepted.
It doesn’t matter what officers in Rwanda, South Sudan, or Eswatini declare in public, sending America’s cast-offs to Africa is colonial exploitation repackaged for right this moment.
This isn’t a brand new technique.
Starting within the nineteenth century, many European colonies have been diminished to offshore extraction centres and dumping grounds. France banished convicts and political exiles to territories comparable to present-day Gabon and Djibouti. Spain used Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea as a penal settlement for deportees from Cuba.
The US has revived that very same imperial entitlement, delivering a recent blow to each Africa and the Americas. Most irregular migrants within the US come from Venezuela, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Haiti – nations scarred by centuries of European colonialism and US imperial interference.
These nations embody the continued impression of colonial legacies and geopolitical meddling that propel migration.
But the West, and Europe above all, denies and disowns the results of its crimes, previous and current.
European nations have actually prospered by means of centuries of colonial exploitation. The UK, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, for example, boast sturdy welfare methods, public well being networks, and jail rehabilitation programmes – magnificent buildings constructed on centuries of colonial extraction.
They’ve each the means and the establishments to soak up deportees.
Additionally they have the document.
These identical powers have eagerly joined the US in focusing on and destabilising sovereign nations throughout Africa, in addition to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya – in wars broadly condemned as violations of worldwide regulation.
Each intervention has unleashed recent waves of refugees and asylum seekers, hapless males, girls, and youngsters fleeing the very chaos Western armies engineered: powerless folks whom the West brazenly ignores or despises.
Africa, against this, performs by the principles and adheres to the UN Constitution. We honour sovereignty, respect worldwide regulation, and try for peace, even whereas shackled by colonial debt designed to maintain us dependent.
Europe breaks the principles, Africa abides by them – but Africa is requested to shoulder the burden.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
We won’t bankroll, legitimise, or inherit the crimes of empire.
In spite of everything, we barely management our personal destinies. The IMF and World Financial institution dictate our economies. The UN Safety Council enforces previous hierarchies. The G7 protects the West’s pursuits over us, Africans left impoverished and ravenous. Structural oppression permits the West to maintain interfering within the lives of individuals throughout Africa and the Americas.
However we won’t be complicit.
We won’t be silent.
Western insurance policies and interventions drive poverty, displacement, and instability within the World South.
If the US insists on offloading its deportees, let it ship them to those that constructed and nonetheless revenue from this technique of oppression.
The West should reckon with its spoils.
Go away Africa out of it.
Ship Trump’s deportees to Europe.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
