Brain Gain Politics Embedded in the North

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​​It has become fashionable to decry the "brain drain" and demonize African intellectuals for seeking greener pastures in the North instead of staying at home to serve the communities that educated them at great expense.

Some blame the North for poaching African health care workers in the midst of an Aids pandemic. Others claim African countries are to blame for underpaying and devaluing their professionals. Most, however, blame the migrants themselves for leaving.

Instead of seeking a scapegoat, African stakeholders need to create institutional frameworks for the Diaspora to contribute to development processes.

The brain drain paradox

The disastrous effect of the brain drain is undeniable. Recent studies show that the migration of African brains has accelerated. The World Bank estimates that 70,000 highly qualified Africans leave their home countries every year. (During the 1990s the number of professional emigrants was estimated at 20-30,000 a year.)

Meanwhile the continent spends $4 billion a year on importing 100,000 expatriates from industrialized countries to perform tasks that could have employed thousands Africans at a fraction of the cost.

Thus it is not surprising that UN reports indicate that 30,000 Africans with Ph.D.s are working outside the continent and six percent of Ghanaian-trained doctors left the country in the 1980s. Or that a University of Cape Town study showed that skilled workers who migrated to other countries have cost South Africa an estimated US$7.8 billion in lost human capital.

African preference for expatriate control

The role of expatriates in Africa's underdevelopment highlights the role of the Northern governments and multilateral institutions that routinely reserve a minimum of 20 percent of bilateral and multilateral assistance for expatriate "consultants."

This preference for expatriate control of development projects sponsored by international agencies is demoralizing for African professionals and increases the likelihood of emigration.

The implications for African development have been far-reaching. While the negative impact of these skilled labor migrations is often emphasized, it is crucial to examine how the "brain drain" can be turned into a "brain gain," or "brain mobility" and what they tell us about Africa's insertion into contemporary processes of globalization.

"Counter-penetration" – striking back from within

Instead of blaming the emigrants, African governments and the North for poaching skilled labor, stakeholders need to focus on how to harness the intellectual, material and financial capital of the African Diaspora that is embedded in the North. This process resembles what Ali Mazrui calls the "counter-penetration" of Africans in the North.

Counter-penetration occurs when African intellectuals embed themselves "in the belly of the beast" and strike back at the empire from within.

Although this theory may sound utopian, the African Diaspora has successfully influenced bilateral and multilateral policies in the North and can be mobilized to serve as an African lobby in Europe and the United States. Governments, civic organizations and institutions of higher education should consider creating policy frameworks that make it easier for the Diaspora to contribute to Africa's development.

A new kind of dynamism

Before urging intellectual migrants to "stay home" or "come home", African stakeholders need to understand the complex relationships the migrants develop with their old and new homes. Drained brains become active members of their new communities in the North while maintaining strong ties with their communities of origin.

They develop relationships with family, schools and universities, professional and ethnic organizations. These ties cut across geographic and national boundaries giving rise to trans-local societies without a fixed territorial definition. These relationships depend on the ability to maintain society despite mobility. Thus it is possible for the brains to take Africa with them and create it anew in the Diaspora.

This Diaspora perspective makes it possible to move beyond the hand wringing, recriminations and bribery that has characterized the "brain drain" discourse to this point.

The meaning of Africa

Maintaining ties with the homeland is a political act tied to the migrant's identity, causes of migration and ease of assimilation. The white migrants from South Africa and Zimbabwe may not be interested in returning to southern Africa. They reject Africa and exchange their national identities for a racial (white) identity.

This is a well-traveled path for European immigrants to the United States who gave up their languages, religions, food and other traditions for the benefits of whiteness.

These avenues of assimilation are closed to the black migrant who is immediately locked into a lower caste reserved for black Africans. The designation African, itself, has evolved from a strictly geographic definition to a racialized definition that equates "African" and "people of African descent" with "black" Africans.

Racial perceptions survived into the 21st century

A white-born in South Africa or an Arab in Morocco is identified as "white" in the United States. They are not considered "African." In contrast, a black person from the United States, South America or the Caribbean would be considered "African American", although their ancestors were brought to the new world 500 years ago.

More recently, of course, we have the introduction of new immigrants from the continent Ali Mazrui designates as American Africans. This represents an expansion of the designation beyond its strictly geographic connotation to include affective associations with the estimated 200 million people of African descent in the Diaspora.

African consciousness is a rarity

The recent immigrants from the continent themselves are new to "African" identity. On the continent, most people live under ethnic categories like Kikuyu, Ibo, Hausa and Acholi. Some educated, middle-class and/or urban dwellers may see themselves as members of a nation like South Africa, Kenya or Tanzania.

In some countries like South Africa, which has recently emerged from the crucible of apartheid, national consciousness is still strong. For most, however, "national" consciousness emerges only occasionally during Independence Day celebrations, international soccer matches or at election time.

"African" consciousness, however, is a rarity. It is in exile that the Nigerian-Ibo, South African-Zulu, Kenyan-Kikuyu person suddenly and unequivocally becomes an "African."

What does it mean to be an African in Europe and America? The migrant quickly learns that the image of Africans is not pretty. It is written in the faces of obnoxious waitresses, the teacher who slams the door of opportunity, the policeman who treats you like a criminal. It is reflected in the floods of negative media images that poison people's minds with racist stereotypes.

Wearing a badge of inferiority

Just when the migrant thought he was free of the travails of the African condition: he was forced to confront the indelible mark of Africanity on his body. He is forced to wear, explain and even defend a badge of inferiority. This predicament tears at his identity. It creates a duality that is the root of the existential crisis faced by the migrant African intellectual.

The postcolonial flight away from the African continent ironically reinforces the worst stereotypes of Africanity. A half century later, Frantz Fanon's description of the black migrant's experience in his classic Black Skin, White Masks (1952) still holds true: "You are in a bar in Rouen or Strasbourg, and you have the misfortune to be spotted by an old drunk. He sits down at your table right way. 'You, African? Dakar, Rufisque, whorehouses, dames, coffee, mangoes, bananas.' You stand up and leave, and your farewell is a torrent of abuse."

The fact of Blackness

Yet, the condition of Africanity both marginalizes and expands the migrant's horizons at the same time. He is no longer Acholi or Ugandan but African. A member of a mythical race created by the white imagination as a foil and a justification for the holocaust of slavery and colonial exploitation.

He is not only responsible for Somalia, Congo and Sierra Leone, but also tied inexplicably to inner city gang-banger, street hustler and drug addict. In the likely encounter with the police profiler, skin color will trump national origin every time.

Color also trumps education, erudition and accomplishment. None of these mean anything in a late-night encounter with the police. In the New World, he is no longer Acholi or even Ugandan. He is an African, or more accurately, a Black man, thus automatically a suspect and a target for any white racist policeman, waitress, and teacher or taxi driver.

Seeing oneself through the eyes of others

The "fact of blackness" as Fanon put it, does not automatically create a collective race consciousness, a natural unity among the African migrants and the native Black populations of Europe and America. This race consciousness is a rarity often limited to the politicized Pan Africanist community. Most African descended peoples continue see each other, and themselves, "through the eyes of others", as Du Bois put it.

Unable to penetrate the veil of racism, many migrants consider African Americans lazy, violent and obsessed with race while many African-Americans see the migrants as inferior, ignorant and uncivilized.

The cultural barriers and social and economic differences separating the Africans and African Americans are sometimes the cause of a simmering hostility and misunderstanding between them. Sharing the common physical characteristic of skin color has not ensured cultural and economic unity between African immigrants and American-born blacks.

Soul torn in double consciousness

Like intra-African relations, relations between African immigrants and the historical African Diaspora are complex and contradictory. Blacks in the Diaspora are ambivalent about their Africanity. W.E.B. Du Bois expressed this ambivalence eloquently in his oft quoted meditation on "double consciousness" when he argued that his soul was torn between his African and American identities.

Most blacks in the Diaspora emphasize their Diasporic identities. Some African-Americans work as agents of American power in Africa leading to tensions.

Pan Africanism

Despite these limitations, a minority of blacks in the historical African Diaspora has been involved in Africa support activities. Pan Africanism, a political philosophy that emerged in the Diaspora brought African migrants and members of the historical African Diaspora together in a global black liberation movement.

Anti-colonial intellectuals like Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Eduardo Mondlane, Nmandi Azikiwe and Jomo Kenyatta adopted the Pan African idea and created the Organization of African Unity in 1963 to, among other things, ensure the liberation of the southern part of the continent.

The OAU and its liberation committee were instrumental in the decolonization of southern Africa in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. This project culminated in the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the president of a free South Africa.

Africa's influence on America

During the 1970s Africans and African Americans reestablished ties that had been severed during the 1950s. These ties were cemented by the increased mobility of people of African descent and in particular the presence of African exiles in the United States.

The theories and activities of anti-colonial intellectuals like Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Agostino Neto, Nelson Mandela and Eduardo Mondlane heavily influenced African American activists.

In 1962 Amilcar Cabral addressed the United Nations and then met with African Americans where he discussed his ideas on revolutionary nationalism. Julius Nyerere's African Socialism was also a major influence leading to support for the armed struggle in South Africa, Angola and Mozambique; the study of Kiswahili by African Americans and the formation of Maulana Karenga's Kwanzaa movement.

These practical and theoretical ties were parlayed into a highly successful global movement for international sanctions in the 1980s led by new Pan Africanist organizations like TransAfrica and the Free South Africa Movement.

Anti-apartheid activists forced corporations, universities and state governments to divest funds from South Africa before forcing the United States Congress to impose comprehensive sanctions over President Reagan's veto in 1986.

Among these activists were African students and immigrants who participated in the movement. Some of these African immigrants participated in the movement at the highest levels influencing African American activists and serving as the bridge linking activists on the continent and those in the Diaspora. African visitors and immigrants have long been involved in African American organizations.

Anti-apartheid activism from US networks

The anti-apartheid movement epitomizes the potential of Diaspora networks' participation in African development. It emerged in the progressive Pan African networks of the United States, the Caribbean and Europe. It was sustained by strong ties that had been forged among Black activists around the world during the anti-colonial movements of the 1930s and 40s.

The first anti-apartheid organization in exile, for instance, was the leftist Council on African Affairs that was led by Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alphaeus Hunton. Among the members of the Council on African Affairs were African exiles like Dr. R.T. Bokwe of South Africa and Nmandi Azikiwe of Nigeria.

Organizations that emerged in the 1960s and 70s like the African Liberation Support Committee, TransAfrica and the Free South Africa Movement all had substantial African immigrant participation.

Like the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, which forced the West to acknowledge that apartheid was a "crime against humanity", the African reparations campaign is gaining momentum and transforming human rights discourse on the global public sphere.

Led by African and African American intellectuals, the black reparations campaign raises critical moral and ethical questions about human responsibility and restitution that the North has refused to acknowledge despite the efforts of 19th century abolitionists and 20th century anti-colonial, anti-apartheid and civil rights activists.

Northern recalcitrance was demonstrated once again at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa from August 31 to September 7, 2001.

At the conference, delegates from Africa and the Diaspora came together to demand that the West acknowledge that slavery and colonialism were crimes against humanity with serious contemporary effects that require reparatory compensation.

Despite resistance from the United States, the conference adopted a declaration that acknowledged slavery and the slave trade were "crimes against humanity" and "should always have been so." The resolution also acknowledged the wrongs of slavery and colonialism and recommended that the international community take measures to alleviate the impact of these crimes.

The declaration fell far short of the African demand for an explicit apology and reparations for the enslavement of millions of Africans, the bloody colonization of the continent, cancellation of illegitimate debt and the return of Africa's material and cultural treasures. Nevertheless, the acknowledgement that slavery and colonialism are crimes against humanity provides the international reparations movement with a foundation on which to build the case.

The black reparations movement

Since the WCAR, the black reparations movement has gained considerable momentum and become the cause celebre in the black world. It is most developed in the United States where the Reparations Coordinating Committee and several other groups and individuals are planning to file a series of lawsuits seeking compensation from a number of private and public institutions for profits earned through slave labor and the slave trade.

In Africa, the Organization of African Unity formed the Reparations Committee in 1984 that seeks capital transfer, skills transfer and equal representation in international bodies like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United Nations Security Council. In Brazil, Afro-Brazilians are demanding land rights for Quilombos (black enclaves liberated by fugitive slaves).

In Colombia, black people won title to land they had occupied for centuries only to be displaced forcefully by right-wing militias allied with the government. Although none of these efforts have been successful, the movement is gaining momentum and requires a global vision and strategy that can play a part in stemming the tide of racial, ethnic and religious strife.

Negotiating for a better African status in the North

These global black solidarity movements demonstrate that perspective is more important than space or time and that progressive African exiles can use their location "in the belly of the beast" to transform the international system for the benefit of all.

The exiles can serve as a bridge between the historic Diaspora and the African continent. They can use their skills and intellectual capital to negotiate a better status for Africans in international institutions and monitor Africa's image in the North.

The movements prove that a united front of people of African descent as imagined by pioneering Pan Africanists like C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah is still possible, even critical, in the New World Order of global markets and corporate domination.

Francis Njubi Nesbitt

© Francis Njubi Nesbitt

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