Africans are dying to reach Europe by crossing into a piece of Africa that Europe still occupies
Since Thursday, thousands of people have poured across the border from Morocco into Ceuta. At least 34 have died. Spain has deployed its army, sent diver teams and maritime vessels, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has called the crossings an attack and a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity. More than 25,000 people have already been pushed back into Morocco. Local officials describe thousands sleeping in parks and on pavements, unaccompanied children among them, and say they cannot even count how many have entered. The numbers being reported range wildly, from a few thousand to as many as 60,000, and Spain’s own interior ministry published a figure of 49,000 before quietly withdrawing it.
Now hold on to the fact almost every report will skip past. Ceuta is not in Europe. Neither is Melilla. They are Spanish cities sitting on the North African coast, on the African continent, and they are the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. Morocco has claimed both for decades and calls them occupied territory. So what is actually happening this week is that Africans are dying by the dozen trying to reach Europe, and the Europe they are running toward is a piece of Africa that Europe simply never gave back.
Sánchez called it a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity. The territory is in Africa. Spain took Ceuta in the 16th century and has held it ever since, through the entire age of empire and everything after it. Africa was decolonised, flags were raised across the continent, and these two cities stayed exactly where they were, European soil by declaration, African soil by geography. Today they are ringed with fences, razor wire, watchtowers and breakwaters, built to keep Africans out of Africa.
And understand what pushes young men to run at those fences knowing people die on them. It is not adventure. It is arithmetic. Youth unemployment across North Africa is brutal, the cost of living keeps rising, and an entire generation has calculated that the risk of dying at a border is smaller than the certainty of having no future at home. That calculation is a verdict on the leadership of their own countries as much as on the wall in front of them. Africa’s young people should not have to choose between a fence and a life without prospects.
Two failures meet on that beach in Ceuta. Europe’s, for holding African land while barricading itself against Africans. And ours, for building economies that cannot hold on to our own young.
Thirty four people are dead this week. They died at a border that should never have been there, running from countries that gave them nothing to stay for.
#HistoricalAfrica #Ceuta #Morocco