Haitians to Africa? Senegal resettlement plans gain steam

Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade announced this week that 50 Haitians displaced by last month’s devastating earthquake have taken him up on his offer to resettle in Senegal.

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“There is a psychological part of this in terms of when Senegal says, ‘This is your home, you can always come back,’” says James Shikwati, director of the Interregion Economic Network in Nairobi, Kenya. “If you look at a country like India, it tapped into its diaspora, and their expertise helped transform India into the country it is today. This could be the part that is more important, where the (African Union) is trying to send a symbolic message to Africans and their brethren in the diaspora."

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A history of repatriation from Caribbean, US

Africa, though, has been down the road of repatriation before, and not always with the best results.

In Sierra Leone, a country established by the British in 1787 as a homeland for former slaves in the Western Hemisphere, newcomers stuck together and used their education and access to markets to dominate their indigenous countrymen. Similarly, Liberia – a neighboring West African country established for American freed slaves in 1821 – created a huge gap between the relatively powerful newcomers and the impoverished local majority. Revolts were common and bloody. The civil wars in both Sierra Leone and Liberia in the late 1990s were largely divided along these ethnic lines.

Land disputes

“[Senegal's offer] is a romantic idea, but not one likely to win the hearts of the landless Senegalese peasants whose own claims to land will be put on the backburner,” says Richard Cornwell, an independent political analyst based in Tshwane (Pretoria), South Africa. Noting the violent experiences in Sierra Leone and Liberia’s histories, he says, “It’s liable to have knock-on effects that are very undesirable.

The key, says Raymond Louw, editor of the Southern African Report in Johannesburg, is to get beyond fine rhetoric and get down to the essentials of what would help these new migrants – Haitians who have lost everything in the quake, who may know how to farm in lush tropical Haiti, but not in the arid Sahel of Senegal – to actually succeed, and to be accepted by the local community.

“It’s all very well to give land, but ... unless there is followup of training and resources – money to buy equipment and seed and fertilizer – it sets them up for failure,” says Mr. Louw. “It’s a nice gesture, but it needs more than a gesture.”