Susan Njoki’s ordeal

WHILE the new generation of black Africans are still struggling to consign the tales of torment and the travails of their forebears during the eras of slave trade and colonisation by the West to oblivion, some people in the Middle East and Asian countries would seem to be intent on reenacting yesteryears’ inhuman and uncivilised treatment of citizens of African descent in their countries. From Malaysia to Lebanon, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, gory details of inhuman treatment of Africans who travelled to these countries to do menial jobs abound. Worse still, some African-Arab countries like Libya, which is perhaps only African in name, are not exempted from the class of countries whose people treat Black people with scorn, disdain and outright cruelty. The only difference between the oppression of Black Africans today and that of the slave trade and the colonisation eras is that there was overt, or at least tacit, support of the state during those eras while individuals are the culprits today.

Just recently, Susan Njoki, a Kimbu young lady from Kenya, recalled the torture she underwent at the hands of her Saudi employer after trying to escape. Susan stated that she had asked for her salary as her contract was running out, but her boss was reluctant to pay. And to avoid double jeopardy since she was also being mistreated in the house, she decided to run away. However, her plan fell through because there was a monitoring electronic device installed in the house that captured her ‘strange behaviour’ and her mistress saw everything. She reportedly attacked her physically when she made the attempt to escape, put her in a chest freezer, and energised it! Susan’s entreaties and her distressed promise to work without salary just to stop the discomfort of being tucked in a freezer fell on deaf ears. Even the pleadings of the cruel woman’s children for Susan’s release from “detention” could not sway her to reconsider her patently inhuman action. She left the poor woman in the freezer without food or water. Susan Njoki said she had to fake insanity, drinking toilet water, before her oppressor reluctantly let her go. The situation of many young Africans, especially in the Arab countries, is similar to or even worse than Susan’s.

For instance, earlier this year, a single mum, Selestine Musavakwa, recalled how she was mistreated by her Saudi boss who reportedly impregnated her. According to Selestine, she was treated well in her first 90 days at her boss’s home in Saudi Arabia, where she worked as a maid. But after what was apparently her probation period, her boss reportedly changed and started to be abusive towards her, making inhumane demands. The single mum of two from Nairobi said at one point, she would drink toilet water, which later affected her liver. These are very sad cases of man’s inhumanity to man. Perhaps what should be more worrying is that only a few of such cases usually come to light.

Unlike in the past when oppressors came to Africa to ferry innocent citizens to farm plantations in Europe and the Americas, it is young African men and women that are paying through their nose to go abroad to eke out existence in countries where they are subjected to slavish employment conditions and cruel treatment today. It is axiomatic that Africans would remain in their countries if their leaders provided basic needs and if they were accorded the opportunity to be gainfully employed. But for as long as the economies of most African nations continue to totter, unable to guarantee basic necessities of life to the citizens and characterised by little or no labour-absorptive capacity, migration, especially of young people, to overseas countries where they are maltreated will continue. It is about the quest for survival.

African leaders should up their ante and fix the economy. The majority of the countries that young people in Africa rush to for greener pasture abroad are not as endowed naturally and in terms of the quality of human capital as some countries on the continent. The missing link has always been the lack of quality leadership. Experienced and academically qualified Africans are taking up demeaning jobs abroad and even at that, they are being treated like animals just because of poor leadership back home. Their incompetent leaders literally throw them into hostile climes, as it were, where they are treated like scum. Perhaps some citizens of these foreign countries also treat Africans with disdain and cruelty in their countries because they are aware that governments in Africa treat their citizens with little or no dignity. This is very bad for Africa’s image.

At this very moment, many Africans are perishing on the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara desert, seeking the proverbial greener pasture. Yet, African leaders are clinging tightly to power and not significantly improving the peoples’ lot. From Uganda to Cameroon, civilian dictators are holding their communities hostage, muzzling the opposition which could have offered an alternative to their retrogressive and inefficient management and administration of human and material resources. Surely, after decades of independence of many African states, they can no longer attribute their backwardness to slave trade and/or colonisation. They have had ample time to reverse the losses of the period of servitude and engender economic prosperity, peace and tranquility on the continent. It is a sad commentary on African leaders that young Africans are increasingly becoming victims of ‘second slavery’ and beastly treatment outside the shores of the continent for no fault of theirs. In the circumstance, the time-tested dictum that free people will never choose their own enslavement is seriously being interrogated in Africa. For in spite of the cruel and bestial treatment being meted out to them by people of their host countries, young Africans have continued to migrate to foreign countries in droves because the condition at home, in totality, is not any better.

African governments have a duty to ensure the safety and well-being of their citizens at home and abroad. This is a core essence of the bilateral relations between nations. In other words, the need to treat Africans in foreign countries with dignity by their host communities should form a significant element of bilateral relations between African states and their foreign counterparts. The preponderance of cases of ill-treatment of young African men and women who travel to foreign countries in pursuit of honest living is not just embarrassing but also distressing, and it is high time local officials began to seek redress for this injustice at the diplomatic level. Nonetheless, it is imperative to emphasise that an effective and enduring solution to the challenge of young Africans’ migration to foreign lands where they are treated harshly lies in deliberate and intentional repair of the domestic economies of the African states in such a way that bolsters their capacity to retain all willing young men and women as economic actors at home.

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