Over the course of a year Green Heart Films has been filming migrants across the African continent and listening to their stories on why they are prepared to risk their lives and leave their countries of origins in order to migrate to Europe.
The journeys begun in the far northern borders of Kenya and Ethiopia where we met with an impoverished tribal community of a people know as the Dashnet.
The Dashnet have suffered years of neglect by local authorities and have struggled against droughts and hunger for thousands of years for in a bygone era they would have been able to migrate in order to search for pasture and water but with the advent of colonial borders their migrations have long since been curtailed.
Five hundred kilometres to the east of the Dashnet are to be found Somali clans who have over many hundreds of years migrated south again in search of pastures and water for their camels and goats but with the demise of the state of Somalia a bitter civil war has ensued for over the last twenty five years leading to a complete collapse of all services once provided by the central government of Mogadishu.
Across this vast continent states with ineffectual governments are in a perilous state of near collapse and with booming populations and growing cities dire poverty and unemployment are compounded by civil strife and dysfunctional administrations which are in many cases corrupt and incapable of managing the changing face of their societies.
After E.Africa I was to visit the Sahel states of Niger & Burkina Faso where an ongoing crisis of conflicts is contributing to the crisis of mostly young and able body citizens choosing to flee destitution and the lack of employment and stability or simply a better quality of life.
After the Sahel I was to visit the Moroccan port city of Tangiers the closes point on the African continent to Europe where groups of migrants from mostly failed W.African states such as Liberia – Mali – Niger – and an increasing number of Senegalese – Ghanians and other W.Africans come in the hope of crossing the straights of Gibraltar to Europe.
Europe and Africa are neighbouring continents and whilst former European colonial states continue to benefit from their economic relationships with the continent, Africa remains increasingly impoverished with weak and fragile dysfunctional governments who are largely unable to simply manage their booming populations and a global economic infrastructure that seeks only to exploit their natural resources.
Europe as a neighbouring continent will soon need to face this growing crisis which is unlikely to disappear. States such as Nigeria will in time pose a serious threat as their economies and infrastructure struggles to cope with an ever growing crisis of overpopulation and a lack of fundamental services such as health care and employment all of which are compounding an already fragile state of national poverty.
The crisis we are all witnessing is an epic catastrophe that is growing by the year and as a global community we need to find a method of managing a crisis that is unlikely to disappear.
