BUWEMBO: Death in the Middle East: It’s WW2, Burma, Abyssinia all over again

Although I expected some intensive brainstorming when I was invited to a coastal retreat with Kenyan editors last weekend, pondering models of probable revolutions in East African states a decade from today was the last thing I expected.

Of course there was no such thing on the agenda, as the senior scribes were preoccupied with the rather predictable topic of digital disruption in media.

But at some point they got to discussing some of today’s events and important stories for tomorrow, and one scenario considered was million or more East African youth who are going to work in the Middle East.

Charts of maps with arrows of yesteryears’ migrations were generated and juxtaposed to today’s. A notable one was of men who went to fight in World War II and came back in 1945.

No editor needed to be told that their return boosted the agitation for independence from 1945 to early 1960s, a mere one and half decades. The battlefield experiences and exposure overseas were a strong energiser.

So what is similar between children flocking to the Middle East today and their grandparents who returned 75 years ago from Burma, Abyssinia, Madagascar and other places with strange-sounding names where they fought under the Union Jack?

First, many of our grandparents who went fight Germans and Italians whose countries they couldn’t even place on the map went unwillingly; they were either forcefully conscripted or they badly needed a job.

Today’s youth going to the Middle East are also unwilling but the biting unemployment and deception by human traffickers forces them to go, in spite of horror stories told by survivors.

Secondly, many of the men who went to fight against Germans and Japanese died in the process. The same applies to the children going to the Middle East today.

A surprising number are dying despite the fact that before they are taken they are first examined and found to be medically fit. Some three boys are said to have drowned recently yet their families say they had no interest in swimming.

If those men powered the independence struggles, what will their children returning inspire when they return to the Middle East? The pacifist in me hopes they will inspire a new culture of work, after being used to labouring hard and uncomplainingly for those long hours we hear they do.

But someone in our coastal retreat predicted that these children’s eyes are being opened by the suffering they undergo out there and they will starting asking hard questions like why their resource-rich countries are pushing them into near-slavery abroad; that even if they are hardened by subhuman working conditions they may not just come back and start working hard, partly because their customary and ancestral lands are being grabbed or sold off by careless elders; that they will have to return home en masse and unwillingly at some point when some cheaper workers from even poorer countries will start replacing them from their Middle East destinations, that they will cause trouble when they return.

I thought of a small township near Jinja named Burma Garrison—Magamaga—and wondered where a slum to be called Oman will be located.