Western Adoptions of African Children Are Modern Day Slavery

Wandia Njoya writes, I feel partially vindicated by the decision of authorities in Chad to charge six French nationals, members of the French humanitarian organization L’Arche de Zoe (Zoe’s Arc), with kidnapping of children from Chad destined for adoption in France. I wish the six faced a more serious charge such as child trafficking or slave trade (banned two centuries ago), but for now I’ll appreciate these charges as a minor victory.

L’Arche de Zoe was unable to coherently explain why 103 children (the number itself is staggering!) were being taken to France, which proves once again that the adoption of African children by Europeans has no justification. The organization’s feeble excuse that the efforts were not malicious but humanitarian rides on the inherent racist belief that anything whites do is righteous and acceptable, and that Africans should accept any insult or mistreatment because nothing is more miserable than their very existence without any intervention from whites. The resort to their good intentions as a defence is also a poor attempt to dismiss the historical relationship between Europe and Africa that inherently infects any European intervention in the African continent, however benevolent. Even colonialism was justified by its good intentions, namely the desire of European governments and intellectuals to “civilize” Africans and of churches to save the lost souls in the continent.

The explanation of L’Arche de Zoe that the children were not going to be adopted but hosted also flies in the face of reason. In the Western context, host families are understood to be part of an educational program and under contract to live with foreign teenagers and university students for a couple of months. The travel expenses are paid for by the children’s parents, not the host families, and the parents know where their children are and expect them to return after a specified time. But the L’Arche de Zoe has not provided proof or such arrangements. Why would they, when Madonna and her ilk have continued the racist myth that children in Africa have no parents, and even if they did, the parents are just biological accidents rather than flesh and blood adults? The expatriation of the children was not going to be temporary. It is unlikely that the children had the option to return home when it was the French benefactors, not their parents, who paid approximately $3,000 for “travel expenses.” The organization’s clarification that the money was for travel expenses rather than the price of the children themselves is an attempt at splitting hairs. The shipping companies in Boston probably said the same thing to exonerate themselves when slave ships docked at the ports to empty its human cargo headed for plantations in the South.

With a “host” program in which African parents have no input, it is not surprising that the children headed for France were actually Chadian, not Sudanese. The mistake was almost inevitable, since it is doubtful that the organization’s staff speaks any of the languages of the groups concerned. It is unlikely that the organization even cared, since Western organizations are not held up to scrutiny for competence or credibility when Africa is the subject of attention. As long as children with black skin showed up in France, the French nationals paying for the trip would probably not have cared if the children were from Senegal, Gabon, Zambia or Botswana.

Even if the children were indeed from Darfur, it is improbable that they were in a refugee camp with no adults. It is hard to believe that during conflict, children under 13 trek thousands of miles on their own, unaccompanied by an adult relative or fellow villager. And even if they did, human nature would have made them form bonds with adults who were in the same predicament as they were. The question therefore arises as to why African adult refugees are not included in this purported mission to save African children. Why are these adults not given the resources to take care of the children, since they come from the same area and speak the same language?

But that’s the thing about the Western fuss about African children: African adults are rarely mentioned. The best attempt at mentioning them is in the presentation of a teenage mother who is portrayed as having too many children for her age, or an older mother who is described as so oppressed by patriarchy that she cannot speak for herself. The exclusion of African adults from the humanitarian picture allows Euro-America to speak of Africa as if it is a continent where children pop out of the ground like a mineral resource waiting to be harvested by Hollywood, humanitarian organizations and European politicians. Only the gods can tell us how that mentality is different from the days of slavery when Africa was regarded as a labor resource.

The logic that justifies L’Arche de Zoe or Madonna stealing African children from under the communities’ noses without attracting moral indignation from the Western world lacks coherence. In the United States and Europe, no one would accept that state authorities take all children away from their parents simply because the latter earn less than $10,000 a year. That is why these countries have a welfare system. But African governments do not have one because the Euro-American governments now lamenting about the African child are the same ones that denied African parents their livelihoods by imposing privatisation of public resources in Africa and advocating for free market policies in African agriculture while the Euro-American farmers are still subsidized.

There are two things that make the hypocrisy of Western laments about African children sickening. The first and obvious one is that African slavery, by its very nature, was based on the separation of African children from their parents, whether in the motherland or in the Americas. In the Americas, slaves’ right to raise their own children was constantly violated because the children were considered the property of the master and were often sold to prevent Africans from maintaining family bonds that could upset the economic system. The fight against slavery embodied in people such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth included the fight of Black Americans to raise and protect their own children. The Juneteenth celebration commemorates the end of slavery when Black Americans sought to locate their families and loved ones from whom they had been separated. This fight for social dignity as Black people continued into the twentieth century. It is echoed in Martin Luther King Jnr’s famous “I have a Dream” speech in which he affirmed his fight to make a world a better place for his four children, or in the famous photo of Malcolm X holding a gun after his family was attacked in their home. For white philanthropists to come to Africa and snatch children away from their homeland, and then cynically justify their actions by arguing that Africa is a miserable place, is a sign of outright arrogance and contempt for African struggles over the centuries.

The second disturbing thing about Western adoptions is, sadly, the fact that some Africans accept these adoptions as well intended and often dismiss those who question the practice as jealous hypocrites. In Kenya, for example, some bloggers in the local dailies argued, with obvious bitterness, that critics of the Madonna adoption should have taken the child and raised him themselves instead of complaining. At the heart of these responses is a deep-seated belief that the African existence is purely biological, and so identity and self-worth are inconsequential as long as an African child is given food and shelter by a Hollywood star. It is difficult to explain the self-hatred embodied in such statements. There may be a class issue at stake, in which members of the economically modest African classes feel that the African elite do not have the moral authority to stifle their only shot at leading the same lifestyle as the Western-educated and travelled elites. However, it is doubtful that a member of the English working class would accept the same logic if Kofi Olomide or some other African pop star offered to adopt a poor European child and raise him in the luxury of Kinshasa, or even Paris for that matter. I doubt that the poor and homeless whites in New York, Paris and London would appreciate TV crews and humanitarian organizations, whether Western or African, invading their privacy in order to raise money for them. Material wealth without dignity is always demeaning, which is the precise reason why Madonna, Bono and Angelina Jolie come to Africa in the first place: in search of the dignity that fame and fortune have failed to provide.

Westerners do not help the African poor merely out of benevolence. To the adamant sceptics who think otherwise, I recommend BBC interview of Lemn Sissay, an Ethiopian poet adopted by English parents, and Aminata Sow Fall’s excellent novel La Grève des battus or The Calabash-Bearers’ Strike, which its English translator titled The Beggars’ Strike. Those who prefer movies may want to watch The Pursuit of Happyness, in which Will Smith gives the best performance of his career in his portrayal Chris Gardner’s commitment to raise his son despite his adverse living conditions. The Rabbit Proof Fence is another excellent film about the despicable policy of the Australian government in the early 20^th century to raise children of indigenous peoples. Given the risks that the children in the film underwent to rejoin their mother, the assumption that African children do not care about their parents but only want food, clothing and school uniform does not hold any weight. Sissay articulately states in the BBC interview: “When somebody takes a child from their native culture, that is in itself an act of aggression. People will often say, love is all you need. But that is not true. Love without understanding is a dangerous thing.”

The favourable response of some Africans to these adoptions demonstrates the urgent need for us to constantly affirm that our dignity is priceless. The poor have a right to respect, to family life, to privacy and to dignity without the Western media intruding into their households with cameras. The African elite have partially abetted the violation of the dignity of the African poor by welcoming the celebrities and accepting economic measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank that cripple the ability of African parents to raise their children. Euro-America does not really care about poverty but is trying to use the poverty of some Africans to make Africans worldwide feel too ashamed to stand up for themselves. Thomas Sankara, the eminent Bourkinabe revolutionary, demonstrated that we can hold our heads high despite our dire circumstances. While acknowledging and attempting to redress the dire straits in which most of his people lived, he refused to let the poverty in his country be used as an excuse to silence Bourkina Faso. He castigated France for its support for the apartheid regime and opposed American resolutions during Bourkina Faso’s tenure in the UN Security council. He paid the ultimate price for his courage when he was assassinated with the help of the French government.

The prosecution of the six French nationals in Chad, a country that has been visited by Angelina Jolie, could be seen as a minor victory in the assertion of our dignity as Africans. I say “minor” because I doubt that the six will be convicted, and even if they are, it is unlikely that the Chad authorities will place six white people in the same prison cells as ordinary Chadian criminals. In fact, it is surprising that the authorities proceeded to prosecute the six rather than release them on some technicality. Chad’s president Idriss Deby is a life member of Françafrique, the cartel of French and African governments that profits from civil conflict and exploitation of mineral resources in Africa. He depends on France for political survival, and he recently amended the constitution to run for an extra term as president. Deby could not have condemned the actions of the French humanitarian organization without receiving a heads up from Nicolas Sarkozy, which press reports indicate Sarkozy has given in return for Deby’s support of the EU’s peace-keeping mission in Darfur.

This political deal is ambiguous, if not sinister. As far as peace-keeping goes, the Western world, and France in particular, has a grievous and deadly record in Africa. Some will remember the white supremacist-style lynching of Somali teenager Shidane Arone by Canadian peace-keepers in 1993, an action whose ideological roots were traced to white-supremacist groups that had infiltrated Fort Bragg, North Carolina and influenced soldiers to terrorize Black civilians of Fayetteville. In 1994 there was Operation Turquoise, dubbed by the French government as a peace-keeping mission to Rwanda but which was, in reality, a conduit for political and military support to the organizers of the genocide. French soldiers are reported to have participated in rapes and assisted in the disposal of bodies in mass graves.

Given this background, it is inevitable that one would suspect that the French government has bigger political and economic interests at stake when its president and government are willing to sacrifice six of their nationals to protect their mission to Darfur. These interests may include petrol, or the desire to redeem the French national pride dented by the Fashoda syndrome. It was a century ago that the French imperial expansion was stopped at Djibouti when its arch rivals the British outmanoeuvred the French in the Sudan. The same rivalry was behind the Operation Turquoise, in which the French sought to stop the penetration of Rwanda by the “Anglo-Saxons” from Uganda. As with the case in Rwanda, the French government may see this EU intervention in Darfur a means of settling a political score, which will be yet another instance in which it will be playing political games with African lives.

Despite my reservations, I still hope that the officials of L’Arche de Zoe go to jail, where they belong. More than that, I hope the trial will resound as the willingness of Africans to protect their dignity and as a reminder to the Western world that our children are not for sale. In the meantime, we will pour libations to the ancestors in memory of the African members of the AU force who lost their lives in Darfur as they honored that commitment.