Review: Backway to Europe: Talking Borders and Migration with Gambians on the Move (Series 1)
This summer, while listening to one of the last episodes from the podcast’s first series, I stumbled upon rapidly spreading news of the mass-scale crossings into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in late July. Over 80, 000 people evaded border controls to swim (and walk) into this North African remnant of Spain’s colonial empire. NGOs provisionally reported as many as 141 deaths. Predictably, commentators and politicians across Europe and beyond pictured this new tragedy as the latest manifestation of an intolerable migration crisis, an act of war, an invasion, and an existential threat to Europe requiring tough and swift action. Reactionary speeches raised the sempiternal spectre of the “illegal migrant” to warn against an impeding dystopia heralding the Great Replacement. In this all-too-familiar discourse fuelled by pervasive colonial and racist tropes, Europe is a garden whose prosperity and security requires protection from the surrounding jungle.
The podcast offers a sharp rebuttal against simplistic and misleading stories about perilous journeys between Africa and Europe and those who are prepared to risk their lives. Dominant narratives and representations reduce migrants to threatening criminals, or an indistinguishable sea of humanity chiefly marked by vulnerability. They are either forbidding villains or fragile victims – in both cases morally dubious people who are severed from where they belong. The wider political and historical context is often occulted. Migrants (and refugees) are reduced to a form of enforced speechlessness while others, including researchers, talk and write about them. Their own words, reflections, and analyses remain unheard or ignored.
This podcast, produced by members of Youth Against Irregular Migration (YAIM), a Gambian advocacy organisation founded by young people who met in a Libyan detention centre, and anthropologist Viola Castellano, provides a much-needed corrective to shallow commentaries from this summer – and the past few decades – about migration. Away from miserabilist and fearmongering tropes, its strength lies in the crafting of a sonic platform that disrupts misconceptions about borders and routes. Gambians directly affected by European migration policies are not limited to displaying testimonials about their lives for a worn-out audience well-versed in adjudicating and/or intervening in the business of migration. The seven episodes foreground the voices, experiences as well as interpretations and, importantly, (political) analyses of people who have undertaken such (irregularized) journeys – as well as people who have considered doing it. Together, they detail, comment and critique a broader system impeding the mobility of millions of Africans treated as undesirables.
Emerging from a longstanding collaboration between Castellano and YAIM, the seven episodes illustrate the breadth and depth of insights afforded by epistemological practices that defy and transcend conventional hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination. It is a compelling listen for researchers, students and anyone interested in going beyond conventional discourses about migration that remain beleaguered by distorted and alarmist tropes. Castellano describes her own role as providing anthropological context and placing her research on border externalisation into dialogue with YAIM members’ insights. Besides the audio-tracks, the footnotes provide important avenues for the listener to deepen their understanding and challenge their assumptions, making this podcast a valuable tool for both education and advocacy.
The discussion across the podcast is centred on the concept of the “backway”. The term refers locally to the irregularised route from The Gambia through West and North Africa towards Europe, particularly the journeys across the Sahara and through Libya towards the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. The backway is “an alternative route” when the more official, and safer, pathways into Europe are blocked. It is the only way out for those who seek opportunities to “lift their family out of poverty’” It might lead to death, but the backway is the only (“affordable”) one that can offer “a better life”. As an ambivalent place (“Babylon”) onto which migrants project their dreams with contradictory feelings, Europe is discussed as “a land of opportunity”, not a simple country of destination. Undertaking such a perilous journey is not just about money. Migrants are on a quest for “dignity, respect, and changing social status”. The podcast discusses how the dreams and aspirations of Gambian migrants grate against deadly border regimes designed to impede the mobility of most African citizens.
Measures to stop and deter them are not enough as people continue to take the backway to “develop their selves” and “lift their family out of poverty”. It is a “sacrifice”. The hardship is plainly outlined in the discussion of the journey and detention migrants endure. The podcast’s deep exploration of these violent processes echoes many other routes where migrants’ radical movement towards life is also met by crushing policies. Though the issue is recognisable in many places within a wider world of visas and fences, the podcast traces how imaginaries, expectations and dynamics of the backway have changed over the past decades in Gambia (e.g. the figure of the “semester”), bringing a useful historical lens to an issue that is always in movement.
What has remained salient is the relevance of racializing processes – “the colour or the skin”. The first and last episodes of the podcast vividly frame the issue of illegalised migration as a neocolonial one marked by inequalities and fraught relations between Europe and Africa more broadly. “Why are Europeans coming to Africa with a free visa and then Africa going to Europe with a visa?” Many actors (including state actors) profit from exploitative economies that revolve around illegalised migration. Episodes discuss how the bodies of migrants are assets to be seized, held, and exchanged. The podcast vividly demonstrates how staying, leaving, and returning are shaped by transnational processes marked by “colonial and extractive practices”. The backway is seen as the only way out. Programmes for returnees are not sustainable. The work of international organisations on “voluntary” return is ambiguous at best. Cruel conditions in detention centred, such as those in Libya, are directly entangled with decisions taken by European politicians.
A very compelling, and challenging, takeaway from the podcast for the audience is the framing of backway migration as “a debt” and not a crime. As the podcast shows, illegal migration is not about what people do. Complex forces and processes combine to curb the “fundamental rights […] to migrate” for Gambians. While finishing this review, I am reading commentaries about the latest anti-migrant riots in the UK. The framing of such debates about “boat people” often revolves around the “legitimate concerns” of protesters; a term that does little to shed light on complex social issues but has been very useful to mask and fuel racist and xenophobic discourse, with violent consequences for migrants and others deemed no to belong. The podcast radically opens up what can be understood as legitimate concerns, bringing to the listeners not only reflections from migrants about such policies but an appeal for genuine dialogue and collaboration: “to get connected” because “migration is everyone’s business”. I very much look forward to the upcoming second series of this podcast to find out what further insights the collaboration YAIM and Castellano will bring in the crafting of this rich podcast.
