标签： Africa

LAGOS, Nigeria — For 52-year-old Iniebong James, the rush of relief after his repatriation flight touched down in Lagos last week quickly gave way to quiet anxiety. Nearly two weeks back on Nigerian soil, he is still struggling to rebuild a life he walked away from a decade earlier, when he first left for South Africa on a six-month visitor visa that he would ultimately overstay.

After overstaying his visa, James carved out a living as a car mechanic in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, a quiet existence that unraveled in May when he was assaulted by anti-immigrant demonstrators, leaving him with a severe head injury, he told the Associated Press. His attack is far from an isolated incident: in recent months, South Africa has seen a sharp escalation of anti-migrant sentiment, with public marches demanding the expulsion of undocumented migrants and widespread reports of targeted violence against foreign nationals.

In response to the rising threats and growing tension, several African governments have organized large-scale repatriation efforts to bring their citizens home from South Africa, with hundreds of Nigerians among the first groups evacuated. For decades, South Africa has drawn millions of migrants from across the continent, pulled by its relatively robust economy and greater access to economic opportunity compared to many neighboring nations. But this steady influx of migrants has been repeatedly punctuated by sporadic outbreaks of xenophobic violence, as many South Africans blame undocumented foreigners for the country’s persistently high unemployment rates, widespread poverty, strained public services and rising crime.

For James, the decision to leave Nigeria back in 2014 was driven by economic collapse. Before his move, he worked as a truck driver for a Lagos-based haulage company, which shut down in 2016 when Nigeria entered its first economic recession in 20 years. Persistent job insecurity paired with crippling, days-long national power outages pushed him to seek opportunity abroad. During his years living in South Africa with an expired visa, James says he paid regular bribes to local police and immigration officials to keep operating his small mechanic shop, claims the AP has not been able to independently verify.

James is among the first group of Nigerians repatriated on the government-organized flight that departed South Africa on June 11. While he says he values the freedom of being back in his home country, he faces a far grimmer economic reality than the one he left. Over the past decade, Nigeria’s economy has contracted significantly, prompting sweeping economic reforms from new President Bola Tinubu in 2023. Those reforms included eliminating long-standing national fuel subsidies that had kept fuel prices artificially low for decades, as well as allowing the Nigerian naira to float on the open market. These policy changes, compounded by global market volatility stemming from U.S.-Iran tensions, have sent inflation soaring across the country. When James left Nigeria in 2016, fuel cost roughly $0.10 per liter; on the day he returned, that same liter cost $1.03. “Everything is too expensive,” James noted. He says he is willing to take any available work, but is pinning his hopes on government support to secure stable employment.

Nigerian authorities have stated that repatriated citizens will receive appropriate support before reuniting with their families, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not responded to questions about long-term support plans for returning migrants. Migration expert Margaret Monyani, founder of the Johannesburg-based OLAM Africa Research Institute, emphasizes that restarting life after repatriation is far from simple. “Reparation is not transformation,” Monyani explained. “Returning is not always as straightforward as it sounds. People just think, go back home and start again. No, what is home?”

Twenty-year-old Omotola Adeniyi echoes that sense of disorientation. She moved to South Africa to join her mother in 2015, when she was just 8 years old. After finishing high school, she found herself locked out of formal employment and higher education entirely. “After I finished high school, that’s when I saw real life because everywhere I looked for a job, all I could get was, ‘No, we don’t want to employ foreigners,’” Adeniyi said. She began saving for a return flight last year, but airfare was out of reach, so she accepted the Nigerian government’s offer of a free flight home. After 11 years away, she says Nigeria now feels like a foreign country.

The recent wave of anti-immigrant violence and protests has sparked widespread diplomatic backlash across the African continent. In addition to Nigeria, governments including Ghana, Malawi and others have organized repatriations for their citizens, and both Nigeria and Ghana summoned South Africa’s top diplomatic representatives to issue formal protest over the violence. “The price of your peace, and the safety of your children, is worth any sacrifices you have to make, or any assets you have to leave behind when fleeing a conflict zone or hate-infested environment. Survival is the noblest form of vengeance,” Nigerian Foreign Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu told returning migrants in a statement delivered by her representatives upon their arrival in Lagos.

Even amid the ongoing outbreaks of xenophobic violence, migration experts note that South Africa remains a top destination for most African migrants due to its more advanced economy and developed infrastructure. “It doesn’t mean South Africa has the perfect institutions, but they’re working to a large extent,” Monyani added.

This coverage is supported by the Gates Foundation as part of the AP’s global Africa development reporting, with the AP retaining full editorial control over all content.

Three days of intensive talks focused on addressing the lasting harm of the trans-Atlantic slave trade concluded in Ghana’s capital Accra this week, with delegates from across Africa and the Caribbean unanimously backing a bold 19-point roadmap to advance reparatory justice against nations that profited from centuries of human trafficking.

Hosted near Cape Coast Castle, one of the most infamous remaining strongholds that facilitated the forced displacement of millions of African people, the “Next Steps” conference built on a historic United Nations General Assembly resolution passed in March that formally labeled the 400-year transatlantic slave trade “the gravest crime against humanity.” That vote, which garnered 123 votes in support, was opposed by just three nations — the United States, Israel, and Argentina — while 52 countries including the United Kingdom and most European Union member states chose to abstain. Unlike binding Security Council measures, General Assembly resolutions carry no legal weight, but they carry significant symbolic and political capital for the global reparations movement.

Between the 15th and 19th centuries, an estimated 12 to 15 million African men, women and children were captured from their homelands, trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean, and forced into chattel slavery in the Americas. The legacy of that exploitation continues to shape systemic inequality and underdevelopment across African and Caribbean nations today, delegates emphasized.

The newly endorsed 19-point plan outlines core demands: sweeping debt relief for affected nations, the repatriation of thousands of cultural artifacts looted by former colonial powers during and after the slave trade era, and the creation of a dedicated global reparations fund — though negotiators did not announce a specific funding target in the final statement. The framework also for the first time centers the unique, disproportionate harm of slavery and intergenerational trauma on African women and girls, a gap that has long been overlooked in global conversations about the crime.

Beyond material redress, conference leaders issued a unified call for former slave-trading nations to issue a “full, formal and unconditional apology” for their role in perpetuating the trade. Opening the conference, Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama framed the demand not as a push for collective modern guilt, but as a call to collective responsibility. “History does not ask us to inherit guilt, but it asks us to inherit responsibility,” Mahama told assembled delegates.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a virtual address to the conference, acknowledging that enslaved people were systematically dehumanized and treated as disposable commercial goods rather than human beings. But he pushed back against framing reparations as a one-time financial settlement, arguing that the issue should not be reduced to “a cheque written to bring the story to a close.”

To date, no sovereign nation has ever paid reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans or to affected African, Caribbean and Latin American states. What little compensation has been distributed historically went exclusively to former slave owners, not to the people who were enslaved. Most notably, after abolishing slavery in the 1830s, the British government paid out compensation to enslavers equal to more than $21 billion in 2024 currency, a sum that was never redistributed to the families of the enslaved.

The UK has maintained a long-standing refusal to entertain reparations claims, arguing that current generations and modern institutions cannot be held legally or morally responsible for atrocities committed centuries ago. During the March UN General Assembly debate, UK Ambassador to the UN James Kariuki argued that “No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another.” The US ambassador echoed that position, saying the United States does not recognize any legal basis for reparations for historical acts that were not classified as illegal under international law at the time they occurred, adding that the UN resolution failed to clarify who would qualify as recipients of reparatory justice.

A controversial U.S. immigration policy that sends asylum seekers to third-party African nations is facing fresh scrutiny after a new group of deportees arrived in Sierra Leone this week, with legal advocates warning the practice directly undermines existing court-ordered protections and puts vulnerable migrants at grave risk of persecution.

Erica Reilly, an attorney representing one of the migrants who arrived Thursday, confirmed to the Associated Press that the flight marked the second such deportation to Sierra Leone in as many months. Last month, nine West African asylum seekers landed in the country under the same policy, and approximately 12 more joined them this week.

Sierra Leone is just one of at least nine African nations that have struck formal third-country deportation agreements with the U.S., alongside a number of Latin American and Caribbean states that have reached similar arrangements. Under the terms of Sierra Leone’s agreement, which is backed by a $1.5 million U.S. government grant, the West African nation only accepts citizens of other West African countries, serving strictly as a temporary transit point rather than a place of permanent resettlement. A monthly cap of 25 deportees and an annual limit of 300 have been placed on the program, though Sierra Leonean authorities have not disclosed how long the agreement will remain in effect.

Upon arrival in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, deportees receive a briefing pamphlet from Kenvah Solutions, a private contractor hired by the Sierra Leonean government to manage deportees’ accommodations, food, healthcare, and transfers to their home countries. The document explicitly labels Sierra Leone a “temporary transit location” and confirms that “no long-term settlement is provided for or permitted,” adding that local authorities and contractors are working to “return you home as quickly and safely as possible.” Neither Kenvah Solutions nor Sierra Leonean government officials responded to requests for comment from the AP.

Immigration advocates and legal representatives say the policy is a deliberate legacy of the Trump administration’s broad crackdown on irregular migration, which relies on often-unpublicized third-country deportation agreements to create a legal loophole. U.S. courts have issued formal orders barring the deportation of many of these asylum seekers directly back to their home countries, where judges have confirmed they face credible threats of persecution. By routing them through third-party nations like Sierra Leone, the U.S. effectively bypasses these protections.

Reilly, who is representing a Nigerian asylum seeker among the most recent group of deportees, explained that once migrants arrive in Sierra Leone, they have almost no power to block their forced transfer to the countries where they face danger. “They’re put in a position where they just don’t have a say at all,” Reilly said. She added that U.S. authorities are fully aware of the risk facing most deportees sent through this program, choosing instead to disavow responsibility for their fates once they leave U.S. soil. “Our government is just saying, ‘What happens to them after they leave the United States is not our problem,’” she said.

This is not the first challenge to the controversial policy. Earlier this month, human rights lawyers filed a legal case against Equatorial Guinea with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Africa’s top regional human rights body, accusing the central African nation of violating international human rights law by forcing U.S.-deported asylum seekers back to their unsafe home countries.