I recently made the mistake of trying to watch an entire BBC world news programme, which I don’t recommend if you are the kind of person who needs to believe that human beings have redeeming qualities. Unless maybe you stick to the sports section.

Somewhere in the course of the newscast about death, destruction and amazing acts of inhumanity, the issue of immigrants came up. Why is there always that faction of people who get exceedingly worked up about “Why won’t these (insert immigrant nationality of choice) stay in their own countries instead of coming to ruin ours?”

Heh. Put me in mind of a series of articles floating around the net, mostly written by disgruntled people from non-Western countries, about the difference between being called an expatriate and being an immigrant.

Technically the two are really the same thing, but one carries an air of adventure and affluence in exotic locales whereas the other suggests menial jobs below minimum wage and a constant fear of being asked to produce some form of valid identification.

But that question about why immigrants emigrate from their countries? It is a valid and an interesting one. With the numbers of Africans facing incredible dangers, obstacles and death to cross oceans and deserts in search of a better life, this is hitting home rather hard.

It is also an old story: For as long as I have been watching coverage of Africa by international news services, some version of this has come up. If it isn’t Israelis telling Ethiopian Jews that they don’t really belong, it is disenfranchised South Africans telling immigrants that they are abusing their hospitality.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is exactly why some of us are Africa Rising naysayers. Africa rising is an economic story that wilfully ignores the politics and the why-we’re-here.

I have never really bought into certain terminologies used to describe the inequalities across the world, but it is nice from a politically correct point of view to have witnessed the move from the First World/Third World dichotomy to developed countries vs developing countries.

Oh, wait, sorry — that might be a little dated as well, the issue at stake here is poverty and its eradication. But I do want to raise some uncomfortable history behind this political correctness.

Please let us take a moment to consider, truly consider an oft-ignored part of the course of human history and the rise of this modern globalised era that rarely shows up except in the never-read books scribbled furiously by angry Africanist scholars.

There was a time, oh long ago-ish, when Africans were not particularly keen on forcibly emigrating to offer their unpaid labour for the growth of cotton and sugar and lord-only-knows what else, but there you have it. Now we can’t mass emigrate for love or money. There’s a dark joke in there somewhere about the reality of modern geopolitics.

But there is an even darker joke, emanating from this apparently rising continent of ours. I live in a country that has a wonderfully warm welcoming spirit... except if you actually want to overstay your welcome, possibly naturalise and even become a card-carrying member of the republic.

Oh, and a struggling youth population that has developed a canny bit of a habit of wending its way down to South Africa in search of lucrative urban opportunities.

With, to make things even more wonderfully complex, a policy of welcome in so far as we can afford it to those neighbours who have been displaced by strife.

Which circles back to why people emigrate from their countries, especially Africans who are so vulnerable to the worst excesses of prejudice. Look no farther than their own countries. The Africa rising narrative is underpinned by foreign direct investment porn, which sidesteps the grim realities of the politics that make it necessary, all too often, for people to leave their homes in search of a better life.

I look around this East African neighbourhood of ours and even beyond to see reports of magnificent GDP growth rates per annum and other performance indicators.

But you have to read between the careful lines in small, fine print the quiet discussions about our realities. Those realities that have women crossing the border into Tanzania again, carrying their lives in buckets on their heads, trailing sons who as soon as they grow old enough will probably pay a man to sail them across the Mediterranean so they can one day send their mothers enough money to feed their younger siblings.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]