Climate Driven Migration in Africa

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/16/1134823038/climate-change-migration-senegal-africa-environment

This article details how the climate crisis is driving migration to coastal Senegal, where farms have more success. With this article, we can see how drives for migration can be multifaceted and complex. Economic and environmental drives are interlocked– contingent–, as one causes the other. As the climate changes and the temperature increases, agricultural success becomes more challenging in these migrants home countries, thus creating their drive to migrate. The article emphasizes how the majority of migration in Africa today happens within the continent, commenting how boarders are similar to that of the European Union as people can travel freely within these borders. They also note that moving freely among the land has historical precedent. As we’ve learned, borders in Africa were mainly influenced by the colonial period and do not reflect how the land has historically been used. While not mentioned specifically, this is presumably the effects of the African Union.

This article also reflects the idea that those who’ve contributed the least to the climate crisis are those who will– and are effected first.

Latin America 9/19/22

Yesterday in class, Dr. Holt gave a brief rundown of 500 years in Latin America. Dr. Holt began by challenging us to think of the major influences. Latin America is diasporic, and therefore thinking about culture instead of just political nation-states, reflecting the ideas posed by the section of Holloway, is important. Think of Catholicism’s influence as a major institution of colonial power. The Tordesillas, was a treaty where the catholic church divided the world; half for Portugal, and half for Spain to colonize. Once Europeans began creating cities, they would build a prison, a town counsel building, and a catholic church. One of their main goals was to civilize Indigenous people. Dr. Holt explained the typology, or different types of colonialism. The two we focused on in reference to Latin America, were the planter and extractive types. Extractive colonialism was motivated by raw goods exemplified by gold, and silver mines in central Mexico and Peru. Indigenous peoples were forced to send their men to mine under dangerous conditions. This type of colonialism relies on local knowledge and access to resources. Planter colonialism describes the mass production of crops. It does not rely on local knowledge or people but instead the import of enslaved Africans. It involves a more direct way of enforcement, where planter colonialism can be more hands off (as long as imports and taxes are going smoothly). Brazil and the Caribbean were under this type of rule with massive sugar plantations. Brazil having the largest import of African enslaved peoples, Dr. Holt led us into race creation as a product of colonialism. Europeans created racial categories and assigned power to them to create a hierarchy in which they are at the top. As a result of this, they became highly concerned with racial mixing, particularly with Black people, the lowest on the hierarchy. One cannot understand Latin America without its African and Indigenous contributions. In trying to, you erase Latin America all together. These ideas persist today, but also existed within the Independence movements of the early 1800s. The people given power under colonial rule wanted to keep that power and were against Indigenous or Black Latin Americans gaining any. We then had to speed through the shift to neocolonialism, an indirect colonialism that rules through economic power by which beliefs and influence can be spread socially, that started by the 1880s, and the shift from European influence to U.S. majority influence in the 20th century.