Speaking About Trading With Africa Without Africans

It is probably not the first time a meeting on Africa has taken place without Africans, but the annual African Global Economic and Development Summit held in California this week stood out mainly because of the new US administration and the hostile policies it's come up with in a bid to "decrease" migration. Seeing yet another headline about visa restrictions, and an annual US-Africa business forum taking place in the US despite the restrictions, brought back my own experiences with this visa demanding world.

In a 2016 piece called, Traveling while African and trying to appease the visa gods, Kenyan author Ciku Kimeria captured this constant hustle and humiliation we go through simply because of the places we were born in.

She recounted her own experience telling her non-African friends: "I sometimes believe that Africans will need visas for heaven too.”

To know more about these indignities, check out the yearly ranking of the "best passport in the world". Some headlines call them "the most powerful passports" to have with little questioning or challenging how visa regimes maintain a hierarchy of north is best, and further global inequality by locking many from the "least powerful passports" world out of opportunities.

In a new ranking by Henley & Partners, a citizenship and planning firm that looks at how many countries can be visited without applying for a visa, it is revealed that German passport holders can travel to 176 countries and Britons can visit 173. Only about four countries outside the "global north'' made it to top 25. You can guess where most of the bottom countries are from.

The article highlights the challenges the current wave of US anti-immigration policies pose for business opportunities for Africans. But these policies are built on already accepted standards of visa policies beyond the US that make us feel like a visa is a ticket to heaven. So Trump's policies are alarming, but so are many if you ask Africans that try to get out of the zones the global order has designed for us.