Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
Oli, a life-size elephant puppet, parades the streets of Brussels. A glissando of accordion tunes, anecdotes, poetry recitals, and migrant life stories creates a visceral soundtrack to the shows. Spectators follow in rapt attention as Oli trots forward in tatters: rags left behind by African migrants in Morocco. Worn-out clothes bespeak stolen times, waiting, exhaustion, homelessness, and abandonment of racialised African migrants at the external flanks of the European borders[rM3] . But also their hopes, desires, and dreams of crossing the Mediterranean shores.
Many didn't manage to cross; either stuck, dead, or gone missing along treacherous crossing points in North Africa. And yet, Oli crossed the Mediterranean to tell the tales of countless African migrants.
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An Elephant in the Mediterranean is a work that sits at the crossroads of art, advocacy, and academia. Artists, cultural activists, and academic researchers conceived the elephant as a metaphor before bringing it to life as an animated marionette. Together, they collaborated with Racines Aisbl in Morocco--a collective of cultural activists.
Before landing in Brussels, Oli had paraded key migratory waystations: Casablanca, Tiznit, and Zagora. It's a rallying show that expresses the mounting sentiments of anti-blackness in Morocco, while also decrying its contested role as the watchdog of the EU's external borders. And which comes at the expense of macabre violence against migrant bodies. Such orchestration of violence by the Moroccan border regimes culminated in the harrowing spectacle of the Melilla Massacre. Much the same happens in the Maghreb at large: Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Hence, Oli's idiom speaks to the plight of all migrants in such waypoints.
In the case of Morocco, the towering fortification of the Western Mediterranean Route has turned Nador and Fnideq into carceral towns. Like a Venus flytrap, they lock racialised African migrants in prisons at worst, or in informal detention centres before being dumped at the Algerian border at best. Away from the fences. Unable to reach the fence, the urban fringes of Casablanca have become the waiting room of Europe. Squatter encampments are pitched up around bus stations in Ouled Ziane and Derb Milan.
To relieve the presence of Europe-bound migrants in Casablanca, some are rounded up, loaded on ramschackle buses, and dumped off in Tizinit. The city has become a drop-off point for expelled migrants. Some are sheltered in squatters, and others around farms where their labour is exploited for a pittance--something akin to the fugitive conditions of the barracoons. Waiting to cross the Atlantic Route--a treacherous sea route that has been clocking up deaths and disappearances.
Dismantled into body parts, Oli crossed the Mediterranean on a ferry to bear witness to stories of shame, dehumanisation, and political animality unleashed on migrants. He lands in Brussels: the pulsating heart of Europe, but also the headquarters of the European Commission that dishes out anti-migration policies that turn the Mediterranean and Atlantic seas--and the Sahara Desert--into vast graves of unknown migrants. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the deadliest shipwreck in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast.
The big elephant in Brussels commands the attention of policymakers-- and that of the European public at large--to such border fatalities. Ten years have passed, but nothing has changed: the same hackneyed narratives that repackage migration as a 'crisis', migrants as 'problem people'.
Oli stages a histrionic show of the carnival, the obscene, the abject, and the grotesque of the global mobility regimes. The grotesque body of the elephant is a powerful symbol of the hypervisible that Europe keeps unseeing: the silent war against racialised migrant bodies. The magnitude of the EU's border violence is too visible--like the size of an elephant--to go unseen. Its contrail of deaths, disappearances, incarceration, and deportation is too palpable to ignore, too cruel to morally evade. It's a big elephant in the European room.
Beyond the recent history of European border violence, Oli's symbolic performance unfolds older--and much darker--entangled genealogies of European racial and colonial violence.
If there's anything that we should take from Oli, it should be the subversive character of the carnivaleque: Its grotesque capacity for exaggeration, laughter, satire, and communal solidarity and celebration. Oli's shows in local markets and fairs embody this penchant for satirical inversion. They bring to mind the colonial exhibition and its enduring legacies of racial animalisation of black Africans illegally transported to Europe, where they were exhibited as 'freak shows'. The nineteenth century marked the apotheosis of the colonial fair--a playground for scientific racism. Oli is not a freak show; it's a show that mirrors a freak Europe.
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Nabil Ferdaoussi is a Doctoral Research Fellow at HUMA-Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, completing his work on migrant deaths, disappearances, and incarcerations in the Moroccan borderlands. Rajaa Essaghyry is a PhD Candidate at Keele University, working on the aesthetics of emancipation in Moroccan cinema during the 'Years of Lead'. Her Work bridges academia and activism as a project coordinator at Racines aisbl, an NGO using arts and culture to advance democracy, human rights, and social transformation. Her work includes co-directing award-winning documentaries amplifying marginalized voices on themes like gender-based violence, migration, and forced displacement.
