• Films and magazines paint a rosy picture of the West, but the reality is different
As the mystery of the stowaway whose body plummeted from a Kenya Airways flight as it approached Heathrow Airport on the last Sunday of June continues to be a mystery, the bigger question (bigger than how the man got to the plane before takeoff) is why?
Why would anyone be so desperate to flee that they would get into the undercarriage of a commercial jetliner, with all the inherent risks that come with it?
The assumption is that the deceased stowaway, as yet unidentified, was a young Kenyan man. Seeing as that there’s no war in Kenya, just poverty, it is then not unreasonable to assume that the why the young man risked life and limb to get to the west but perished was in pursuit of a better life economically. He was, what the world calls, an economic migrant; looking to find a better job, better services, better education, better medical care, elsewhere, specifically in the west.
That still doesn’t explain why the man felt he had no option but to get into the landing gear of an aircraft. According to a September article in the magazine, Aviation Technology, the profile of such stowaways is that they’re ‘poorly educated people who simply do not appreciate the risks they are subjecting themselves to.’
That sounds to me very much like the article was calling people who stow away stupid. I don’t buy that. The KQ June stowaway knew enough to know where the landing gear was. It was also reported that he had a bag with food and water, which indicates some level of preparedness. This says to me that the man did do some research and presumably he must have come across mention of just how dangerous the conditions inside the landing gear of an aeroplane are. And yet, despite quite possibly having some idea of the perils, he still went ahead and did it. I don’t call that stupid. I call it desperate.
Our stowaway is not the only young person from Africa to lose his life trying desperately to get to the west. Many from our underdeveloped continent have embarked on dangerous journeys by air, sea, and road with expectations of a better life.
Is it, though, a better life? Films, magazines, and the Internet tell us that it is; that in the west everyone is rich and life is easy. The reality, however, is very different, more so for illegal immigrants.
A life without the right papers to live and work in the west is a life of squatting in condemned, abandoned buildings, sleeping under cars in freezing cold weather and moving from place to place to avoid immigration authorities. Hunger is a constant companion, and loneliness looms large as your social circle is considerably smaller than back home.
Add on to that, many places in the west are not particularly welcoming to immigrants. Right-wing populism and xenophobia are on the rise, so there probably won’t be a welcoming party of folk dancers celebrating your arrival.
Perhaps the solution to saving lives from perishing in search of a better life lies in having a borderless world, free from the desperation of irregular migration, a world without the imaginary lines that separate people into ‘us’ and ‘them’, just like it was in medieval times.
I know, now I’m just imagining things.