Beggars are hard to avoid in India. They include amputees, people with severe physical disabilities generally, and the plainly desperately poor. Except most of them are secretly rather well off. Every morning, they put on their rags for the day’s work on the streets. The more enterprising strengthen their hand by chopping off a limb or two. Whatever their ruse, reaching into your pocket only serves to fuel an elaborate con.

Nonsense, clearly, but the kind you may well be told all the time by middle-class Indians. Partly the reason is that it can be hard to justify and live with vast inequalities, especially in cities like Mumbai where wealth is everywhere. A myth like that of the voluntary-amputee beggar anaesthetises people to poverty and lets them carry on with their lives.

Much the same rationale obtains in Malta specifically and Europe generally. It’s not easy to stomach that, every summer, masses of people drown in the very sea we bathe in. Which is why myths step in to justify the indifference and lighten the burden of responsibility. For practical reasons I’ll limit myself to two of these myths, that happen to be common in Malta.

The first is that Malta has nothing to do with it, and that the responsibility lies with other European countries. It was those other countries, the argument goes, that historically plundered Africa, and it is now up to them to settle debts. A listener phoned in on a radio programme the other day to say that Britain, France, Italy, and so on, had stolen Africa’s gold (‘serqulhom id-deheb kollu’) – a crime that Malta had played no part in.

The reasoning is typical and appears to be solid, except it’s actually nonsense. A five-minute appointment with a history book is all it takes to learn that Malta was as much a signatory to the annals of plunder as anyone else. It was all relative, as with everything else, but it was there nonetheless.   

Take slavery. The presence of black African slaves, if never so pronounced as that of Moors and Turks, is well documented in the history of Malta. They often formed part of the booty taken by corsairs, including Maltese corsairs.

In 1549, for example, a Turkish vessel was captured that had on board 109 ‘schiavi negri’. On that occasion, de Valette generously gave “the most beautiful black slaves” as gifts to European princes and high clergy. Another expedition in 1634 netted hundreds of black African slaves, some 36 male and 45 female of who were sold on credit to knights and private individuals.

Nor was Malta in any way detached from the economies of extraction that systematically sapped African resources. On the contrary, the country’s main source of wealth was a maritime trade that, directly or not, also involved the proceeds of that extraction. If what we see in Europe today is in part the result of centuries of pillage, our patrimony is no exception.

The second myth holds that the best way to deal with migration from Africa does not involve migration at all. Rather, it is to develop Africa. That way, Africans will no longer feel the need to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Instead, they will just stay put in perfect static happiness.

Neither shifting responsibility nor visions of developing Africa will do much to the numbers problem

This is a harder one to debunk, partly because it is intuitive to suppose that it is wiser to tackle the cause than the symptoms. Besides, most people tend to sympathise with initiatives that help others, whoever they might be, stand on their own feet. I do, for one.

Be that as it may, it is fuzzy science to link migration and development in such a straightforward way. There is, for example, the issue of just how much help is needed. One figure we’re familiar with is the €40 billion allocated by the EU, allegedly to generate €400 billion of leverage.

Now these may seem like enormous sums. Until, that is, we realise that there are around 47 African countries where most people live in poverty. Many of these countries are vast – the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, for example, can comfortably accommodate most of Europe. Economically, too, 40 billion – or 400, for that matter – is a drop in the ocean. The current overall GDP of Africa hovers around the eight trillion dollar mark.

The ridiculousness of it all hits you when you consider that Malta, which is much smaller than even the tiniest country in Africa, and that had a better start anyway, got hundreds of millions of euros in EU funds – and still there are potholed roads and people who live in dire conditions.

Besides, investment and development do not always go hand in hand. Investors do not normally go to a place to make the locals happy and rich. On the contrary, and especially in Africa for various reasons, they tend to graft their business onto the very economies of extraction that have impoverished millions. If the investors happen to be African, the trend is for them to siphon money out to places like tax havens and such.

There’s another thing, and it is that development and mobility can and often do coexist. A richer Africa would not mean Africans who stayed put. Europe is considered a developed place, and still there are tens of thousands of European people who have moved in search of economic prospects. That’s to Malta alone.

If migration is a problem, and everyone says it is all the time, the numbers suggest that the EU would do well to develop Europe before it turned its attention to Africa. A bizarre conclusion, to be sure, but one that follows if we accept that ideally people stay put, and that the best way to encourage them to do so is to develop their countries.

But let us for a moment assume that it was possible, without much ado and within a reasonable span of time, to develop Africa, and that developed Africans would no longer need to move. The same developed Africans would then move in their numbers for another purpose: tourism. How might Malta cope with the millions of African tourists who would come here to spend their developed cash?

There’s no way around it. Neither shifting responsibility nor visions of developing Africa will do much to the numbers problem. Anaesthetic myths aside, the real question remains what to do with those boats, here and now.

mafalzon@hotmail.com