Migration is in Our Blood
Administrations seek to control our movements, but that will not stop our innate desire for freedom of movement.
Around 100,000 years ago, humans began migrating outside of Africa, populating other continents. At the same time, the African continent had its fair share of inner migration. One of the major migrations was the Bantu expansion, where the Bantu people migrated from southern West Africa (modern Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon) to the central, eastern, and southern areas of the continent. The Bantu ended up dominating all of Africa south of a line crossing from southern Nigeria to Kenya, except for South Africa and the Namibian desert.
Spreading new farming, ironworking, pottery, and deforestation technologies, the Bantu people permanently imprinted on the places they migrated. 500 languages spoken today are derived from the Proto-Bantu language.
Many have left their homeland in search of something new. Sometimes it is for the excitement of exploring, but oftentimes it’s due to the typical culprits — exhaustion of local resources, increased competition for local resources, overpopulation, famine, epidemics, warfare, and climate change. The story hasn’t changed. Culprits like these forced 79.5 million people to migrate by the end of 2019.
Our ancestry is a story of migration. I joke to my friends and family that I could become a top salesman for companies that offer genealogical DNA tests because I’m obsessed with talking about my own results. As a descendent of the Atlantic slave trade, I was stripped of the privilege of knowing the origins of my forefathers, but the genealogical DNA tests provide a fascinating story of my ancestors' movements.
My Nigerian, Cameroonian, Congolese, Beninese, Togolese, Ghanaian, Malian, and Senegalese heritage blueprints a piece of the African Diaspora. My Scottish and English heritage hints at the dominance of a colonialist regime. And, my Western, Eastern, Southern Bantu heritage speaks to an older migration, whose influence lasted thousands of years.
My DNA holds records of various lands, climates, plants, cultures, religions, hierarchies, diseases, conquests, possible extinctions, rapes, loves, prejudices, rituals, and hands.
Your DNA, no matter where you are from, no matter your culture, no matter if you are the victor or the oppressed today, holds the same types of records. Migration is in our DNA.
And I have migrated. I’ve migrated from my hometown of Baltimore to various other U.S. cities like Austin and Denver. This year I even migrated from my country, moving to the Netherlands for school. But some do not feel the necessary or adventurous pull to migrate — my mother is born and raised in Baltimore and will never leave. But she has lived in various parts of the city and county, migrating from different neighborhoods.
When one moves to a new neighborhood, state, or country, there are operational tasks one must complete. I have previously submitted my new addresses to the USPS, and the city municipality in the Netherlands. We know that it is not generally condoned in our societies to be unidentified. Some institution has to track your location. It is preferable if your location is permanent and the institution knows the location’s latitude and longitude.
Today migration is limited by government administrations. I must get my passport stamped to move to essentially any part of the world. Some nation has claimed every parcel of land that dots this earth. For the first time in human history, every acre is attached to an administrative apparatus.
I don’t know about you, but I feel trapped. Bureaucracy governs movement.
The worldwide passport standard emerged in 1920 after World War I by the League of Nations, a Western organization tasked to maintain peace. The U.S. then passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and The Immigration Act of 1924 limiting the inflow of immigrants. What was the emergency? Too many people from unwanted countries were threatening “the ideal of American hegemony.” On November 29, 1941, U.S. law required Americans to have a passport. In 1978, an amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 made it unlawful to enter or depart the U.S. without an issued passport even during peacetime.
As an American, my passport is relatively powerful — I can access 185 countries out of the 195 total countries in the world without a prior visa. Only 15 countries provide better access than the American passport (those members are entirely Asian and European). Yet, I feel uneasy. If I want to go anywhere in the world, I need to tow my passport with me, convert my currency, declare myself with legally binding documentation, be cognizant of the rules of the land to make sure I’m not met with various levels of violence (e.g., a $200 ticket for jaywalking, a night in a jail cell, 15 years of hard labor).
Of course, my passport is one of the most privileged in the world. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I really can never do what my ancestors did.
It seems innate to human nature the drive to strive for something greater than ourselves, to push boundaries that we previously did not know existed, to create a human set of wings and fly.
It was always the case that migration brought the risk of disease, war, and death. But now convoluted administration systems are added to these risks. Don’t get me wrong. Belonging to a certain passport club with inures benefits. The club may offer benefits like clean water, roads, infrastructure, protection from invaders, and vaccines. But in some clubs, club members walking on other club member’s property could be a death sentence. Migrating to a new club so that your children can live a better life might mean your children end up in cages separated from you. In this lifetime you cannot avoid border control.
Our land has become too much like jail, so we have to look at other places. Elon Musk is looking to space. He might look to the ocean next, for more than 80% of the ocean is unmapped and unexplored.
What must it feel like to begin a sojourn to a place where you have absolutely no information? You don’t know what it’s like, how it feels. I feel connected to my Bantu ancestors, my oldest known story of ancestral migration. Their story runs in my veins.
I guess then I will look up to the stars too. Feast my eyes on a new horizon. Gather up my tools for an adventure. Await to learn of new lifeforms.
