PRFDHR Seminar Series: Not only in the Mediterranean — Humanitarian Challenges of Migration In and Out of Africa, Stephen W. Smith

Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Speaker/Performer: 
Stephen W. Smith, Chair, African and African American Studies (AAAS), Duke University
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 203 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Africa is emerging from absolute poverty. As a consequence, a growing number of its 1.3 billion inhabitants — they will be 2.4 billion in thirty years — now have the means to migrate. Four out of ten adults in Africa intend to leave their country, most of them for a more prosperous nation on their own continent but more and more also for promised lands overseas, namely Europe and the United States. Natural and man-made catastrophes are not the only drivers of this rush for better life chances. Africa’s demographic transition, in conjunction with the “principle of seniority”, has become the main reason. 70 percent of Africa’s population is under the age of twenty-five. On a continent where elderly men continue to hoard power, wealth and prestige for no other reason than their gender and age, these young Africans — almost a redundant statement… — try their luck in big cities and, increasingly, abroad.
Rural exodus, mass migration: Africa’s pioneers of new ways of life are on the move, unprotected and expandable. Are they alone responsible for the risks they take?
Stephen W. Smith is the Associate Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies (AAAS) at Duke where he teaches since 2007. His scholarship focuses on conflict analysis and the “human geography” of contemporary Africa, namely the continent’s exceptionally young population age structure. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies and M.A.s in Political Science and History from Berlin’s Free University, as well as an M.A. in Anthropology from the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked as West Africa correspondent for Reuters prior to becoming the Africa Editor of first Libération (1988-2000) and then Le Monde (2000-2005). He is the (co-)author of seventeen monographs. His latest book — The Scramble for Europe. Young Africa on its Way to the Old Continent — was released this summer and has also been published in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.

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