By TEE NGUGI

More by this Author

Yet again, a boat carrying migrants has capsized off the Libyan coast, killing more than 60 people, including women and children. These deaths are only the latest in a string of drowning incidents involving migrants trying to escape Africa to Europe.

This year alone, at least 2,250 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea. We don’t know the numbers of those who perish trekking through the Sahara Desert to get to the Libyan coast.

While the Mediterranean route is the most common, it is not the only one. Migrants sometimes board ships bound for Latin America. They either seek asylum there or travel, by bus and foot, northwards towards America. Trekking through Central American jungles, the migrants run a gauntlet of drug traffickers and other criminals.

Those who make it to the American border quickly realise that their nightmare is far from over. There are other more desperate souls who hide in the cargo holds of Europe-bound planes or behind the landing gear. They are found dead on arrival. There have been cases of dead bodies falling from the sky as planes descend to land. What agonising tragedy!

Read: 'We are dying': Migrants' plea from Libya-Tunisia border

Seeking refuge from war and poverty is not a crime. The world must decriminalise migration. Instead of toughening immigration laws, countries should make legal migration easier to access.

As we do that, however, we must also confront a more fundamental question: Why are mothers risking their lives and those of their dear children to flee their homeland? Why do mothers and fathers choose to place their hopes for the future in rickety boats rather than in their own countries?

This is a terrible indictment of governance in our countries. Most migrants are from mineral-rich countries, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and South Sudan, etc. Why do we have dollar billionaire politicians in these countries and dirt-poor citizens?

In an essay, We Are Orphans of Our Dreams, I argue that Africa needs a paradigm shift in the way we view the world and our place in it.

This is by asking ourselves hard questions. These questions might even be disorienting, because they will be interrogating long-held assumptions and “truths” fashioned in the crucible of the intense post-independence discourse about the meaning, place and future of Africa.

Read: NGUGI: Border fences in Europe won’t stop deadly migrant trips

That discourse rightly attempted to answer the claims of the colonising ideology. Negritude philosophy, for example, answered European claims that Africa, before colonialism, “existed in the conditions of mere nature”.

We can argue about the merits or demerits of philosophies like “negritude.” The fact is that “negritude” and other versions of cultural nationalism have established the prism through which we see the world and the framework within which we analyse it.

Is it not time we had a paradigm shift from being self-righteous about our situation to structured interrogation of how we manage our affairs? Is it not time to have a post-negritude discourse with a view to reinventing ourselves?

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.