News arrived today that several hundred Malawian nationals have been repatriated from South Africa, the economic behemoth of the continent, in what Pretoria calls 'an orderly process of immigration enforcement'. Cue the usual chorus of outrage from the bien-pensants, who see this as a violation of pan-African solidarity. But let us pause, pour a glass of something sharp, and consider the wider tableau: the United Kingdom has issued a statement urging all Commonwealth nations to 'uphold the rule of law' in such matters. The irony, as they say, is so thick you could cut it with a panga.
Here we have a situation that would have been entirely familiar to a Victorian colonial administrator. Labour flows from poorer peripheries to richer centres, only for the centre to decide, when the political winds shift, that the periphery's sons and daughters must return whence they came. The Malawian government, ever the diplomatic mouse, has accepted the repatriation with a grace that borders on the sycophantic. Meanwhile, the UK—a nation that has spent the last decade entangling itself in Brexit knots over its own 'sovereign borders'—dares to lecture others on the sanctity of law. The cognitive dissonance is almost a work of art.
What we are witnessing is not merely a squabble over migration quotas. It is a symptom of a deeper intellectual decay. The post-war dream of a Commonwealth of equals, bound by shared values and a common language, has curdled into a bureaucratic ghost. The UK's moral authority to preach on 'rule of law' is laughable when one considers its own treatment of the Windrush generation, its illegal war in Iraq, or its current dalliance with extra-legal migration deterrents. Yet the show must go on: the British High Commissioner in Lilongwe issues a statement, the Malawian government nods, and the South Africans continue their deportation flights. All very civilised. All very hollow.
The Malawians sent back are not criminals. They are the usual suspects: domestic workers, construction labourers, informal traders. People who, in any rational economic system, would be celebrated for their enterprise. Instead, they become pawns in the great game of national identity, a game that the West has been playing with increasing desperation since the Fall of Rome—or at least since the oil shocks of the 1970s. The parallels to the late Empire are too tempting to resist: a core shrinking in on itself, blaming the barbarians at the gate (or in this case, the migrants from Mzuzu), while forgetting that those very barbarians are the ones propping up the faltering economy.
And what of the UK's advice? It is, as ever, the advice of the comfortable. 'Uphold the rule of law' is a fine maxim when the laws are written by you, enforced by you, and broken by you only when convenient. The Commonwealth has become a Potemkin village of summits and declarations, a stage where the British monarch speaks of 'family ties' while her government stands silent as member states deport each other's citizens. The 'family' is a dysfunctional one, and the patriarch in London has lost all claim to authority.
But perhaps I am too harsh. Perhaps the rule of law is, in fact, a worthy principle, and South Africa is merely exercising its sovereign right to control its borders. Very well. Then let the UK apply that same principle to the 300,000 Malawians estimated to be living in the UK, many without proper papers. Let the UK repatriate them, with the same efficiency, and see how that plays in the British press. The hysteria would be biblical.
We are, I fear, in an age of intellectual dishonesty. The repatriation of Malawians from South Africa is a small story, a footnote in the daily churn of news. But it is a revealing one. It shows that the 'rules-based international order'—that holy grail of liberal interventionism—is merely a set of rules for the weak. The strong, whether in Pretoria, London, or Washington, will always find a way to bend them to their will. The Commonwealth, born of empire and sustained by nostalgia, is a witness to its own irrelevance. The Malawians on that plane know this. It is time the rest of us caught up.
