South Africa Is a Warning

This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

When people in the rich world imagine a migrant from the poor world, I suspect the image conjured is that of a desperately impoverished person with no marketable skills who will travel any distance and brave any risk to grab an unearned fistful of Western wealth.

But the truth is that a migrant is much more likely to look like a man I met last year named Fikre Gebrie Orebo. Growing up in a fertile but deeply impoverished southern region of Ethiopia, he had dreamed of attending university to become an engineer. But he was the firstborn son, and his family depended on him to start working immediately. And so he hit the road, leaving his hometown and heading to the capital, Addis Ababa. He found work as a laborer, digging foundations by hand and moving stones on construction sites.

It didn’t take long for him to realize he’d need to keep moving. The brutal work paid little, and there were few opportunities for young men like him. The government was dominated by a northern ethnic elite that shunned his southern tribe. The last straw came when the government started rounding up young men to send them to fight an ill-advised war with Eritrea. Orebo feared that southerners like him would be used as cannon fodder in a pointless conflict.

But when he finally set off on his cross-border journey, he didn’t head north, toward Europe, or try to somehow get to the distant, prosperous lands of North America, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have settled. He set his sights on Kenya, his country’s neighbor to the south, where he found a job in a cafe, then farther south still, to South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest economy, where he had heard that an enterprising young person could make a prosperous life.

There, he told me, he was granted asylum as a member of a persecuted minority, and he ultimately settled in Heidelberg, a town about an hour’s drive southeast of Johannesburg. Finally, his dreams came to life. He built a successful business, a pair of convenience stores, known locally as spaza shops, in the nearby Black township of Ratanda. He married a young South African woman, and they are raising their children in a comfortable, suburban-style home. He has long sent money home to Ethiopia, supporting his siblings while they were in school and helping to build a house for his father, who had been a farmer, to enjoy a comfortable retirement.