Why Europeans are worried about African babies
by Gaia Baracetti, 12/14/21, Overpopulation Project

Let’s not start with Prince William for once. Let’s begin
with the great Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli. He was one
of those rare rural poets who actually knew rural life,
with intimacy and familiarity, who didn’t just use it as
a romantic backdrop or an excuse for metaphors. He knew its
animals and flowers, its cycles and rhythms; sometimes,
reading his poems aloud, one finds oneself singing with
the birds. Or thundering in the night.

Pascoli was a man of his time, the late 19th & early 20th
centuries: a time of large families, widespread poverty &
high child mortality – all recurring themes in his poems.
He was also a socialist.

In 1911, Pascoli gave a speech in support of Italian
soldiers in the war with the Ottoman Empire in Libya,
titled La grande proletaria si e mossa – The Great
Proletarian has aroused. The “Great Proletarian” is, of
course, Italy. A proletarian is someone so poor they can
only claim ownership of their prole, their children. That
was his point: Italian workers, so numerous, so exploited,
are finally rising up to the challenge of expanding,
conquering and civilising. That is, of colonialism.

That expansion was aimed across the sea towards Northern
Africa. Many times in history the people of the Mediterr-
anean have taken turns in fighting, conquering, enslaving
& invading each other, often with claims of superiority to
justify the bloodshed. In 1911, smelling what was coming,
would the Northern Africans have been justified in worrying
about Italy’s demographic trends? I think so.

The conquest of Libya celebrated in such exalted terms by
Giovanni Pascoli, & then the further expansion into Abyssinia
at the initiative of another socialist (later fascist) from
Romagna hoping to revive the long-gone Roman Empire, Benito
Mussolini, brought to Africa yet more violence & misery. For
the aggression Italy was put under sanctions by the League
of Nations – somewhat hypocritically, as Italy was just the
latest participant in an enterprise the other Euro nations
had been busy with for centuries.

It was now “our” turn to relieve internal pressure thru
external expansion. To Pascoli, the conquering soldiers & the
hard-working migrants were one & the same. “Why am I calling
them heroes? Proletarians, workers, farmers,” reads his speech.

Many people will be offended at the suggested association
between migration & colonisation. But some of the greatest
mass aggressions of human history – such as the Barbarian
Invasions of the late Roman Empire, or the European conquest
of the Americas – began as regular, even humble, migrations.

Colonisations & invasions are certainly not the prerogative of

Europeans – pretty much any people has been guilty of them at
some point – & they always stem from overshoot of some kind.
For all the elites making grand speeches offering reasons to
invade, it takes masses hungry enough to go thru the trouble
of leaving home & fighting in order to carry out the plan.

We can now move on to Prince William. Recently, he once again
attracted controversy by saying: “The increasing pressure on
Africa’s wildlife & spaces as a result of human population
presents a huge challenge for conservationists, as it does
the world over.”

For such a carefully worded statement of the obvious, the
backlash sure was fierce. Racist! Sexist! Eco-fascist! Rich
white people (with 3 kids!) can't tell poor black people how
many babies to have! And not just Prince William – David
Attenborough (2 kids), Jane Goodall (one), even Emmanuel
Macron (none)… they are all white elitists.

This is where the topic broadens too much for a single essay.
I’ll let these famous individuals defend themselves. I’d
just like to say that I believe they aren't the only ones
who worry about what rampant population growth will do to
Africa’s great wild habitats & to the last megafauna on the
planet left relatively untouched by human expansion. I've
gathered the impression that many Africans themselves are
proud of their beautiful nature, of their varied wildernesses,
of sharing their land with such magnificent animals. If these
animals were hunted or starved to extinction, Africans, of
any colour, would lose out – not just in terms of tourism
revenues, but also in identity, culture, company... & the
world as a whole would be poorer. We all have the right
to be worried.

Also, what are we supposed to do? Give up on the giraffes
because we blew our chance with the mammoths?

As much as racism is real & a force in history, this new
fashion of making everything be about race has the effect of
dividing us more than uniting us as humans, & of obfuscating
true responsibilities & very complex challenges. It's also
created a worldview that sometimes appears to be dominant
everywhere, that paradoxically affirms rather than renounces
racism – the idea that whatever happens anywhere in the world,
no matter the complicities, choices or interests of the people

involved, is always & solely white people’s fault. Everyone
just has no say in how their country is run or their nature
treated, not even in Africa or Asia, except white capitalists,
white governments, & their apologists.

The argument dismissing concern about developing countries’
birth rates also revolves around the idea that Western over-
consumption, & not population growth per se, should be blamed
for environmental destruction. This in turn rests on 3 very
odd assumptions: 1, that any one phenomenon can only have one
cause; 2, that poor people have no impact on the environment,
even when they number in the billions, &, 3, that the exploding

populations of Africa are all poor & will stay poor forever.
And, unlike Pascoli’s great proletarians, never go anywhere
else. But Gallup polls now suggest that 1 in 3 African adults
wants to emigrate.

Yes, it’s true: Europeans are worried about African babies.
That isn't because they don't value African lives. On the
contrary: I don't think it’s “white saviourism” to point out
how many efforts are made by Westerners, among others, for
the sake of African children: in terms of aid, medical or
development assistance, & adoptions.

Let’s go back to Libya. The Mediterranean pendulum has swung
once again. Italians left long ago; Libya's now the stepping
stone for migration in the opposite direction: from Sub-
Saharan Africa, after a perilous journey across the desert,
in the hands of smugglers, rapists, kidnappers & torturers.
In the final stage of this long-distance migration many drown
in the sea. Many others make it to Italy. Besides the constant
worry about the loss of human lives, the consequences are growing

profits for local & transnational criminal networks, polarisation
in the receiving societies, & the resurgence of the far right.

And it’s not just Italy & Libya. Morocco & Spain, Turkey & Greece,

Belarus & Poland, even France & Great Britain...it’s
gotten to the point that migrants from the South & East of
Europe are cynically being used as pawns in geopolitical
conflicts that much predate their arrival. Authoritarian
regimes exploit them as bargaining chips for money & political

influence from the EU. And it keeps getting worse.

No country can take in this many people, with so many more on
the way, without losing social cohesion & economic stability.
Yet they can't be sent back to Libya, where they face horren-
dous abuses, nor to their home countries, which don't have
enough jobs for all their young people, constantly growing in
number, constantly fighting over dwindling resources. Just as
the Europeans themselves have been doing until not so long
ago. And if it was bad when the Europeans did it, & there was
fewer of us, imagine what it’s going to be like in the near
future with the population of Nigeria alone projected to reach,
even with declining birth rates, 400 million people in a
couple decades. That's close to the population of the entire
European Union today—which already includes millions of
African-born migrants from both sides of the Sahara.

One thing about Europeans, perhaps more so than some other
cultures, is that we're acutely aware of history. We see the
marks it left in the landscape, we learn about it in schools,
in our 1000s of years of literature, it’s in our conversations
& in the very air we breathe. We're obsessed with warning signs.

Pascoli’s birth place, San Mauro, in Romagna in Central Italy,
was renamed San Mauro Pascoli in his honour. It's the village
where my maternal grandmother was born.

I know that part of Italy fairly well. It is almost unrecog-
nisable from the countryside idyll Pascoli celebrated in his
poems, & others after him. Gone are the malnourished children
– & the singing birds, too. Romagna is now a prosperous,
cheerful wasteland. The internal uplands have been somewhat
spared, but the coast – hyperdeveloped, incessantly built –
is one of the most popular tourist destinations of Italy, in
spite of not being the most beautiful. In the fertile plains,