My wife’s gone to the West Indies

Jamaica? - No, she went of her own accord

Oh, the wit, and his mastery of the homonym! Jamaica—did you make her? So witty.

Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

What irony! For, of all those who ever in the long history of slavery went to Jamaica, few were they who went of their own accord. And, if there is one topic that is guaranteed to raise an argument and quell dissent, it is precisely that which has featured throughout Jamaica’s history: the immigration question.

I once was invited to take part in a celebration of Pride in the state of Wisconsin in the US. The locus was Gayfest in the city of Milwaukee. Now, I have attended Pride celebrations in many places, from Amsterdam (where they do it on the water) to Brussels (where they do it where they oughtta) to Hamburg (where it’s concentrated on a Long Row) to San Diego (twice, in fact, where they shut off Balboa Park for the purpose, and we stand in long rows), but one year it was Milwaukee.

Well, Pride was fun, we were with people from there, so it made it more fun, and they cut our hair and they introduced us to a group of singers they knew and it was lots of … fun. But one doesn’t like to be in a foreign place without learning a little about it, especially when it rejoices in an appellation that so obviously derives from a first nation. Variously spelled over the ages as Milwaukie, Melleokii, Millioki, Meleki, Milwarik, Milwacky, Milwakie, Millewackie, Milwahkie and Milwalky, we have a name that, while of distinct native American origin, is disputed as between two tribes of native Americans: the Ojibway and the Meskwaki. However Milwaukee is spelled, it nowadays betrays far less of its native American origin than of its German influences. The Germania building stands proudly on a street corner not far from the Fest grounds (Fest being the German word for festival), and the city boasts its Pabst and City Hall buildings, which you’d be forgiven at first glance for thinking were not in America but in downtown Hamburg. The city’s brewing tradition stems from German incomers and its early settlement saw influxes from Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Italy, Serbia, Lithuania, Ireland, France, Russia, Bohemia and Sweden, who included Jews, Lutherans, and Catholics along with the Greek Orthodox. Many of these influences can be discerned even by the casual visitor to Milwaukee today. The influence of the Ojibway and the Meskwaki is somewhat more difficult to discern, but it is there nonetheless—in the city’s name.

Fifty years ago saw one of the world’s most televised sporting events. Estimates say that about one billion people around the world watched it on television. Now, let’s put that into perspective. The number of people who are supposed to have watched the Apollo 11 moon landing was 600 million. So, 400 million more watched this sporting event. It was 1974’s Rumble in the Jungle and it was a boxing bout between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. A rumble, in case you’re wondering, in this sense, is a street fight between rival teenage gangs. A rumble is depicted in the stage play and Hollywood movie West Side Story, if you’re interested. Someone always gets hurt in a rumble. In West Side Story that was Russ Tamblyn and George Chakiris; but, in 1974, it was nobody. Sure, Ali knocked Foreman out in the eighth round, but they thereafter became the closest of friends. Mutual respect and friendship blossomed out of a fight that had enraptured the world.

But the Rumble in the Jungle wasn’t even fought in a jungle. It was fought in Zaïre, which had formerly been known as the Belgian Congo, so named for the mighty River Congo which forms its western boundary to Congo (Brazzaville). Nowadays it’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but its name changed in 1971 when its then ruler, Mobutu, altered it to Zaïre in order to align with his philosophy of authenticity, which sought to rid Africa of colonial influences. The fight was actually held in a stadium in Kinshasa, and not in any leafy copse of trees, and Kishasa had started life as Léopoldville (or Leopoldstad in Dutch), being founded and named for the Belgian king whose private domain it was: Leopold II. Although Mobutu sought to eradicate the symbols of western influence in his country, he formed the West’s bastion against communism in west and central Africa, and there is strong evidence that points to Belgian and American involvement in the killing of the Congo’s first post-independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who had embraced a socialist ideology and come from nothing to the country’s leadership in its first post-imperial election in 1960. He was ousted within months and shot by firing squad in 1961, by an army coup funded and encouraged by the usual suspects.

Much of the conflict in the DRC today can be traced back to Belgium’s inept withdrawal from its African colonial bun fight, from its half-baked attempts to conquer Rwanda and Burundi, and its lapdog servility towards the US in the great fight against communism. Although it was King Leopold’s sweet-talking of the Berlin Conference that guaranteed him the Congo in the first place, it was American pressure on Belgium that got its government to wrest the colony out of the king’s personal patrimony. And the Americans were not thereby acting with any philanthropic aim. They knew how to get a piper to play their tune.

Nowadays, foreign powers don’t need to be in Africa in order to control Africa. They can do that with a few emissaries and a few planeloads of artillery and guns, and a slush fund, of course. They don’t need to see the blood being shed in order to direct whose blood will be shed and where. But, if you truly want to exploit a land, then at some point you’re going to need to put boots on the ground and, in the United States of the 19th century, those were riding boots and cavalry swords on the ground that had been promised to the native American.

There are two arguments at stake here and they are basically incompatible. The one would have it that those who migrate ought not to subsequently take up a stance that opposes migration. And the other is that, as long as they migrated sufficiently long ago, like one generation, they are perfectly entitled to oppose the migration of anyone else who wants to follow them—what we call hauling up the ladder behind them. That means that, as a first-generation migrant from the United Kingdom to Belgium, I must be prepared to be ousted from Belgium at the whim of those of its people who oppose migration. If anti-migrant people in Brussels pass a law stripping me of my entitlement to live and work in Belgium, then I shall need to pack my bags and go home. But not my children, surely?

Where does the line get drawn? Where would the folk of Milwaukee like to draw that line? The African Americans who are there—do they need to go home? Where is their home (many of them came in the 1860s during the time of emancipation)? What about the Serbs, and the Greeks, the Italians and, let’s not forget those Germans? They are the nationalities that made Milwaukee great! That made Wisconsin a state of cheeseheads. That made America … what it is today, whatever that is, that it is today.

The implicit response to those who lay the plaint that they would like their country back from the migrant invader is generally Why don’t you come and get it? People express surprise that the rule of law is being ridden roughshod over in some corners of our world. And I cannot understand this: why they should be surprised. After all, people don’t need to be made to leave their homes. They can always go of their own accord. But, then, returning again to Milwaukee: all these Greeks and Serbs and Germans and French and Italians, so proud of their ancestry, and now so keen to ride roughshod over their exemplary rule of law, what if they all quit the city in a oner, right now? Who in heaven’s name would have them back?