On April 7, 2015, being Easter Tuesday, I left Nigeria and landed in Germany the next day being April 8. It was to pursue a further study. Ten years later, I look back and make a reflection on the life of Nigerian migrants in Germany. This essay therefore marks my tenth anniversary in Germany. It is an abridged version of a longer paper - Reconsidering René Girard´s Archetypal Scapegoat Hypothesis in the Light of Nigerian Migrants in Germany.

According to the present statistics, there are about 85000 Nigerians in Germany. Out of this 35805 are asylum seekers. Others are students, workers, and family members. They are found mostly in big cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Köln, Essen Dusseldorf, etc. It used to be only missionaries that were found in rural areas. Recently, however, some Nigerians are buying or building houses in the city outskirts. The migration of Nigerians to Germany dates back to the post-independence era when some students received scholarships as a way of sustaining the new independent nation. The rate of Nigerian migration to Germany comes behind USA, England, and Canada because of language difficulty.

There are many reasons for migration, such as the proverbial search for greener pastures, political persecution, terrorism, studies, and family reunions. In all, these Nigerians are called migrants without an exception. There are also other migrants from other parts of the world making up the 30% of the population from about 600 cultural backgrounds.

Life in Germany is not really easy. Some Nigerians here travelled illegally and most of the time through Libyan and Mediterranean Sea. Lives are lost in the desert and on the sea. Majority of them are subjected to inhuman treatment such as slavery and prostitution. Some of them enter Europe with trauma which is most of the time untreated. Their quarantine in a refugee Centre could worsen the situation making them unfit for any job and integration later.

There is also the case of discrimination based on skin colour. Added to this is a huge loss of human social capital. They find it difficult in finding a job commensurate to their level of education. They are then exploited and underutilized both by the Germans and their fellow Nigerians.

Also, an average Nigerian lives in two worlds. He is uprooted from his cultural background and is not fully planted in the new culture. At the end of it he or she makes money more than it could have been in Nigeria, but his or her life remains broken without self-actualization.

An important point to note here is the hyped link between migration and criminality. It is believed that migrants are importing crime into the German society. This canonization of the Germans and the demonization of the foreigners is a dangerous binary and has been counteracted by a recent study carried out by Ifo Institute of the University of Munich. According to this study, the migrants are mostly young men and this is naturally the population bracket known with crime. Most crimes committed by the Germans do not appear in the statistics. This is because it is either repressed by the police or the case is not reported at all. There are reasons for not reporting cases. First of all, when the victim is undocumented, he or she is afraid of appearing before the authority. Some of them have no confidence in the German police. Also, language issue could be a cause here. 

It is good to note, that there is no systematic targeting of Nigerians as regards violence. Most of what they suffer is also the fate of other foreigners. Neither are also these difficulties mono-causal. Some of the problems have cultural roots. Others are encountered along the way. However, the problem of racism could be addressed within the society. This could be explained in the light of René Girard´s scapegoat hypothesis.

According to Girard, humans desire by mimicking. This is called mimetic desire. There is a model that possesses an object and a subject that desires the same object by a way of mimetic. When the object of desire is limited and cannot be possessed by both at the same time, there will then be a rivalry between the subject and the model. At this stage, the mimetic desire will lead to a mimetic crisis. When this crisis reaches a breaking point, the blame will be laid on a minority group or individual outside of the popular culture.

This becomes a scapegoat to be sacrificed for the return of normalcy. The violence meted on the scapegoat does not actually solve the problem. It rather helps the warring factions to ventilate their anger. Whenever there is crisis in the society, the same process is repeated again and again. The alterity is what makes a scapegoat. Alterity breeds fear and ignorance and when not well managed could breed aversion, hatred and even violence. This is the root cause of racism. Considering the dark skin colour of the sub Saharan Africans, they are placed at the end pole of the alterity scale and bear the greatest brunt of racism.

A crime committed by an Arab, for example, is blamed on a black African. Foreigners are accused of stealing jobs from the Germans, causing unrest in the society and polluting their racial purity. Good to note is that many Germans are not guilty of this. The racists are only a small fraction of the population. 

Germans are not the only people known for racism. It is everywhere in the world. That of the Germans is so obvious because of a philosophical system that taught it for a long time. Immanuel Kant and the German idealists such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nitezsche had elements of racism in their philosophies. This peaked in Adolf Hitler´s propaganda on the superiority of the Aryan race. Today, such binary is taken up by the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), a political party seen by many as new Nazi. This makes life uncomfortable for many foreigners especially the blacks and Nigerians inclusive.

At home, many Nigerians also suffer a kind of reverse scapegoatism.  Many in Nigeria blame their relatives abroad for their misfortunes. The so called entitlement mentality has clogged their wheel of success. This is more than a personal opinion. Through a mimetic catharsis, it has become almost a creed among some folks in Nigeria. This has led to the exploitation of their friends and relatives in diaspora. Trapped in the two worlds that see them as the scapegoat to be sacrificed, these migrants end up in a life of unfulfilled dreams and aspirations.

A milestone in the civilization is therefore recognizing that the supposed scapegoats may not necessarily be the cause of their problems both in the country of origin and in the land of the supposed greener pasture. Also, beneath the so called greener pastures are dry leaves as well.