This was a new parcel—a tractor had just dug the trenches—and the workers asked us to plant the first trees. One handed me a seedling and lopped off the bottom of the plastic wrapping with his machete. I took off the rest of the plastic and lowered it into the hole; a few inches of rich, wet soil were now all that insulated the roots from the cracked, sandy Sahel. Seven paces away, Pape planted the second tree and sprayed it with a few drops of water. Before we drove off, he gathered his crew for a speech, imploring them never to tire. “Fatigue?” he yelled. “Non!” they responded. “Fatigue?” “Non!” “Fatigue?” “Non!” “Fatigue?” “Non!”
Morale was important because, as I soon learned, money was scarce. Every time Pape needed to pay for more seedlings or repair a truck, he went begging to the director of Eaux et Forêts, and the director went to a minister, and then they waited. “Wait. Wait. Wait. We don’t know how he gets the money,” Pape said. There was support for the wall from Europe as early as 2009, but the money—a little over $1 million—went only to a feasibility study. In 2011, the UN’s Global Environment Facility (GEF) made headlines by pledging up to $119 million to build the Great Green Wall—but this was not additional funding, it clarified. If the eleven countries involved wanted to starve other projects and divert all the money, this would be allowed. And the GEF suggested that the name Great Green Wall should be used to brand a raft of development projects in the Sahel—dams, wells, animal husbandry—and not, in fact, to build a wall of trees. “In my vision of the Great Green Wall, there will be practically no place for plantations,” the GEF’s Senegal program officer told me. Even if Western money did get diverted to Pape’s trenches, the EU would be spending at least ten times more on a virtual wall around itself than on a green wall around the Sahara.
So far in Senegal, international support for the Great Green Wall came mostly from the Japanese spiritual group Sukyo Mahikari. In Japan, the Mahikaris’ main temple is an architectural marvel: five minarets topped with five Stars of David surrounding a cavernous hall with a traditional Japanese roof, inside of which is a koi-filled aquarium and a wall of water spewing from the heads of Mayan gods. In the Ferlo, they camped in green military tents in the savanna forty-five minutes from Widou. They had giant bonfires and religious lessons when not planting, and they marched around camp, chanting.
“Have you heard of them?” asked one of the Eaux et Forêts lieutenants in the jeep one afternoon. I’d looked them up, I said: “They believe in the healing power of light energy.” The lieutenant nodded. He was sweating and had bloodshot eyes, a likely case of malaria. “Un sect,” he said—a cult. “All they do is pray.”
Beside us was a civilian Eaux et Forêts official named Mara, a man of feline movements who described his job as “évaluation”: He traveled around the agency’s various projects, taking notes and asking long, philosophical questions. He had been staring out the window at the empty trenches of the Great Green Wall. “It’s good to believe in something,” he said. “It helps you do things.”
• • •
WHEN FRONTEX INTERCEPTED the flat-bottomed pirogues close to the Senegalese coast, the European Parliament’s resident migration expert told me, the encounters were unpredictable, sometimes violent. The men were at the beginning of their journey, and they wanted to go on. “They can be ferocious,” he said. “Sometimes, there is even the throwing of machetes. But if we approach them out in the open sea, when they have been out for a good amount of time, they are too exhausted to offer any resistance.” He cocked his head. “This is interesting.”
Simon Busuttil was slight and soft-spoken, with a young, clean-shaven face but graying hair. From Malta, one of the EU’s newest members and certainly its smallest, he was the 122-square-mile island nation’s senior representative to greater Europe. I met him in his parliamentary office in Brussels. When I was in the Ferlo, Busuttil had also been in Senegal, riding on Frontex boats and meeting with top ministers, trying to determine if Spain’s cooperation agreements with Senegal could be a model for all of Europe. Before the toppling of Moammar Gadhafi, he had made a similar trip to Libya, and after the Arab Spring sent waves of refugees across the Mediterranean, he would lead a delegation to Tunisia. “In fact, I was in Washington last September,” he said. “The U.S. Coast Guard gave a very interesting presentation. Between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, the influx has been reduced from around four thousand a year to one thousand. They use biometric equipment. We have some lessons there to learn.
“Finding countries that cooperate is not so easy for the EU,” Busuttil said. “So in that respect, Senegal is a blessing.” But from the perspective of some in Malta, the Spanish-led clampdown was also a curse. As the Atlantic route to the Canaries was blocked, the flow of African migrants was shifting: across the Sahara they went, on trucks and on foot, from Mali to Niger and then into Libya, where smugglers packed them into matching wooden boats—black hulls, black decks, black gunwales—and sent them in the night across the Mediterranean. In 2008, after the clampdown began, there was a 70 percent drop in migrant arrivals in the Canaries. That year in Lampedusa, the Italian island near Malta in the central Mediterranean that in 2013 would host Pope Francis’s first official trip out of Rome, there was a 75 percent jump in arrivals. More than thirty-one thousand people washed up, almost the exact number that had reached the Canaries at their peak. “If you close a door, people will try to go through a window,” Busuttil said. “This is human nature.”
Data on Mediterranean casualties was incomplete—fishermen who caught bodies in their nets sometimes threw them back, so onerous was the paperwork if one found a dead African—but one in twenty-five boat people was said to die in the crossing. Malta was the next-worst fate: a wrong turn on the way to neighboring Lampedusa, which migrants targeted because they could expect to eventually be transferred to the Italian mainland. Malta, on the other hand, was no ticket to the rest of Europe. When illegal migrants landed here, usually by accident, they were thrown in jail for up to eighteen months. When they were released, they had nowhere to go, because Malta is so small. It is the eighth most densely populated country in the world, just ahead of Bangladesh. Arrivals to Malta were few in comparison to Lampedusa—only twenty-seven hundred in 2008—but in Maltese terms this was another twenty-two people per square mile, and its nationalists were becoming enraged. Under existing EU law, the country where migrants first land is responsible for them. If they escaped to another European country and were caught, they would be transferred back to Malta.
“All evidence points to them not wanting to come to my country,” Busuttil emphasized. “They’re trying to go to Lampedusa. Those who manage to get through our defenses, they are thinking they’ve reached Italy. When they see the flags and realize they haven’t, they get the shock of their lives.” In the Parliament in Brussels, he vainly pushed for what he called “burden sharing”: a recognition that frontline states such as Spain, Italy, Malta, and Greece were now policing the border for all of Europe. The Continent’s richer, more northerly countries, great emitters of carbon and producers of wealth, barely contributed ships or aircraft to Frontex, and they processed a relative trickle of African asylum seekers. So Malta was itself a victim in this, he suggested. It was a power game: Northern Europe bullied southern Europe. Southern Europe fought within itself and with or against North Africa. The big stepped on the small, and the small stepped on the smaller. The migrants themselves were at the bottom. Here, too, shit rolls downhill.
When vessels were detected drifting between Malta and Italy, the two countries sometimes fought over who should take them in. In 2007, twenty-seven Africans were left clinging to a tuna net because the boat’s Maltese captain refused to bring them on board; they had to be rescued by the Italian navy. Italy later pulled out of the Frontex missions altogether and cut a quiet side deal with Gadhafi. “What will be the reaction of white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans?”
the dictator told the press on a state visit to Rome, as he angled for $5 billion a year to stop smugglers’ boats from leaving Libya. “We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed as happened with the barbarian invasions.” Under the 2009 Treaty on Friendship, Partnership, and Cooperation, Italy had agreed to pay 250 million euros a year for twenty-five years in exchange for joint infrastructure projects, oil contracts, and help on immigration. Rumors circulated of vast detention camps in the Libyan desert, and the migrant flow seemed to shift farther east. The Greek-Turkish border became Frontex’s next hot spot.
Malta’s up-to-eighteen-month imprisonment for new arrivals was its own deterrent, Busuttil told me. “Not because we want to be cruel to other human beings,” he said, “but because it’s our only remaining weapon, if you like. It might seem harsh, but if you knew the context of this country . . .”
North of Malta, a web of detention centers was rising all over Europe: more than two hundred sites spread between two dozen countries, from a former Jewish internment camp in France to an abandoned tobacco factory in Greece to an empty airline hangar in Austria. Together, they had room for as many as forty thousand migrants. In Britain, most of the prisons were run by private contractors such as the Serco Group, the MITIE Group, and especially G4S, the world’s second-largest private employer, after Walmart, and the source of a scandal at the 2012 London Olympics: Its guards were so poorly trained that the British army had to be called in to replace them. The contractors carried out deportations, too, escorting shackled Nigerians or Angolans or Bangladeshis on a coach-class flight home. Outside the EU, G4S ran Australia’s refugee detention system until another scandal, this one involving children sewing their lips shut during hunger strikes. In the United States, the prisoner market was dominated by the Corrections Corporation of America, whose lobbyists helped draft Arizona’s controversial 2010 immigration bill, apparently because it was good for the bottom line: The more migrants arrested under the new law, the more demand there would be for the corporation’s jails.
Climate change would only grow the market, as I was reminded after I left Busuttil and drove across the border to the Netherlands, a partly below-sea-level country preparing for migrants as well as a more literal deluge from sea-level rise. North of Amsterdam, amid shipyards and warehouses in the city of Zaandam, was a new, 544-migrant prison: two gray modernist blocks ringed with concertina wire and built not on land but on water. The prison floated. Until a guard chased me away, screaming, for whatever reason, in angry, Dutch-accented German, I paced along its fence line, snapping photographs of water lapping up against the cell blocks.
• • •
I’D TRIED TO ARRANGE for a translator in the Ferlo, and one day, after Pape, Mara, and I returned to the research station from the Great Green Wall, he was there. Magueye Mungune was twenty, a village boy in hip-hop garb: white baseball cap cocked sideways, baggy jeans, expensive shoes. His home was forty miles south across the plain. There he was alone among old people, he told me. All his friends had long ago left, some for Dakar, some for other cities, some for Europe. His mother was in Mauritania, his elder brother in New York. “But if everyone leaves, who will stay for Senegal?” he asked. “People will do jobs in Europe that they would never do here. I do not want to clean toilets!” Magueye had heard rumors about the Great Green Wall, heard that the government was planting trees to stop the Sahara from swallowing his and the other villages, and he already knew what he thought about it. He thought it was stupid.
“They will never finish it,” he whispered. “There is no water. You need people to water the trees, but soon there will be no one here. The trees will die. The ministers will just eat the money.” Pape, lounging in a nearby chair, took the newcomer in. “If I were a minister, I would do the same,” he joked.
“No, no, we must set an example,” one of the officers said. “We should take the money for the Green Wall and just give it directly to the people. And forget the wall.” Magueye, unsure if the foresters were making fun of him, was momentarily disarmed. “How long will it take to plant?” he asked. Pape did the math: It was almost seven thousand kilometers across Africa to Djibouti. The wall would be fifteen kilometers wide. So, 10.5 million hectares of trees. This summer, his teams would plant 5,000 hectares. “Okay, it will take twenty-five or fifty years,” Pape said. “Just for Senegal.”
Magueye deciphered the good-natured arguments that raged endlessly around me: Mara asked about cows eating the seedlings, and Pape said they would not be interested in acacia or ziziphus. The experts on the scientific committee had thought of this already. Mara asked about goats, and Pape said they would eat the trees if they had a chance—but they would not have a chance. The goats belonged to the nomads, and the nomads left the Ferlo at the end of the rainy season, which was before the Eaux et Forêts men would leave. As for the people themselves, they would not cut down the Great Green Wall for firewood because acacia trees were worth more alive than dead: They produce gum arabic, a hardened sap that is used in everything from marshmallows to M&M’s to shoe polish. To make one point, Pape pulled out the Dictionnaire de l’écologie from his briefcase, a black leather sack with an ivory latch, and waved it in Mara’s face. Sometimes he stopped to consult a weathered printout of Senegal’s forestry code or to leaf through a manila folder marked “GMV”—for Grande Muraille Verte, the Great Green Wall—which contained the minutes of scientific committee meetings. Sometimes he sounded like a true believer. “This is like extending electricity across Senegal,” he told Mara. “In 1967, the country said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And in 1968, we did it.”
The Great Green Wall had inherited its name from the Great Wall of China, the barrier that repelled invaders for two thousand years. When it failed, it was due to human weakness, not any engineering faults: A corrupt seventeenth-century general had accepted a bribe and let the Manchu army sweep past. More immediately, Africa’s wall had been inspired by China’s own Green Wall, a planned 2,800-mile bulwark against the drifting sands and dust storms of the Gobi Desert. Its first poplars and eucalyptus trees were planted thirty-five years ago. It was already the largest man-made forest in the world. There were other precedents: Joseph Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature involved planting interconnected bands of forest across the southern steppes. In the Dust Bowl–era United States, the Great Plains Shelterbelt Project planted 220 million trees stretching 18,600 miles, from North Dakota to Texas. In Australia, in addition to the Number 1 Rabbit-Proof Fence of the early twentieth century, which wasn’t entirely rabbit-proof, there was MOTT: Men of the Trees, a nonprofit that since 1979 has planted 11 million seedlings. MOTT was the inspiration for the Woman Against the Desert author Wendy Campbell-Purdie’s 1959 move to North Africa. She grew trees twelve feet high in the Moroccan Sahara, then moved to Algeria, where her plantation in a 260-acre trash dump led to a countrywide project. First known as the Green Wall, in 1978 it became the Green Belt of Northern African Countries—and then, with loss of interest and the passage of time, again became the Sahara.
Even in Senegal there were precedents, smaller-scale tree-planting programs to the west and south. “But those ones are not the Great Green Wall,” reasoned Mara. “This is the Great Green Wall.” Magueye and I looked on as he and Pape argued about why this was important, and soon they looked back at us.
“What is your philosophy?” Mara asked Magueye. “What is mankind’s proper relationship with nature?” My translator, sitting in one of the compound’s few chairs, sank further behind his white baseball cap. “Do you like Kant?” Pape asked. “Descartes?” Magueye said nothing. “What is spirituality?” Pape continued. “What does it translate to?” Finally, Magueye pointed to the sky. “There is something looking down on me,” he said. “But I can’t say who.”
These questions soon seemed relevant. One afternoon Pape received a situation report, and an air of crisis settled over the research stat
ion. The professionals of Eaux et Forêts were no longer winning the friendly planting competition. The light-energized spiritualists of Sukyo Mahikari were faster. “Sukyo Mahikari?” someone asked incredulously. “Sukyo Mahikari?” Pape seemed resolved. “We must go faster,” he said. “We must be the fastest.”
We piled into a jeep to see the Mahikaris in action. Their camp was orderly—green army tents in military rows surrounding a main pavilion of blue tarps, with a kitchen area to the side—and everyone wore a white name tag. The president of Sukyo Mahikari Senegal, whom Pape and the others called Monsieur Président, stood in the shade of a baobab and held court with two of the prettiest volunteers, his hands clasped together, his head giving small, formal nods: Japanese in manner but otherwise a six-foot-tall African man in a gray tracksuit. A videographer, who also had a name tag, filmed the scene. Two other leaders, a Frenchman from Toulouse and a South African woman from Cape Town, spoke to each other in Japanese, and when they called the camp to attention, the youths—Congolese, French, Senegalese, Ivorians, Guineans, Gabonese, South Africans, Belgians—yelled in response: “Hai!”
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