Exodus

The refugee is an all too common figure in modern Africa. He has appeared in Kenya and the Congo, the Sudan and Nigeria, his belongings piled in an ungainly bundle atop his head, his children skipping naked alongside, his path a dusty road leading nowhere. Still, familiar as the phenomenon may be, there is a particularly nightmarish quality to the scene that has been unfolding in recent weeks along the borders of the West African nation of Ghana.

More than a quarter of the country's 8,000,000 inhabitants have been ordered by the government to leave. They are Africans from other countries, many of whom have lived and worked in Ghana under loose alien status for decades. They include nearly 1,000,000 Nigerians, 186,000 Upper Voltans and 196,000 Togolese, who make their living mostly as small traders, unskilled industrial workers, miners and farm laborers. Last week police began arresting those without residence permits. Some 900,000 have already fled back to their homelands. Hundreds of thousands more are waiting to follow. Some are crammed into hastily built army camps waiting to be given exit forms; others have been lined up for days at broiling border posts leading east to Togo and west to the Ivory Coast.

Groaning Lorries. The bedraggled caravans are filled with Hausa tribesmen in flowing white robes, bare-breasted Yoruba women from Nigeria, Malian water carriers, Upper Voltan gold miners, Ivorean timber merchants and beggars of all nationalities. The luckier ones started out in trucks or wood-frame "mammy wagons" whose fares have jumped more than 400% since the exodus got under way. For many, travel by whatever means stopped at the border. Groaning lorries carrying homeward-bound Nigerians and Dahomians are stalled in columns miles long because they have not received permission to cross tiny Togo. An unknown number of people have died of hunger and exhaustion.

The big move began in December, after the government of Prime Minister Kofi Busia announced that all aliens who lacked residence permits would be expelled from Ghana within two weeks. Few of the aliens could produce official papers, and fewer still took the warning seriously. They had heard the same threat before, but official identification had never been required in practice. When the Interior Ministry announced that police would actually begin to flush out illegal residents, it was clear that this time the government was serious. By then, few had time to apply for permits--or had the confidence that they would be granted. The result was panic.

In Accra, great crowds of foreigners joined an endless queue outside the Accra Sport Stadium, the emergency emigration center. As often as not, they paid $10 or $20 in "dash" money (bribes) for the proper forms. At night, many slept near Kotoka international airport --alongside billboards hailing African unity.

Flimsy Excuse. Busia's policy eventually may uproot all but 10% of Ghana's 2,500,000 aliens. The action may antagonize his neighbors, especially the Nigerians. But at home, where 600,000 Ghanaians are unemployed, the move has already proved popular.

Defending the mass expulsion, Busia charged that 90% of Ghana's past and present prison population was made up of aliens. It seemed a flimsy excuse for one of the greatest forced population movements in black African history. In numbers, if not in poignancy, it exceeds two recent forced moves. One was the flight of 150,000 Watutsi from Rwanda in the early 1960s, when the tall, proud tribesmen were hunted down and slaughtered by rival Bahutus. The other was the exodus of 21,000 Asians from Kenya over the past two years.

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