The Last Border Is the Mind

The Children of the Sun “They were born under a sun that has fed every empire, and they died in a sea that recognized no flag.” In every culture I have visited, the children of equatorial latitudes are called by some version of the same name: the children of the sun. Sometimes it is a literal translation, as in certain Saharan dialects. Sometimes it is figurative, embedded in lullabies, in praise songs, in the way grandmothers describe the colour of their grandchildren’s skin to relatives across the sea. The phrase is older than any nation. It predates the borders, the empires, the trade routes. It is one of those rare expressions that survives every attempt by power to redefine it. The children of the sun are simply that: the descendants of the latitudes where the sun has shone, unfiltered and ungovernable, for more generations than memory. These children are dying. They are dying in the Sahel, of malnutrition and conflict. They are dying in the Mediterranean, of drowning. They are dying in the Sahara, of dehydration. They are dying in the camps of Libya, of cruelty. They are dying in the favelas of South America, in the slums of Southeast Asia, in the under-bridges of cities that were built, on paper, to welcome them. They are dying in numbers that, expressed annually, exceed the casualty figures of most wars in modern history — and yet there has been no war declared, no general signed the surrender, no treaty was negotiated to end the deaths. The deaths are not a war. They are something arguably worse: a background condition of the global economy, an expected loss, a line in the actuarial table of how the wealthy world balances its books. I want to write this chapter for the children of the sun specifically. Not because the children of other latitudes are less precious — they are not, and this book is, in the end, for all of them — but because the contemporary global system has, for reasons of geography, race, and historical accident, designated the children of the equatorial South as the principal absorbers of its dysfunction. The cost of the system is being externalized onto them. They are paying with their childhoods. They are paying with their bodies. They are paying with their futures. And the world has, until now, been content to look elsewhere. This chapter is an attempt to look directly. Who are the children of the sun, in the literal demographic sense? They are, today, more than one billion human beings under the age of twenty-five who live in the equatorial and tropical belt of the planet, from sub-Saharan Africa through South Asia through Southeast Asia and into Latin America and the Pacific. They are the fastest-growing demographic in the history of the species. By 2050, the population of Africa alone is projected to exceed two and a half billion, the majority of them under thirty. By 2100, one in three human beings on this planet is projected to be African. There is no possible future of humanity in which the children of the sun are not the largest cohort of the species. The only question is what kind of future they will be permitted to participate in. This is not a side question. This is the question. Every other question that animates global politics in our decade — the future of climate, the future of work, the future of governance, the future of migration, the future of innovation, the future of peace — is, in the final accounting, a question about what the children of the sun will be allowed to become. If they are educated, the planet has its next renaissance. If they are denied, the planet has its next conflict. If they are connected, the planet has its next economic engine. If they are isolated, the planet has its next refugee wave. There is no scenario in which their condition is irrelevant to the rest of us. There is no future in which the wealthy global North enjoys its prosperity in serene insulation from the demographic reality of the global tropical belt. The future will be shared, willingly or unwillingly. The only choice is which. And yet — let us be honest — the current global policy posture toward the children of the sun is, at best, containment, and at worst, deterrence. We invest, as a planet, far more in the prevention of their arrival in the wealthy North than in the preparation of their flourishing in the latitudes where they were born. The fortified borders, the maritime patrols, the visa regimes, the offshore detention centres, the diplomatic agreements that pay third countries to absorb the deterrence cost — these are the visible budget of our policy toward the children of the sun. The Vocational Renaissance Centers, the local opportunity infrastructure, the cross-continental educational exchanges, the public investment in tropical-belt enterprise — these are, by comparison, a rounding error in the global ledger. This imbalance is, I submit, the most expensive mistake the wealthy world is currently making. It is expensive in the moral register, obviously. But it is also expensive in the strictly self-interested register. Every dollar spent on deterrence buys a year of postponement. Every dollar spent on opportunity buys a decade of compounding. The deterrence dollar is a consumable. The opportunity dollar is an asset. The wealthy nations of the global North are currently the worst investors on the planet, by their own preferred logic, because they are systematically allocating their capital to the lower-return option. Let me tell you a story about a girl I will call Amina. Amina is fourteen years old. She lives in a town near the coast of West Africa whose name does not matter, because the story repeats in every coastal town between Dakar and Lagos. Her father fishes. Her mother trades. Her older brother left for Europe two years ago and has not been heard from since the boat. Her younger brother is six and has begun to ask, with a frequency that breaks his mother’s heart, when the older brother will return. Amina is the best student in her class. She has scored at the top of her year in every subject she has been allowed to study. Her teacher, an older woman who has taught for thirty-one years in the same school, tells me, with a kind of weary pride, that Amina is “the brightest student I have ever taught, in any year, in any subject.” I believe her. I have sat with Amina. She has the quiet, watchful intelligence of a person who has learned, in a household of grief, to listen before she speaks. Amina wants to be a doctor. She has wanted to be a doctor since the year her father was sick, and she watched the village clinic close for lack of supplies, and she watched her father recover only because a cousin in Banjul sent money for a private hospital that the family could not otherwise have afforded. She does not want any other family in her town to depend on the accident of a cousin’s remittance to survive an illness that the clinic should have been able to treat. She wants to be the clinic. This is not, in her mind, a metaphor. She has drawn floor plans of the clinic she intends to build. She is fourteen years old. I want you, reader, to imagine what would happen if Amina were born in Berlin instead of in this town. She would, by the calculation of her grades alone, be on a scholarship trajectory. She would, by her diligence, be a candidate for the most competitive medical training programmes in Europe. She would, by her quiet brilliance, become, almost certainly, a doctor of unusual capability. She would save lives. She would train other doctors. She would publish research. The cost of her education, from primary school through medical residency, would be borne by the German taxpayer as a routine matter of national policy, and that cost would be repaid many times over, across her career, in tax contributions, in lives saved, in the social capital she would generate. The German calculation would be straightforward. The German calculation has been understood for a hundred years. It is the basic logic of the welfare state in industrial democracies: invest in the talent of your children, and the talent of your children will fund the civilization that invested in them. The accident of her birthplace has removed her from this calculation entirely. Amina is, by virtue of having been born in West Africa rather than in Western Europe, not a candidate for any scholarship trajectory. Her school will close for one term of every two due to lack of funding. The senior secondary school in her region will be over-subscribed by a factor of seven, and the available places will be allocated by a combination of family influence and bribery in which her household, having no money and no influence, will be a default loser. Her brilliance, if it survives, will survive by accident. If she becomes a doctor — and the odds, statistically, are very long against her doing so — she will become a doctor in spite of the system into which she was born, not because of it. I want to make a claim that I believe is the moral hinge of this entire book: Amina’s brilliance is not, in any honest accounting, the property of West Africa alone. Amina’s brilliance is the property of the human species, and our species is, every year, abandoning a million Aminas to the rounding error of policies that pretend not to see them. The wealthy world will, over the next thirty years, suffer from severe shortages of doctors, nurses, engineers, software developers, agricultural scientists, and skilled tradespeople. We know this. The demographic curves of every industrialized nation tell us so. We know, with statistical certainty, that the cost of not training enough professionals in the wealthy world will, by 2050, run into trillions of dollars annually. We also know, with statistical certainty, that there is a generation of children of the sun whose talent, if mobilized, would close these gaps several times over. We have, in other words, the demand and the supply in the same global system. What we lack is the bridge — and the bridge has been, until now, deliberately under-built. This is not a small policy oversight. This is the most expensive structural error in the contemporary global economy. The remainder of this book will propose the bridge. The bridge has technological components, which I will discuss in Part V. It has educational components, which I will discuss under the heading of the Vocational Renaissance Centers in Part VI. It has economic components, which I will develop under the heading of the Peace Economy. It has communicative components, which I will develop under the heading of MarVertisement. And it has, beneath all of these, a moral component, which is the most important: the recognition that the children of the sun are, simultaneously, the heirs of the planet’s largest unexploited human capital and the carriers of the planet’s most urgent moral debt. A civilization that recognizes both halves of that sentence will build the bridge. A civilization that recognizes only the first half will build a system of extraction, in which the talent of the global South is mined for the benefit of the global North without compensation to the communities of origin — and this, in many respects, is the system we currently have. A civilization that recognizes only the second half will build a system of guilt without infrastructure, in which the wealthy world expresses sorrow at the suffering of the children of the sun but does not build the institutions that would prevent it — and this, too, is the system we currently have. The system we do not yet have — the system that recognizes both halves — is the system I am writing this book to argue for. It is the system the Peace Artists Foundation and BIG SYSTEMS have been quietly building the architecture of for the past several years. It is the system that, with the help of the readers of this book and the institutions they influence, may yet become the dominant operating model of the twenty-second century. I close with one final reflection on Amina. I last spoke with her two weeks before I sat down to begin writing this chapter. She had won, at the regional level, a school examination that was supposed to confer a small bursary. The bursary was, in the end, awarded to the daughter of a local official whose grades were two-thirds of Amina’s. Amina did not weep. She said, instead, the sentence which I have carried with me into this paragraph and now into yours: “Uncle, the sun is still rising tomorrow. So am I.” The children of the sun are still rising. They will continue to rise, with or without our help. The question this book asks of every reader is whether they will rise into a future we built with them — or a future we abandoned against them.