Imagine a world without borders

Although I am a South Africa, born and bred, with a South African passport, I usually travel on a British/EU passport, a happy consequence of my first marriage. I hadn’t thought much about this incredible privilege, until I had to help an elderly relative to apply for a visa to visit the UK. It took about 12 hours in total of trawling web sites, completing the application and collecting the documents, and a further 4 hour wait at the processing centre in Sandton.

After that experience, I was inspired to go looking for information about which passports are the most useful for travel. I found this great article on atlasandboots.com that ranks passports by the number of countries that each one gets you visa-free access to (or where you can pick up a visa on arrival).

The list set me thinking.

It seems clear that the passports of wealthy and powerful countries are the best to travel on, while the poorer or less powerful your country is, the lower in the ranking it tends to appear. So one can’t help concluding that passports and visas and all the border control efforts are about letting rich and powerful people travel freely, while restricting the movement of poor and powerless people – kind of like the old apartheid dompas. The dompas, as a symbol of the inequities of apartheid, became the focus of protest and discontent, culminating in the Sharpeville massacre, the year before I was born.

As I sat in the visa processing centre, looking at all the people patiently waiting in one queue after the next, I wondered what makes people so compliant in this process? What makes so many sane adults, all with better things to do with their time, give up 4 or 5 hours to sit and shuffle from chair to chair in order to obtain that piece of paper that will allow them access, just temporarily, to the rarefied air of England? I’m more used to seeing my countrymen and women out in the streets with placards, toyi-toying over their grievances.

Since one is required to switch off cellphones in the processing centre, so no email, no social media, I amused myself by imagining a world movement in which people resisted this humiliation and degradation in the same way that South Africans resisted the dompas back in the 50s. I imagined people arriving en-mass at borders to march across them. I imagined public burning of passports. I imagined the soldiers deployed to mow down the invaders and the TV footage. Would the world be as outraged by these massacres as they were by Sharpeville? And if not, why not?

We live in a world where the rich minority are entitled to live in protected enclaves, shutting out the poor majority who might mess up their pretty places. How is this different from apartheid?

I’d like to see countries ranked in terms of how many places they demand visas from. That would give us a clear idea of which countries are the most exclusive and least willing to share their special corners of the world.

Remember John Lennon?

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do…

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…