The Master: On Borders, Labour, and the Inheritance of Power by David Yambio

The Master once sold human beings; today he categorizes them. He congratulated himself for abolishing slavery and erected statues to commemorate his morality. He said, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” then he invented the visa, divided humanity into citizens, foreigners, refugees, economic migrants, undesirables, and deportation targets. 

The Master loves migration, not the migrant but the migration itself. He loves hands that harvest his fruit, hands that clean his hotels, hands that raise his towers toward the clouds. The Master loves movement, as long as it arrives on time, works quietly, and disappears before election season.

The Master abolished the slave market. Then he opened the labour market and congratulated himself once again. No chains, no auctions, no overseers—only contracts, only sponsorship systems, only recruitment agencies, only debts large enough to keep a nation at bay.

The Master speaks many languages. In one country he is called development, in another security, in another national interest, in another border management. But wherever he travels, the worker sleeps in a smaller room than the one he builds.

The Master does not hate the exiled. Hatred is too emotional, too personal, too human. The Master prefers administration: databases, categories, quotas, risk assessments, waiting periods. For there is no violence more efficient than violence that arrives with a stamp.

The Master sailed to every continent. He took gold, diamonds, ivory, rubber, cotton, and oil. He took humans, languages, gods, and futures. Then one day the descendants of the dispossessed arrived at his gates, and the Master asked, “Why have you come?”

The Master drew lines across maps—straight lines, careless lines, lines that separated tribes, rivers, and memories. Then he called them nations. When the fires began to engulf those nations, he watched from afar and called the refugees a crisis.

The Master loves the word crisis: migration crisis, border crisis, security crisis, integration crisis. Everything becomes a crisis except the centuries that prepared the arrival, the wars that tore apart homes, the mines that emptied mountains, the markets that emptied villages, and the governments that sold tomorrow for today’s applause.

The Master fears the migrant’s memory, for memory is a dangerous witness. Memory remembers the colony, the plantation, the ship, the concentration camp and more. The Master prefers short memories. He teaches history in fragments: a chapter on abolition, a chapter on liberty, a chapter on human rights, a chapter on democracy—then closes the book before the chapter on consequences and accountability.

The Master visits memorials. He lays flowers before the dead, bows his head, observes a minute of silence, and says, “Never again.” Then he checks the departure board for the next deportation flight.

The Master has learned that chains attract attention, but paperwork does not. A man in chains troubles the conscience; a man waiting twelve years inside a procedure barely makes the news. The Master understands the mathematics of visibility. He no longer hides suffering; he manages it.

The Master loves the sea. The sea asks no questions, signs no testimonies, and appears in statistics more often than in courtrooms. It receives what governments reject and returns nothing but silence.

The Master discovered a remarkable invention: distance. He moved the prison beyond the horizon, the suffering beyond the camera, the screams beyond the voter, and called it border management.

The Master learned that fear alone was not enough. Fear creates resistance, rebellion, and memory. So he studied compassion. He learned the language of concern, of protection, of humanitarian response, and suddenly the cage began speaking softly. He no longer says, “Obey,” but “We are concerned.” He no longer says, “You are trapped,” but “We are seeking durable solutions.” With every century, his vocabulary improves, while the waiting remains the same.

The Master loves meetings: round tables, high-level forums, global compacts, ministerial conferences, expert consultations, task forces, working groups. He gathers the wisest people in the world to discuss why the drowning continues.

The Master fears one creature above all: the witness. The witness survives, remembers, and compares what was promised with what was done. Every empire eventually discovers that memory is harder to imprison than a human being.

The Master believed that time would solve the problem—that the dead would disappear, the drowned would disappear, the disappeared would disappear, that memory itself would grow tired. So he waited, and waited, and waited. But the Master never understood a simple thing: a wound does not become justice because it grows old. A grave does not become silent because grass grows above it. And an exile does not stop asking questions simply because the world has become accustomed to not answering them.

Today the Master still governs. He governs borders, visas, detention centres, labour markets, seas, deserts—the distance between one human being and another. But every night, before sleep finds him, he hears the footsteps: the footsteps of those who crossed anyway, who survived anyway, who remembered anyway. And perhaps that is why the Master builds so many walls—not because he fears the arrival of the exiled, but because he fears the return of the truth.