Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
high-modernist public housing projects with old town squares. The vast majority of the station’s passenger traffic comes from the commuter rail, built in the 1970s, which brings suburban traffic into the city center. Those train lines include the exurbs or grande banlieue, where picturesque towns and single-family homes give way to rolling farmland. The high-speed lines race through that whole stretch in a blur to arrive in the provincial northern capital of Lille, one hour away, now in commuting distance to Paris. From there, it is one hundred kilometers northwest to the English Channel, where the Eurostar trains will pass through an underwater tunnel, before traversing the English countryside on their way to London. The northeastern route through Lille connects the Gare du Nord to northern European cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Cologne. By the 1990s, over five hundred thousand people passed through the Gare du Nord each day, making it the busiest station in Europe. Today, that number may be closer to one million on some days.38
As a node created by multiple transportation infrastructures coming together, the Gare du Nord has also become a central point of exchange in unsanctioned economic networks and urban hustling, from commerce in stolen cell phones, personal check fraud schemes, and pirated DVD sales to the formalized structures that enable the sale of illegal drugs arriving on the train from Belgium and the Netherlands.39 Networks of Eastern European immigrants have mobilized transportation and related tourism infrastructure to make money from begging practices, which have joined the ranks of “uncivil” offenses (les incivilités) punished by the railway police.40
The station’s social environment has also been produced through the changing legal economy. The establishment of West and North African networks there occurred when migrant settlement patterns in Paris met the process economists call the flexibilization of labor: agencies specializing in temporary day-labor work placements sprang up around the station in the 1970s, and in the morning would recruit construction workers at the entrance. Around that time, African migrants were moving to the cheaper housing in the area and also to the new public housing in suburbs served by the Gare du Nord rail lines. The work agencies are still in the area, though they no longer recruit at the Gare. But many West Africans still meet at the station and use it to find work.
It was no coincidence, Lassana told me, that they ended up at Europe’s busiest rail hub. “It’s an international railway station here,” as he often put it. The potential for movement suffused the station, with fifteen hundred trains coming and going each day and passengers from the world over pouring out of the station’s doors. It is the “true wilderness,” as Bakary, a Senegalese migrant put it, referring to the Gare du Nord as that liminal space of possibility in his migratory rite of passage where, away from his family, he would prove his ability to overcome obstacles and danger.
NEW ADVENTURES: REDEFINING THE MIGRANT’S JOURNEY
When I first asked Lassana what he meant when he referred to his departure from his home village as “leaving on adventure” (partir en/à l’aventure) and to himself and his comrades as adventurers (aventuriers),41 he explained it this way: “We’re all looking for a way to get out of struggle (la galère) and into happiness (le bonheur). But some are not cut out for adventure, and they stay in la galère. But I’m an adventurer. My father was an adventurer. My father was poor. My mother was poor. But my father told me, if you’re born in misery you can end up with happiness, but if you’re born with wealth you can end up in misery. And he told me my pathway would take me far from our home.” The notion of adventure helped Lassana connect his struggles to a tradition passed down from father to son. It offered a framework for interpreting hard times abroad as well as a sense of belonging to a larger community of adventurers.
Adventure was not just another word for migration: it contained a whole world of West African migrant histories.42 Precolonial trading empires and colonial rule have helped shape a flexible cultural idiom for West Africans voyaging abroad. Like all idioms, it is not a deterministic cultural pattern but rather a malleable resource that migrants draw on in different contexts, transforming it as they do so. As Lassana taught me, it provided a template for those who left their families for lands unknown. Sylvie Bredeloup, an anthropologist who has long studied the notion of adventure among West Africans, calls it a form of “moral experience” in which migrants seek personal and social fulfillment through migration.43 Examining how West African migrants understand and express their life course through this idiom sheds light on critical aspects of migratory pathways that are often ignored in policy debates. The adventurer outlook offers a cultural logic and moral template for how life should unfold, and for how people ought to relate to one another.
Seeing migration as adventure does not mean seeing it as a romantic or thrilling odyssey that exists outside of the social realm. “L’aventure” and “l’aventurier” are rather loose French translations of terms from Mande languages spoken by West Africans in France (including the languages Soninke, Bamanakan, Malinke, Mandingo, Jula/Dyula, and Khassonke). The space of this journey is called the tunga/tunwa, an unknown or foreign place, a “space of exile.”44 In Soninke, the word adventure is also translated as gunne (“wilderness/bush”) and adventurer is a translation of gounike/gudunke and other similar terms meaning “the man of the bush” or “the man of the wilderness.”45 These terms point to what makes the West African migratory adventure specific and remarkable: Migration in this case is a rite of passage in which the migrant must confront risk and the unfamiliar to ensure his social becoming. Becoming a marriageable man meant undertaking an initiatory journey during which the migrant is supposed to accumulate wealth before returning home to marry and settle in the village. Migration in this context is seen as a way of reproducing—not dismantling—peasant communities.46
Adventures have a long history. Well before they migrated to France, the importance of commerce and travel among Soninke had already been established through a long history of contact, exchange, and mobility, including trans-Saharan trading empires and caravans that predate European colonization.47 Similar idioms have existed in many parts of West and Central Africa, as Jean Rouch documented in his 1967 film Jaguar about Nigerien migration to Ghana, and as anthropologist Paul Stoller explored in his ethnography and fiction (including his ethnographic novel Jaguar, narrating the present and pasts of journeying Songhay traders from Niger).48 These notions are being updated and transformed in present contexts, such as the recent resurgence and new significations of the term “bush-falling” to describe Cameroonian migration to Europe.49
Islamic religious commitments shape the adventures examined in this book. They provide a moral template for how to act in foreign and fraught situations: Lassana’s father guided him to use the Qur’an to “find the pathway” through Islam while abroad, in order to avoid trouble that could disrupt his voyage. It was thought that going to Qur’anic school was the best training for succeeding abroad because it provided moral discipline. Amadou and Jal referred to the importance of “din” (religion, from the Arabic) in helping them stay on the right path in France. Seeking knowledge and (self-) discovery through travel is based on Islamic traditions, whether in pilgrimage to Mecca and other sites of religious learning, such as Timbuktu, or in voyages to the non-Islamic world, as the writings of the great fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta testify.50
Colonial rule did not introduce mobility, but it would transform the pathways of many adventurers as they became wage laborers.51 Many Soninke continued their mobile traditions by seeking work across the French empire. They took grueling jobs cultivating crops in Senegal or working on the docks in Marseille not because they were forced to by the real burden of French colonial taxes or because they were desperate and disenfranchised, lacking land or wealth and seeking to escape. Rather, as historian François Manchuelle illustrates, migrants were often village nobles who left with the goal of strengthening traditional authority and their own status.52 Voyages have long conferred prestige to migrants.53 There is a saying that I heard several versions of in Soninke and Bamanakan that reflects this notion: “If he who has visited 100 places meets he who has lived 100 years, they will be able to discuss.” In other words, knowledge gained through travel abroad can disrupt a rigid hierarchy based on age, allowing a younger