Marriage Without Borders. Dinah Hannaford
and then winks at me.
Occasionally, while out in one of Dakar’s many nightclubs, Momar tells bouncers and attractive women he meets in the club that one of his companions that night is a migrant home from Europe on a visit and Momar is taking him out to show him a good time. When I ask Momar’s friend Lamine about these little white lies, he sheepishly tells me that they work. Lamine and Momar receive preferential treatment and deference—and even sexual attention from women—when they are perceived to be migrants on a visit home from work overseas.
In contemporary Senegal, migrants occupy a particular place of privilege in the social landscape due to what Massey et al. have called a “culture of migration.” As migration becomes “deeply ingrained into the repertoire of people’s behaviors, and values associated with migration become part of the community’s values” (Massey et al. 1993: 452–53), international mobility is imbued with prestige in Senegal. This culture of migration, as shown below, not only encourages migration as a pathway to success and social status, but also profoundly shapes the ambitions and behaviors of those who never leave Senegal. Ideas of bitim rëw (the world outside Senegal) and its attendant riches persist despite evidence of the disappointing realities of life abroad. In a context where fulfilling masculine goals at home is no longer attainable for most men in Senegal, these myths have profoundly altered understandings of class, prestige, and value in ways that facilitate the prevalence and desirability of transnational marriage.
Momar never pays the cover charge at nightclubs in Dakar—which can be up to 5,000 cfa (around $10 US) at the fancier dance clubs such as the Casino de Cap Vert, which attracts an international crowd. He arrives at the door, high fives the bouncer, and puts his arm around him like an old friend. Handsome and bursting with self-confidence, Momar has a magnetic quality that makes those around him feel flattered by his attentions. After a long chat and a series of intricate high fives and handshakes, Momar and his companions eventually slip through the door into the dark club and throbbing house music, leaving the bouncer feeling pleased and gratified by the encounter.
Momar and his friends don’t have the money to pay their way into nightclubs every weekend. Like many Senegalese men in their late twenties and early thirties, Momar and his friends have no formal employment. They live at home with their parents and many siblings in the middle-class neighborhoods of Dakar. Momar plays soccer for a semi-professional team that pays next to nothing but has a demanding practice schedule. Like most of his fellow teammates, Momar dreams of being recruited to play for a professional team abroad in Europe or the Middle East. By positioning themselves as international migrants, Momar and Lamine and their friends inhabit the power and status inherent in that role—at least for the night.
Sasha Newell’s excellent study of the power of the bluff in Côte d’Ivoire explains why so many of those people who have so little spend their time and resources pretending to be rich. Newell argues that bluffing—pretending to have wealth when you have nothing at all—is not merely artifice but actually produces results. He compares this to the concept of the bluff in poker—pretending to have something when you have nothing can in fact result in a gain, allowing you to “make value out of nothing” (Newell 2012: 6). Illusion participates in the production of reality. Momar and Lamine’s playacting as returning migrants similarly produces a change in the way they are treated by those around them. This simple act of posturing gives them access to the type of respect and deference they rarely receive in their daily lives as unemployed, unmarried non-migrant men.
An overwhelming majority of young Senegalese men today, like Momar and Lamine, find themselves financially and socially stuck in Senegal. These men are delaying marriage and family formation; they have no jobs, no real job prospects, and no clear path to finding jobs as higher education no longer guarantees employment; they live with their parents because they can’t afford to build, rent, or buy houses of their own. Though university degrees and provenance from urban, middle-class neighborhoods might once have signaled potential financial prowess, access to travel and overseas employment have all but replaced these trappings of symbolic capital as a key sign of access to resources (see Rodriguez 2015). Young men like Momar and Lamine pin their hopes on migration as the key to achieving explicitly gendered goals. To become men and to achieve masculine ideals, they believe they must migrate.
Structural Adjustment and Migration
Senegal’s population has grown tremendously in recent years, from 9.9 million in 2002 to an estimated 15.6 million in 2016, and is said to be growing at a rate of 2.6 percent per year. Like many of its African counterparts, a growing percentage of Senegal’s residents live in urban areas—nearly half—and more than half of Senegal’s citizens are younger than age 20.
Various household surveys have estimated that the number of households that have at least one member living overseas is alternately about half (Beauchemin et al. 2013) to 76 percent (Melly 2011: 43) in Dakar, and one out of ten nationwide (Daffé 2008). The UNDP Human Development Report 2009 puts the emigration rate from Senegal at 4.4 percent, and the IOM (International Organization for Migration) later estimated that about half a million Senegalese were working abroad, though this number—and others—is likely an underestimate, due to the complicated nature of collecting data from a transnational group of migrants whose size and shape fluctuates constantly.2 As a contrast, The Ministry of Senegalese Abroad estimated in 2007 that more than two million Senegalese citizens were living abroad, out of a population of then 11.9 million. What is clear is that the number has increased dramatically in the past few decades.
Senegal’s overseas emigration in the past 35 years is intimately tied to the impact of structural adjustment policies in the mid to late 1980s. To obtain relief from mounting debt and the failed promise of an economy that never fully developed after independence from France in 1960, Senegal agreed to structural adjustment policies in exchange for loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (Creevey et al. 1995: 674). Through these policies, the IMF and the World Bank pushed the Senegalese government to shrink government, withdraw many of its social services, abolish trade barriers and privatize its markets. These neoliberal reforms had a profound effect on Senegal’s agricultural sector, abolishing agricultural cooperatives that small farmers relied on for purchasing the provisions needed to farm cash crops. Without these cooperatives, the majority of small farmers could no longer depend on farming for financial gain (Perry 1997: 212). This retrenchment—combined with a series of severe droughts in the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent crisis in groundnut cultivation—solidified the decline of the agricultural sector as a viable livelihood. Thus much of the “first wave” of Senegalese migration to southern Europe and the United States came from Senegal’s “groundnut basin” in the 1980s. Many of the earlier influential studies of Senegalese migration3 focus exclusively on Mouride4 traders from this region (who are called “modou modous”) and their extensive economic and religious networks, their solidarity, and their hierarchical structures of discipleship.
Another important impact of structural adjustment policies was the devaluation of the West African franc in 1994. The effect of this devaluation of 50 percent was devastating—cutting the standard of living across West Africa in half in a single day. The currency devaluation impacted migration in at least three significant ways. Imports that were crucial for Senegalese farmers (including farm equipment) were now completely unaffordable, further collapsing the productive potential of the agricultural lifestyle (Perry 1997: 213). Inflated import costs also had devastating effects on trade as a profession and drove traders out of West Africa, many to New York City (Stoller 1997: 84).
One of the biggest changes resulting from the currency devaluation, however, was an immediate inflation that pushed the cost of everyday staples out of reach for families. This led to rising food insecurity and what some have called the “pauperization” of the middle class (Aduayi-Diop 2010: 53–54). Structural adjustment also took away important social safety nets (Creevey et al. 1995: 669), giving young people the additional burden of providing for their elders in the absence of substantial pensions. The effect of this lack of employment and increased familial burden on young Senegalese like Momar and Lamine who were just coming of age was similar to that on youth in the rest of Africa: The gap between expectations and opportunities—particularly for young people—disrupted a linear narrative for advancement