Marriage Without Borders. Dinah Hannaford
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might be the “one unifying feature” of African youth (Weiss 2004)—citing frustration and stagnation as the defining characteristic of what it means to be young and African. As elsewhere on the continent,5 young Senegalese men began delaying social adulthood and family-formation because they could not afford it.
Momar is entering his thirties and though he has had no shortage of girlfriends and love interests, he is not in a position to marry. He cannot afford the warugar (“bride wealth”) payments that are central to Wolof marriages. Observers have noted the drastic increase in expectations for bride wealth payments, which today include bedroom furniture, cars, and millions of francs in cash (Dial et al. 2004: 253).6 With no income, Momar would also find himself unable to pay for the expenses of supporting a wife and eventual children.
Marriage is socially compulsory in Senegal, for men and women alike. Men do not achieve adulthood before marrying and taking on dependents and becoming what is called in Wolof a “borom keur,” a household head. Men like Momar who remain bachelors well into their thirties are pressured to grow up and get married. As Schaller de la Cova has put it, “there exists no model of swinging bachelorhood to which to aspire” in Senegal (Schaller de la Cova 2013: 211)—a successful adult male is one with a wife (or several wives) and children.
Momar has no savings and no clear plan to accumulate. Though he claims not to be concerned about his state of affairs, his mother has been pressuring him to marry for years. As the eldest son and with his father deceased, Momar should be contributing to his mother’s household expenses. He has tried entrepreneurial activities such as traveling to Mali and purchasing expensive and highly desirable thioub cloth with borrowed money to sell back in Senegal and even raising chickens to sell for meat, but these endeavors largely have failed to produce tangible results. He continues investing in his soccer career in the hope of getting a contract to move abroad, though that dream grows less and less tenable as he ages. Escaping into nightclubs and migrant role-play is certainly not furthering his economic prospects, but Momar does not want to be excluded from the expanding consumer delights of his city.
At the same time that opportunities for young people have disappeared in Senegal, privatization has placed public wealth in private hands and the extreme wealth of the elite is increasingly visible in Dakar. New shopping malls with escalators and European clothing stores, chic ocean-view hotels, and omnipresent luxury SUVs exist alongside multiple-day power and water cuts, poor public sanitation,7 and malnutrition. Global images of wealth are also pervasive in Senegal, reminding the disenfranchised that vast riches and the good life are just out of reach. James Ferguson sees globalization as having brought an acute awareness of the “semiotic and material goods of the global rich” to most Africans, without bringing these goods within their grasp (Ferguson 2006: 21). Weiss (2004: 116) speaks of a kind of pain that African youth feel in being marginal to the global consumer culture that they desire so ardently. As Comaroff and Comaroff put it, African youth are increasingly welcomed into the global marketplace as consumers but simultaneously are being excluded from its benefits by being left out of economic participation (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 29). Neoliberal capitalism produces expectation and desire for consumption and simultaneously cuts off paths to earning and economic stability (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 8). In the wake of this disruption, a new trajectory to accumulation and social advancement appears to have emerged: international migration.
Upward, Outward Mobility
Many of the symbols of prosperity that are visible in Dakar were paid for by remittances from Senegalese working abroad. When the 1994 currency devaluation took place, migrant remittances and overseas earnings instantly were worth twice what they had been (Melly 2011: 374). Since the mid-1990s, therefore, the perception of migrant success has doubled. More and more, migrants were able to build homes, mosques, and businesses in Senegal, as well as support families and spend lavishly on trips home. This change cemented the growing idea that moving abroad was the only path towards material success and providing for a family (Rodriguez 2015). Combined with the drastic fall in the standard of living, more than just farmers and traders concluded that Senegal no longer offered employment possibilities (Somerville 1997, Tousignant 2013: 7). A second wave of urban residents and employed middle-class men began leaving Senegal to seek their fortunes abroad (Riccio 2005: 114). The World Bank has suggested that nearly a quarter of Senegalese citizens who have a university education emigrate (Docquier and Marfouk 2004).
In the past two decades since the currency devaluation, migration has taken on the qualities of what Comaroff and Comaroff (2001) call the “enchantments” of neoliberal globalization. One of the defining characteristics of neoliberal capitalism is the decreasing importance of production, leading to an obfuscation of how wealth is accumulated (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 5) The origins of the fortunes people see around them are less tangible and more mysterious than ever. Comaroff and Comaroff describe a perception among those marginalized by neoliberal capitalism that the few who master its technologies seem to make money effortlessly and instantly (2001: 8).
This perception is certainly in line with the worldview of most non-migrants in Senegal. As wealth from overseas continues to dot the landscape in the form of homes, clothing boutiques, and fancy cars, the origins of said wealth are quite abstract. For many non-migrants, being “la bas,” “bitim rëw,” or “à l’extérieur”8 is synonymous with being successful and having access to great wealth. Even after years of emigration and close contacts and family overseas, most non-migrants in Senegal remain quite ignorant about the specifics of how migrants make their livings.
Previously, land, large families, or bureaucratic jobs were synonymous with wealth. Now, however, signifiers of Europe such as a Juventus jersey or authentic Adidas sneakers are more likely to hint at fortune than do a briefcase or a shirt and tie (see Riccio 2005). No explicit position in relation to the means of production is necessary to give migrants social status. Money seems to come from abroad, therefore most Senegalese make the logical jump that to be abroad is to have money. This equation makes citizens of an economically depressed Senegal desperate to be associated with the world outside of Senegal. Though economic opportunities do exist abroad, this equation of life abroad and automatic, easily attainable, and infinite wealth functions as a myth, in Ferguson’s sense when he says that myths are not merely fictional stories, but “ways of expressing and constructing complex political and cosmological schemas” (Ferguson 1999: 203). This myth impacts Senegalese society in myriad ways—from fashion and dreaming to, as is developed further below, migrant-class status and the selection of spouses.
The Senegalese belief that the West is full of riches and that Europe represents “El Dorado” (Riccio 2004) leads non-migrants to think that merely setting foot outside of Senegal means access to riches and the good life. Disconnected from labor processes abroad, non-migrant Senegalese can conclude only that it is the overseas location that itself generates easy wealth. The idea that if one could only get abroad, then the money would begin flowing is Senegal’s version of the “locally nuanced fantasies of abundance without effort” that characterize the casino capitalist zeitgeist in the new millennium (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 6).
Honwana and de Boeck discuss how the West functions as “an imagined topos,” just out of reach for most young Africans (2005: 8). Indeed, as immigration regulations in “Fortress Europe” and in the United States become stricter, impatient young Senegalese are ready to risk their lives for the chance to make it overseas. “Barça walla barsakh” (“Barcelona or death”) became a popular saying to capture the desperation of the tens of thousands of young men (and some women) who piled into fishing boats beginning in the 2000s, hoping to sail from the coast of West Africa to Southern Europe (Carling 2007, Willems 2008, Melly 2011). These boats continue to depart from the shores of Libya—and Morocco as well—full of migrants from Senegal and other economically depressed nations.9 Many of these boats have famously sunk in the Atlantic or Mediterranean, and others arrived on the shores of the Canary Islands of Spain or the Italian island of Lampedusa only to be met by border police who incarcerated their passengers in detention centers. The International Red Cross; the governments of Spain, Italy, and Senegal; and other international organizations have attempted to stem this tide of economic refugees through various sanctions and development programs. Although the