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CHAPTER 1

Bitim Rëw

People in Dakar often mistake Momar¹ for a returned migrant, in part because of his swagger and braggadocio. Though he has never been farther than neighboring Mali, Momar plays into this perception. Several times I’ve observed an acquaintance ask him “Kañ nga niow?” (“When did you get back?”), the implication being that Momar must have just returned from “là-bas” (“over there,” a vague reference to the United States, Europe, or elsewhere). Momar smiles and says, “Just the other day!” 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 (Mains 2007: 666, Ferguson 2006). Weiss has gone so far as to say that this gap 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 rate of clandestine immigration to Spain dropped for a time in 2009 (Gimeno 2010), hopeful would-be migrants continue to attempt the voyage by sea. The total number of drowning deaths of clandestine migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean was estimated at 7,189 in 2016, according to the IOM. Although the majority of migrants from Senegal attempt to reach Europe and the United States by much less dramatic methods, these clandestine voyages represent the spirit of anxious certainty in Senegal that a better life waits just across the ocean and the lengths to which many Senegalese would go to make it overseas.

Searching for Goor Jaarin

A less risky strategy to migrate is to marry a migrant who is already overseas. Most of the migrants’ wives I interviewed said they would like to join their husbands abroad, or at least go visit, but few were willing to claim that desire as a motivating factor in their marriage to a migrant. Many were happy, however, to project that motivation onto other migrants’ wives. A young woman named Mariama—herself a migrant’s wife—drew a direct comparison between women who marry migrants and women who marry “toubabs,” or Europeans. “It’s only to travel. A woman will do anything to change countries. There are lots of women like that.”¹⁰ She was herself, she assured me, not that type of woman.

The employment obstacles and inflation woes that trouble men in Senegal have a parallel impact on working women as well. Mariama gave me the example of her own financial calculations as a gas station shop clerk in Dakar before she married a migrant. She worked the night shift, from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. five days a week and was paid a salary of 100,000 cfa (CFA Franc), which is about $200 US per month. She tabulated that every day she would pay 2,000 cfa for her transport to and from work and another 500 to 1,000 cfa to buy herself food at her shift break; these expenses would eat away at her already trivial monthly earnings.

Mariama went on to describe the difficulties of accumulating wealth and saving on a meager salary in a culture of communal sharing and low employment.

When I worked, it was difficult, everyone counted on you, everyone. They don’t know how much you are paid, but they know that, “Mariama, dey, she works!” At the end of the month, everyone calls you, “I have this or that problem.” It’s just you with your 100,000 cfa a month—it’s not enough!

Mariama lived in her family’s home while working, and thus didn’t pay rent, but she felt pressure as an employed person to contribute to household expenses, to help her siblings who were still in school, and to make her own displays of generosity and giving at family celebrations and rituals.

These paltry salaries and insecure working conditions are the types of available employment that workers in Dakar must negotiate. Mariama explained that these sorts of considerations make labor migration appeal to many Senegalese.

Where I worked, if you are sick, it is you who pays for your care. You don’t have benefits or paid vacation. That’s why everyone wants [to travel/migrate] … because over there at least you can work, you can réaliser quelque chose.…¹¹ Here you can work for years and never even have a bank account!

Though Mariama insists that her desire to go abroad and work to support her parents did not factor into her decision to marry a migrant, she hopes that her husband Serigne will eventually bring her overseas to join him. She envisions working abroad and sending money home to support her aging parents.

As this book makes clear, however, marrying a migrant does not necessarily lead to migration. The common Senegalese vision of the migrant’s wife—the “jabaaru immigré”—is one who does not migrate, but rather receives remittances from abroad and awaits the visits of her husband. Women are far more likely to be accused of marrying a migrant for “intérêt” (self-interest or financial advantages) than for the hope of migrating, and this was another motivator my interviewees denied in their own cases but projected onto their peers with wild abandon.

Pursuing relationships for intérêt, rather than with more respectable intentions such as religious or filial duty, is considered regrettably commonplace in contemporary Senegal. Nyamnjoh (2005) describes the growing gap between the increasing availability of images of consumerism and consumables and the declining economic conditions of most sub-Saharan countries as pushing young Senegalese to pursue romantic and sexual relationships with wealthier partners “for consumer opportunities and consumer citizenship” (2005: 296). It would be inaccurate and an oversimplification to—as Nyamnjoh does—restrict women’s motivation to marry with intérêt to a greedy desire for material things. The reality of what most women yearn for is both more modest and more complex. A closer look at what women wish to do with their wealth belies the idea of sacrificing morality and seeking money for the sake of mere consumption alone. The longing for disposable income among Senegalese women comprises not only the desire to adorn oneself with expensive locally tailored clothing and European “pret-à-porter” items, but also the ability to give generously at religious holidays and life-cycle ceremonies as well as to support elderly parents and other relatives. Women seek money explicitly to play a role in Senegal’s moral economy and to garner religious honor (Buggenhagen 2012).

Furthermore, I depart from Nyamnjoh—and many Senegalese—who point to women’s desire to make financially advantageous marital unions as a new phenomenon that signals moral decline. Senegalese culture has long emphasized the importance of a husband as provider, and this quality traditionally has been given value equal to other characteristics, such as provenance from a good family, strong character, and religious piety. Women always have sought to attach themselves to goor jaarin, or a man who is worth something. Even as women join the workforce more and more, the expectation remains that a husband must provide financially (“yor”) for his wife. Physical desire and emotional compatibility figure into marital calculations, yet ideal husbands must be goor jaarin—men who fulfill their marital duties to their wives by providing them with material support (Hannaford and Foley 2015).

The fallout from privatization and structural adjustment reforms in the 1980s has meant the disappearance of jobs in the public sector and the formal economy, including the role of the Senegalese civil servant—once an archetypical goor jaarin. As elsewhere in the region, the decline of the public sector and the apparent “end of salary” (Mbembe and Roitman 1995) have produced disruptions in social life, including the aforementioned delaying of marriage among men. For women, this means a parallel and unwelcome delay despite the continued importance of marriage for women as a means of obtaining social adulthood and financial security. A Wolof proverb states that “a bad husband is better than a good boyfriend,”¹² emphasizing the indispensability of marriage. As the Senegalese sociologist Fatou Binetou Dial points out, although “the ideal model of a good husband no longer corresponds to the realities of marriage, … women continue to believe in it” (Dial 2008: 181). For many women, contemporary challenges and the increasing inability of men to fulfill the traditional role as breadwinner has prompted innovation within and outside of the institution of marriage, including through long-distance marriage to migrants.

Though Mariama had been dating another man for more than a year, she had lost hope that he would ever propose; and, at 30 years old, she felt that her window of desirability was closing. When Serigne—a distant relative by marriage and a migrant home on vacation from Italy—proposed to her, she felt compelled to say yes. Though Serigne was many years her senior, of rural origin, and not nearly as flashy or handsome as her Dakar boyfriend, Serigne was offering Mariama something that no other boyfriend had—the social status of wifehood.

Desiring to marry a goor jaarin, a man who can provide, is not in itself a new phenomenon for Senegalese women—yet marrying migrants represents a change in the conception of goor jaarin for Senegalese women and their families (Hannaford and Foley 2015).¹³ Changing dynamics surrounding migration and class in Senegal facilitate the increased desirability of migrant spouses, overturning other older strictures of social order that once determined these choices. The following examines the way that changing understandings of social class and what constitutes social capital make migrant suitors more desirable—though not necessarily better—spouses.

Class, Courtship, Marriage, and Migration

Bruno Riccio noted a profound ambivalence surrounding the figure of the visiting migrant in Senegal, with the dual perception of the migrant as both a “hero” and a “trickster” (2005). Although not explicitly employing class terms himself, Riccio described a class-based division between returning migrants of rural origin displaying and exaggerating their newfound wealth, and educated, (middle class) non-migrant men with more limited access to cash and consumer goods. Non-migrant men such as Momar and Lamine, who live in middle-class urban neighborhoods and consider themselves above their rural counterparts, accuse these migrants of rural origin—or “modou modou,” as they are commonly called—of ostentatious display. They see modou modous’ vulgar spending and peacocking as a weapon against their feelings of social inadequacy vis-à-vis their more elite and educated urban counterparts.¹⁴

What this phenomenon reveals is a complicated rupture in Senegalese understandings of social class. Whereas the urban, educated, and French-speaking¹⁵ elite were—and to some extent still are—considered cosmopolitan, Senegal’s contemporary “culture of migration” increases the standing of even the least-educated rural migrant to levels that make urban, educated non-migrants very uncomfortable.

In recent years, modou modou as a category has expanded as more middle-class and educated men turn to migration. Though modou modou was the shorthand for rural-born migrants who do manual labor abroad, the term has widened to encompass a range of different migratory identities and trajectories. With few viable economic opportunities in Senegal, urban, educated men are taking their chances on migration and moving abroad to do the same types of work as uneducated rural men do—including ambulant selling and factory work. Simultaneously, some young rural men with limited education who migrate to Europe and the United States as modou modous are continuing their education, even getting university degrees and moving into professional jobs (see Hannaford 2008). As is the case in many stories of migration, class categories in the host country often do not correspond with class categories in the community of origin.¹⁶

The lines between men of rural origin with little education and urban-born men from middle-class families are eroding when it comes to migration. Both aspire to leave Senegal; both have goals of achieving masculine high status by providing for their families, marrying, and establishing a reputation in Senegal as pious, financially successful, and generous men. The term “immigré” is starting to eclipse the term “modou-modou” and its class-bound associations. Both the restaurant owner in Normandy and the key chain vendor in Milan fit into the category of immigré. Consequently, their wives all could be considered “jaabaru immigré,” with the accompanying expectations among non-migrants in Senegal about their access to wealth.

Yet, because so many of Senegal’s migrants still hail from rural regions, important distinctions and class-based divisions do remain, and these significantly impact the experience of transnational marriages between migrants of rural origin and urban women. Fatou Binetou Dial in her study of marriage in Senegal observed that most marriage matches are made in light of class and even neighborhood homogamy; spouses usually have grown up near one another and their families have similar class backgrounds. When a mismatch occurs, it has traditionally been the husband practicing hypogamy, or marrying a woman of a lower class (Dial 2008: 70). Antoine et al. in 1995 also noted that, for generations, Dakar-based women had rarely married men from outside of Dakar (1995: 67). In recent years, however, it has become increasingly common for middle-class, Dakaroise women to marry rural men of lower-class origin when they are overseas migrants (see M. Tall 2002, Riccio 2005).

The perception among many marriageable women and their families is that purely by virtue of being a migrant, a suitor is in a better position to provide for his wife than a non-migrant, regardless of his education or upbringing. Non-migrant middle-class men find it hard to compete on the marriage market and that is a large part of why they, too, are turning to menial labor overseas. Migrants—almost regardless of their rural/urban origin, caste, pre-migratory class status, or actual job/migration status overseas—find themselves in a position to marry Senegalese women who might not even have looked in their direction before they became migrants.

That international migrants expand their opportunities for marriage is in no way a purely Senegalese phenomenon. Other studies in vastly different places have shown this type of hypergamy due to migration; otherwise ineligible spousal candidates become marriageable because of their location in the diaspora.¹⁷ Thai’s study of Vietnamese brides and migrant grooms illustrates how a Vietnamese woman might marry an undereducated man or a man from a less respectable family because his location in the diaspora elevates his marriageability (Thai 2005, 2008).¹⁸ In both the Vietnamese and the Senegalese cases, women and their families are making new choices about marriage and class due to the pervasive cultural influence of migration.

Senegalese transnational marriages are distinctive from those in Thai’s and other studies of marriage migration, however, because women who marry migrants do not themselves migrate. Wives of migrants acquire status and social personhood through attachment to men who are mobile, rather than through mobility for themselves. This fact underscores two key features of Senegal’s culture of migration. It shows that the imagined topos of the West is so powerfully associated with wealth and power that mere attachment to it through marriage or blood relations imbues status and power, and it shows just how vaguely the Senegalese understand what actually goes on abroad. Status and social personhood can result from association with any Senegalese migrant living abroad—be he a university student on the path towards a career in accounting or a clandestine migrant who is hawking umbrellas and dodging police. These dual realities—the dependence on association with the world overseas for social prestige and the persistent ignorance of the realities of life abroad—make up the core irony of Senegal’s culture of migration.

Class and Employment: “My Husband’s Job is Immigré”

A migrant’s exact employment overseas and his legal immigration status usually are of little importance to wives and their families in the negotiations for marriage. In fact, of the 51 nonmigrant women I interviewed who had married migrants, roughly a third had no idea what their husband did for work. When I asked the question, “What is your husband’s work?” several interviewees answered, “immigré” or “mingi extérieur” (“he’s abroad”). As class becomes further dissociated from the means of production, imagined possibilities abroad make the details of employment seem inconsequential to those contemplating marriage to a migrant. Being overseas is in itself a profession, as far as many Senegalese are concerned and thus immigrés have established their own class category.

In Lamine Mbengue’s film Toubab Dou Woujj (“White Women Aren’t Polygamous”) one scene in particular hits upon this concept of the immigré as a social class/profession. In the film, a Senegalese migrant’s French wife discovers her husband is polygamous and decides to move to Senegal and live alongside her co-wives. The protagonist protests and says he must return to France, “What about my job in France?” She responds, “What job?” and reminds him that he never worked when they lived in France. He says, “Yes, but for the people here, being in Europe means having a job.” The man’s identity and status—his belonging to a certain class of men—are wrapped up not in an actual career, not in access to the means of production or even in wages, but in his residence overseas.

Migrant suitors can benefit from being lumped into an amorphous immigré professional category and most keep the details of their overseas lives vague when pursuing a potential wife, as the 16 of 51 wives who have no knowledge of their husbands’ job suggest. A Senegalese factory worker I interviewed in Northern Italy in 2011 rebuffed my question about whether he had explained the realities of life in Italy to his new wife before he married her, claiming the details of his everyday life abroad were irrelevant. “She’s marrying me, not Italy,” he said sharply. Kane (2011: 185) notes that Senegalese migrants in the United States who pretend to be wealthy while courting their wives in Senegal fear bringing their wives abroad lest the wives should ask for a divorce or no longer be “good wives” upon seeing their husbands’ humble conditions.

Many migrant suitors in fact themselves play into the assumptions made about their wealth as migrants by performing the habitus (Bourdieu 1984) of their new social class while visiting Senegal. The stereotype among non-migrants in Dakar of migrants home on vacation and on the prowl includes wearing sunglasses indoors at night as a way to signal their foreignness and access to luxury accessories (Kane 2011: 193).¹⁹ The women I interviewed who were courted by migrant suitors said the courtship was punctuated by gifts from abroad, either cash or commercial goods that were also clearly marked as foreign—such as ready-to-wear clothes, handbags, shoes, and perfumes. Parodies of modou modous home on visits conspicuously interject Italian or English words into their Wolof conversation. I should note that this satire is meant to poke fun not only at the showiness of this linguistic tick, but also to mock the stereotypical rural-born modou modou’s ignorance of French due to a lack of formal schooling—and thus a lack of “linguistic capital” and “educational capital” (Bourdieu 1984).²⁰

Although women might marry without regard to their husband’s actual career overseas, after a marriage takes place specific factors about employment in the host country begin to surface. A husband’s career and legal status, for example, make a significant difference in the life of a Senegalese migrant’s wife even if she never joins her husband abroad. Nearly a dozen of my Dakar interviewees’ husbands did not have immigration papers at the time of the interview. In some cases this meant that the bride had not seen the groom even once over the course of their entire marriage, as the husband could not travel back and forth without legal immigration papers. Others had waited a period of several years before their husbands eventually got the paperwork they needed to be able to come home to visit.²¹

Career status naturally also has an impact on the amount and the frequency of remittances that a migrant can send home to his wife, as well as on his ability to travel home. Ambulant sellers who receive no monthly salary cannot send remittances on a regular schedule. The amount of money one earns working in a print shop versus selling umbrellas in the street naturally varies, and wives see the difference in what they receive from their husbands. Migrants who work in factories commonly have a specific amount of time off each year in which they could potentially travel home—generally around the Christmas holiday if they are in countries with a Christian majority²² or, in the case of Italy, the annual August holiday “ferragosto.” Conversely, “commerçants” (tradesmen) might have to return frequently as part of their trade and, because they are self-employed, are free to come and go when they can afford the trip—though that could be less often than once a year. All these differences have significant impacts on migrants’ wives, yet they are not considered prior to marriage, nor do they push many women to press their potential spouses for details about their employment status abroad.

As mentioned above, in addition to not giving full consideration to a husband’s legal and career status overseas before marrying, many women overlook the salience of a husband’s class origins. This results in a number of marriages that are unlikely to occur outside the context of migration, such as middle-class urban women marrying men of rural origin and with little education. As Chapter 3 makes clear, however, pre-migratory class status of a husband is also a crucially important gauge of what a woman will experience as his wife because of patrilocal residence patterns, the importance of kin, and the differences in pre-migratory habitus that attends rural or urban origin.

Migration and Mysticism

There is a hole in the wall that runs around Ouakam, a sprawling Dakar neighborhood²³ that abuts the Leopold Sedar Senghor airport. Through the hole you can see the airport and its runways, the planes taking off and landing, and the gateway to the world outside of Senegal. For residents of Ouakam, most of whom have never been on a plane, it is a strangely dissonant sight. How easy it would be to walk through that hole and out to the airfield, to join the lucky ones in line to board the planes to Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

Of course, the reality of obtaining the connections, the capital, and the visas necessary to get aboard is much more complicated. For the hopeful emigrants who go through the official channels to secure a visa for a Western country, the sense of gambling is strong. Many Senegalese treat the visa process like a game of chance, spending borrowed money to file costly applications in the hopes that once they “win” they will be able to pay it back in spades, fetishizing documents like “letters of invitation” from Europeans and Americans they know, and attempting to use fraud to beat the system. The mysterious and opaque nature of how capital is accumulated makes the occult a particularly salient tool for navigating contemporary capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 27), and many Senegalese visa hopefuls turn to their “serignes” (“marabouts,” religious/spiritual leaders) for prayers, amulets, and sacrifices that will help them turn the hands of fate and of foreign embassies.

As a young man with no employment or responsibilities at home, Momar would be denied a short-term visa by most Western consulates, which would assume his intentions to be to overstay his visa indefinitely. This is why Momar’s hopes are pinned to a soccer contract—getting a visa on his own seems out of the realm of possibility. Urban legends about different embassies and strategies for getting visas circulate widely, revealing the perception that getting a visa requires some mix of magic, cunning, and connections.²⁴

European and U.S. embassy officials stationed in Senegal tell humorous anecdotes among themselves about immigration fraud attempts that happen in their consular offices in Dakar. Though they believe—and express repeatedly in information sessions to aspirant Senegalese emigrants—that the path to a visa is very straightforward, they see countless examples of would-be migrants trying to game the system. Exaggerations, overstatements, and outright lies are remembered vividly, particularly when they border on the fantastic. Consular officers in the U.S. Embassy in Dakar are trained to ask pointed and unexpected questions to catch these tall tales. One consular officer told me about the man who claimed to be a medical student in his last year of school. The officer asked him to tell her how many bones were in the human body. After a long, nervous pause, the man replied, “Three.”

The same consular officer recounted the episode of another group who claimed to be a dance troupe, applying for a visa with a famous Senegalese musician to accompany him on his U.S. tour. This type of fraud is common, she said, and often half of the “band” or “backup dancers” are merely friends or paying clients of the headliner and his staff who will disappear in the United States immediately upon arrival and remain in country after their artistic visa expires. The officer asked this alleged dance troupe to perform something for her right there in the consular section of the Embassy. The group looked stunned and, as the officer recounts, they gave a half-hearted attempt at uncoordinated dance movements, bumping into one another and generally looking like a sloppy mess. Needless to say, their visas were denied.²⁵

Another form of fraud that embassy officials are trained to spot is marriage fraud. As most destination countries of Senegalese migration have some type of spousal reunification program, and because marrying a national of a given country is a simpler path to access to that country than most, marriage seems like an effective means to migration. While in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, I once overheard a particularly uncomfortable visa interview for a young American woman and her Senegalese fiancé. The consular officer asked the Senegalese half of the couple questions including, “What do you like about each other? What is her mother’s name? Are you marrying her just to migrate?” while the American woman sat and fumed.

A U.S. embassy employee told me that the most common kind of marriage fraud that she sees is cases between Senegalese men and women. Someone wishing to migrate pays an agent to find a visa applicant who has a good chance of getting a visa. The agent will create false marriage documents, even staging wedding photos, and pay a fee to the viable visa candidate to go along with the ruse and include the customer in his or her visa application as a spouse. This consular officer said that sometimes she sees a stack of different applications in which the wedding date is the same and the wedding guests in the pictures are the same people in the same clothes for a series of supposedly unrelated marriages. Because marriage fraud is so common, the United States has a policy of crosschecking information about marriage dates with previous records. If an applicant has previously applied for a visa and included different information—for example applying in 2007 and saying he or she was unmarried, then applying again in 2011 and including a marriage license that states that he or she has been married since 2004—then the application immediately is rejected as fraudulent.

In 2010, a friend brought me a letter and a query from her neighbor. Hearing that she knew an American, the neighbor asked my friend to show me a letter from the U.S. embassy sent in 2001 informing the neighbor that he had won the “lottery,” the U.S. Diversity Visa program which distributes diversity visas to would-be migrants of select countries. At the time, the neighbor could not afford the other elements that would make migration possible—such as an international plane ticket—but he held onto this now irrelevant paper for nine years, hoping that it would one day be his ticket out. I marveled at the pristine letter and the crisp white paper—clearly the neighbor had been guarding this letter delicately, and pointlessly, for nearly a decade. In Senegal’s culture of migration, he had won the lottery but couldn’t cash in.

Conclusion

In Senegal, men are migrating to fulfill gendered ideals of masculinity including becoming husbands and household heads. For non-migrant Senegalese men, finding a foothold in the Senegalese marriage market is not easy despite the continued compulsory nature of marriage for social adulthood. Non-migrant men from middle-class families, like Momar, find it difficult to compete with those living overseas who seem to be a safer bet for a stable financial future for women also navigating economic hardship and social pressure to marry.

While Momar dreams of taking his soccer skills abroad, his younger siblings are trying other tactics to achieve full social adulthood. One of his brothers married a woman from a lower-class neighborhood, where his residence of origin—the middle-class Sicaps (an administrative district of Dakar)—still carries some prestige. The couple has moved into the crowded household with Momar’s family, and they have no clear plans to establish a household of their own. Another brother has been accumulating degrees in business administration. He wears a tie daily and carries a briefcase with him on most occasions—an ostentatious display of his own middle-class station—though he has no job at present and has few prospects for employment.²⁶

The eldest of Momar’s two sisters is the one sibling who no longer lives under her mother’s roof and who is financially independent from her family. She is pursuing her dream of becoming a model and an actress and regularly contributes financially to her mother’s household and her siblings’ activities. How did she achieve this? She married an elderly French man and moved with him to Europe.

In Chapter 2, the focus turns from non-migrant Senegalese to migrants themselves. Just as it is argued here that neoliberal reforms in Senegal have driven many men into international migration and changed non-migrant perceptions of status and success, the next chapter shows that neoliberal restructuring abroad has also profoundly shaped migrant trajectories and orientations, making transnationality an imperative of contemporary Senegalese migration. Chapter 2 also examines the consequences of the myth of migration-as-wealth for the overseas-earners who struggle to remit adequately to their loved ones at home. Gendered ideals are not only a stimulus for men to migrate, but a source of motivation for most of their transnational activities in which they attempt to gain status and provide care from abroad through remittances, marriage, and other highly gendered activities in an unstable economic and legal climate.