Chapter 2 The Pursuit of Relations in a Time of Social Change

Narratives of Mobility and Immobility

The historiography of West African mobilities can be understood as a tension between a long-standing distrust and avoidance of undomesticated spaces outside the bounds of a community, on one hand, and a tradition of expansive networks for long-distance trade and mobility, on the other. Discussing this first dimension, Isaie Dougnon (2013, 35) notes that “African societies were characterized by a sharply bounded community [where] any movement of individuals outside this community and environment was understood in terms of a threat or danger to their lives.” However, longue durée historical and archaeological scholarship on West Africa has also shown it to be an active place of long-distance, cyclical mobility for many centuries (Brooks 1993; Barry 1998; Bruijn, Dijk, and Foeken 2001; Gokee 2011; d’Avignon 2022). Early perspectives on mobility in West Africa noted that “the Europeans had no need to send out overland trade diasporas, much less develop trading post empires. The African merchants had already established trade networks in long distance trade, some of them extending back in time to the thirteenth century if not before” (Curtin 1975, 62). How can these two perspectives simultaneously be true of the same region?

Situating mobility as a social process helps dissolve this apparent conundrum: individuals expanded their trading and migratory reach through building relationships with other individuals and corporate groups. In short, people moved through places by assimilating them into their social networks. My ethnography of border crossing in chapter 1—an act of going from one social island to another—provides a demonstration of this pattern at a granular level. More broadly, shared social knowledge of negotiating kinship, caste, or affinal relations with others has allowed West Africans to expand the range of the familiar and, thereby, to move through it. Arrangements were forged with autochthonous spirits throughout West Africa. In precolonial times an individual’s ability to function in a particular activity was a contingent on their integration into a household, kin group, or other type of community (Berry 1989). Social relationships not only enabled mobility, resources, and employment but also made places.

Some common features of this social assemblage were spread by expanding and contracting empires such as the Empire of Mali (1240–1645), whose political dominance spread Mande languages and cultural practices across much of the Sahel and southern Sahara for many centuries. This left many populations with common blueprints for tracing commonalities through social identities. Though not exclusively Mande, these included the significance of last names (often clan names) through which individuals could trace belonging with one another across great distances. Oftentimes these names held equivalencies across different groups such that an individual’s social role could be translated into a related social framework (McGovern 2013). Relatedly, a caste system based on conceptions of innate differences between social groups who displayed complementary social roles provided a way for individuals to be rendered intelligible in neighboring communities (Tamari 1991). Together, these demonstrate a widespread social sense of how to interpret ethnic, patronymic, and other name-based keys to identity. They show the traces of long-term mobility in which people translated themselves in new places. In this way, “these clan name exchanges are deeply rooted in the social history and practices of the western savanna. It is a ticket to mobility, a smoothing of the way down the road” (Bird 1999, 276). The practice of joking relationships in Sahelian West Africa (Ndiaye 1993), which I go on to discuss, offers one such common intersubjective technology through which individuals interpreted social connections in interactions (E. Smith 2004; Sweet 2021a).

In West Africa as elsewhere, anthropological scholarship has examined recent mobilities within the context of neoliberal policies and thereby has tracked how individuals are able to situate themselves within broader economic and political systems (Ong 2007). Indeed the earliest work on mobility and migration merely saw these phenomena as push-and-pull factors that moved people around the globe (Whitehouse 2013). Framing mobility in this way is useful and enables global perspectives that highlight systemic inequalities and precarities. But these are not the only lenses through which these stories are told. Equally significant are durable bundles of social practices, which include centuries-old routines of sociality, such as joking relationships, that have enabled individuals to traverse and make their lives across long distances. These practices mobilize locally significant distinctions and narratives to make sense of persisting linguistic and cultural practices. These idioms of relationality continue to offer migrants resources for navigating changing social, economic, and environmental contexts.

Scholars on mobility have emphasized distant migratory destinations as places where individuals seek opportunity away from kin in order to escape potentially constraining social relationships and expectations (Simone 2004; Whitehouse 2013; Bredeloup 2014). Not merely constraining, however, these same idioms of kinship and affinity in interaction also offered migrants tools for building or insulating themselves from important social relationships. In this chapter, I take a step back to offer a broader view of the existing social idioms and routines that West Africans creatively adopt to thrive in mobile contexts. I describe the diverse interactional practices through which mobile individuals in West Africa cultivated relationships across great distance. In so doing, I track the verbal art of building and maintaining relationships with others as practiced by mobile residents of the broader Kédougou region.

The Stakes of Saying One’s Name

On my first trip down to Kédougou to conduct fieldwork in 2014, our overland bus broke down on an uninhabited stretch of highway. Crouched in the sandy ditches by the side of the road, we passed the time telling stories of other harrowing overland trips to and from Kédougou. In doing so, we weren’t merely passing along tales of travels. These narratives helped fellow travelers steel themselves for the long road ahead. Making it through this ordeal together brought us closer through a shared experience of precarity. Many of us stayed in touch during the years of my ethnographic fieldwork, and some of us still text each other on WhatsApp to this day.

Through this experience, I met a migrant named Duke, an electronics technician from Dakar who specialized in repairing metal detectors. Although Duke’s family and children lived in Dakar, he spent much of the year in Kédougou to pursue opportunities offered by the gold boom. Encounters between Duke and his clients demonstrate some of the powerful social idioms through which individuals from distant lands could come to understand one another. Individuals drawn to his remarkable ability to bring broken things back to life would entrust him with electronics that had fallen in disarray from dust, sun, and extended use. He lived in one of Kédougou’s largest apartment buildings overlooking the road that led to the industrial mines. In each of the units lived many hopeful migrant entrepreneurs, trying to find their place in the workings of the mining economy. One was a Malian chef known for his meat skewers. We mused that his food must be very good indeed because he was never home. Another neighbor woman washed the dusty clothes of busy miners, ever squatting on a bright plastic stool. Her hands wrung rust-colored water out of colorful fabrics twisted in on themselves. When her knuckles came together in powerful cleansing strokes, a familiar pitsch, pitsch, pitsch sound gave auditory evidence of her impeccable technique.

From his dusty cement balcony, Duke and I would watch individuals loading up trucks with building supplies to take to the gold fields. One day, as I was catching up with Duke in the weeks after our fateful bus ride, two Pular-speaking men walked into his shop lobby. They wore colorful but worn robes whose ragged hems gave evidence of long journeys over dusty roads. As they approached Duke, one of them pulled out an evidently broken phone from his pocket to be repaired. After exchanging a short greeting in Pular, Duke soon realized that neither man spoke his native language of Wolof. Duke himself spoke only halting Pular of basic greetings and market phrases—this despite his significant time in Kédougou. Nevertheless, Duke soon understood that they wanted him to repair their cell phone. However, the two parties could not agree on a price, which they negotiated by switching between the conventional French and base-five Pular counting systems.1 After a minute of difficult negotiations in which Duke refused to budge—either because of a communicative impasse or because of his own intractability—one of the Pular speakers shifted his footing (Goffman 1981) and asked of Duke: “ko honno inneteɗaa?” (What is your name?). Duke pursed his lips and responded in a brusque but animated repartee: “Way yooy il faut même pas commencer avec ça!” (Oh, man, don’t even get started with that!).

How are we to understand this moment when Duke refuses to utter his name to these potential clients? What was the “that” to which Duke was alluding? Duke’s momentary refusal encapsulates many of the questions that drove my curiosity about how West African migrants weave names, ethnicities, or affinities into webs of social connectivity. Was Duke fearing that in uttering his name, others might be able to reveal some connection and then wield it as leverage to advance their aims? I suggest that this seemingly simple moment of self-identification hints at what are highly productive routines of everyday social identification through which mobile West Africans negotiate relationships with one another through names, ethnicity, and kinship. While in this case Duke manages to suppress his name, these were the kinds of encounters in which individuals brought up relation names and identities, thrusting interlocutors into webs of relationality. While these kinds of interactional connections were pertinent mundane social contexts, they became particularly important in the context of mobility wherein individuals from far away might draw on diverse social correspondences to build relationships with one another.

By avoiding the disclosure of his name, Duke was also insulating himself from a joking relationship (also called sanakuyaagal in Pular or cousinage in French), a routine of teasing and play based on specific correspondences between last names, generations, caste, or ethnic identities that allowed individuals to tease and probe one another interactionally. His refusal is telling and hints at the potent social connections that his solicitors might have established given the affordance of his name. Indeed, after the two clients left, Duke admitted to me that—among other things—he had wondered whether they had identified him as a Serer (which indeed he was) and thus were hoping to play off a Serer-Pular ethnic correspondence to plead their case for a preferable price. While those identifying as ethnically Pular were widespread throughout southeastern Senegal, Serer constituted only a very small minority of traders who were valuable contacts because they served as key nodes in trade with coastal Senegal.

As noted by scholars of social interaction, such as Erving Goffman, communication entails risk. The things you say and the signs you inadvertently give off during interactions all reveal things about yourself that can be exploited by interlocutors to characterize you (Keane 2015; Goffman 1981b). Given the existence of myriad genres of social connectivity in West Africa, speaking one’s name thus offers a rich opportunity to establish relationships of privilege, bait others into interaction, and otherwise mobilize identity-based connections. Negotiating relationships with others was a verbal art of mobility that enabled individuals to negotiate connections with a diverse range of others across West Africa.

The Verbal Arts of Mobility

Interactional perspectives demonstrate these negotiated relationships to be achievements rather than merely activated connections. Other approaches to migrant community formation have often posited the connection of individuals based on ethnicity, kinship, or locality. The often-creative performance of relational idioms, such as joking relationships, enables individuals to formulate different kinds of connections with people in mobile contexts. Rather than fixed aspects of social structure, the routines of relationality based on name, kinship, or identity I describe in this chapter enable people to form relationships in innovative ways. Successful migrants were often those who could utilize these connections to gain access to markets, products, spaces for selling, information, and social networks that would prove useful to untethered entrepreneurs.

While not exhaustive, table 2.1 offers a sketch of some of the most common routines of social connectivity that enabled mobile communities to negotiate multiple presentations of themselves and others in diverse contexts. Not merely relational in an abstract sense, these social negotiations of status and identity rooted people to places in material ways and partly served to constitute the places that migrants found themselves in. Through in-law talk, for instance, migrants were turning foreign markets into domestic spaces from which they could perform domestic hospitality, establish patronage, and share food. Linguistic practices thereby ground actors in the infrastructure and spatiality of the everyday, partly constituting the places they move between. Routines of relationality like these are both demonstrations of relationships and interactional stances and infrastructures that etch contours into our built environment.

Though long-standing, the relational routines I discuss in this chapter are not timeless, ahistorical practices. Instead, they have long offered tools for navigating processes of social and economic change. Indeed, many of the interactional routines I discuss in this chapter, such as joking relationships, were shared and exchanged across many languages. They are particularly useful to the study of southeastern Senegal, where populations have for centuries been politically recalcitrant and decentralized. As an example of a shatter zone (a term from political geography that often refers to contested borderland areas), Kédougou’s diverse populations sought refuge in the region, located at the fringes of successive empires and states, all the while benefiting from trade and coalition as strategically as they could. Being able to cultivate selective relationships with allies while insulating oneself from the state apparatus has defined much of this region’s history. By 2014, however, these verbal arts of mobility were happening on a social landscape that was increasingly inscribed by the Senegalese state. Along with the appearance of the state came a steady wave of bureaucratic efforts to identify and manage populations. This occurred in the form of mining ID cards, national ID documents, birth registries, and surveillance initiatives to monitor the border populations in the context of an Ebola epidemic. As such, the increased reach of the Senegalese state into the region of Kédougou has, in one sense, threatened to fix identities in place. These routines of relationality became increasingly entangled with bureaucratic modes of identification that included ID cards, land registries, and birth certificates.

In introducing these more interactional and textual forms of identification, I do not wish to posit the former relational routines like joking relationships as flexible and unconstrained and the latter bureaucratic forms of identification as utterly fixed. While a useful initial contrast, I add nuance to this distinction by showing how the textual technologies of statecraft such as ID cards were brought into more creative routines of negotiated social identification. As I have shown, forms of identity and self-presentation invoked in interactions are not merely controlled by an individual but rather emerge through the course of multiparty interactions, which is the topic of the next chapter.

The Pursuit of Relations

Keen observers of their own social worlds, my West African interlocutors understood the mediation of social relationships to be an inherently mobile process, often described as jokkere enɗaŋ, or the pursuit of relations—the social labor of building social relations with in-laws, kin, and neighbors.2 Residents of the far-flung villages of the Fouta Djallon mountains recognized that the cultivation of relationships amid centripetal forces of cyclical migration required a significant investment in social visitations and the judicious balance of recognizing, teasing, and honoring others. These social and linguistic routines were not merely a question of categorical affiliation but also a strategic verbal art that both facilitated mobility and was brought into being through social visit reciprocities.

As explained to me by Taabe’s village chief, jokkere enɗaŋ was achieved through “ko e ɗengal, newre, e jungo”—a linguistic, interactional labor entailing the itinerant cultivation of social ties through one’s tongue and hands as well as feet. The chief of Taabe, who traveled from village to village along the Fouta Djallon plateau on regular trips, described the visitation of kin, affines, and collaborators as an embodied labor: tongues for speaking, hands for shaking, and feet for going the distance. In an area with limited cell phone reception, conducting business among villages in the area often required personal travel to friends and colleagues. Maintaining a strong social network thus entailed the linguistic and physical labor of social visitation and reciprocity.

Amid a deep history of cyclical migration, mobile West Africans have relied on interactional routines based in idioms like joking relationships to relate with other individuals and communities. One dimension of this history of migration has entailed a dense landlord-stranger network in which individuals from far away could often rely on the hospitality of autochthonous individuals through the payment of respect and patronage (Brooks 1993; Barry 1998). Hardly a place of discrete villages and ethnic homelands (Amselle 1985, 1990), West Africa has long been a place of movement enabled by performances of verbal creativity that link individuals to one another through various social idioms.

In this context of high cyclical mobility, maintaining a community of kin, neighbors, and friends necessitated significant social labor. Accordingly, farmers and itinerant laborers in southeastern Senegal invested in everyday routines of contact and exchange with neighbors and kin through reciprocal greeting and gift giving. These exchanges entailed the upkeep of visitation channels formed by long return trips to hometowns and regular visits to distant hamlets. The expected reciprocity of such trips also propelled a cyclical mobility of individuals who continually felt pressure to greet one another and attend the distant life cycle rituals or ceremonies of others in their network. This social labor could be felt through yearly cycles. While the rainy season drew people to and from agricultural fields, the cessation of the rains prompted a continual flow of visitations that dispersed residents across family compounds, neighboring villages, and urban centers in the region. Scholars viewing West and Central African histories with a broad lens have described this concern with cultivating diverse and wide-spread ties as “wealth in people” (Guyer 1993), a particular concern of African localities that are rich in land but low in population. Becoming a person of consequence in southeastern Senegal likewise entailed the continuous renewal of social relationships through the shrewd reciprocation of words and other objects.

Joking Relationships and Verbal Creativity

In what follows, I describe some of the routines that migrants drew on to interact with others across markets, overland trips, and hometown visits in Senegal. I begin by introducing the routine of joking relationships, which Duke partly feared his Pular customers might draw on to gain favorable terms with him in the previous example. Joking relationships are a very common form of verbal art performed on the basis of privileged relationships between particular last names (patronyms such as Diallo-Ba) and ethnic identifications (e.g., Pullo-Serer).3 Although I refer to these routines as joking relationships for the sake of clarity, the local name for this routine was sanakuyaagal in Pular (or in Maninka, senankuya), where one’s joking cousin was a sanaku. The French terms, cousinage or parentés à plaisanteries, were also commonly invoked to describe this practice in anthropological scholarship. In broad strokes, joking relationship routines involved the exchange of teases and jokes at the expense of individuals who were seen to be linked by a privileged relationship. The insults and relationships were often animated by historical relationships between individuals associated with different social groups based on ethnicity, patronym, or caste. Caste provides an important embodied dimension of social hierarchy that is prevalent throughout West Africa, though this became somewhat more fluid in the decentralized region of Kédougou (Tamari 1991, 1998). Early studies show how caste was partly enacted through particular linguistic practices that offered axes of differentiation between nobles and griots (the oral historians of West Africa), for instance (Irvine 1973; Irvine and Gal 2019). Joking relationships thus enabled West Africans to gain increased access to others in interactional contexts with an expanded range of conversational license. Not only limited to Kédougou, joking relationships can be found across the Sahelian region of West Africa and thus enable speakers from potentially distant places to formulate connections in the idiom of teasing. The origins of joking relationships are related in myths and historical accounts of West Africa. In the epics of old Mali told by griots, senanku joking relationships are often seen as the result of alliances of those clans who united in defense of Sundiata Keita, whose defeat of the Blacksmith sorcerer Sumanguru Keita gave rise to the Empire of Mali (Niane 1965). To this day, patronyms—last names passed along the male line—like Keita and Kante offer a well-known correspondence on which significant social bricolage is performed in face-to-face encounters. Table 2.2 gives some examples of observed correspondences in southeastern Senegal.

The following short example shows the social and spatial expansiveness that joking relationship connections could afford West Africans. I once witnessed a group of wandering Fulɓe merchants from over two thousand kilometers away in Niger be able to place individuals in Kédougou in an idiom of sanaku. I encountered these travelers as they set up a temporary encampment outside my friend Mamadou’s house one evening. We managed basic exchanges across the Pular Fouta variety I had learned and their Fulfulde variety from farther east. Among those I met were individuals with the last names Diallo and Ba, just like many from the region of Kédougou. The merchants warmed up small pots of tea, using their flowing robes as blankets to protect themselves from dusty harmattan winds. Reclining on plastic mats on the ground beside the road, these traveling merchants soon showed me the wares they were selling across the region. They produced little vials of liquid and packets of powders from underneath their robes, touting their beneficial properties against insomnia and infertility as well as a product to enhance one’s charisma: liquid clout.

As I returned to Mamadou’s nearby house later in the evening, I asked him if he had seen these Fulɓe from Niger.4 In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way (that betrayed a previous joking performance with them), he assured me that while there were some sketchy Bas (his joking partners) out there to be watchful of, the Diallos among them (his people) would keep an eye on them. In saying this, Mamadou was drawing on the characters and dispositions from the narratives of joking relationship exchanges to build an initial understanding of who these individuals were.

Joking relationship routines thus afforded one possible frame through which interlocutors embodied characters and navigated relationships in their daily greetings and practices. Joking relationship routines ranged from lighthearted teasing between friends—for example, “yette Ba moƴƴaa!” (The Bas are no good!)—to what sounded like verbal abuse to the untrained ear. At times this could sound like bitter insults (“aŋ ko a maccuɗo aŋ” [you’re my slave]), while at others it was expressed through more lighthearted-sounding critiques of diet: “a ñaamay ñebbe!” (you eat beans!) (Jones 2007). Table 2.3 transcribes an exchange between migrant sellers from Guinea in Kédougou City’s downtown market that offers a simple example of this practice. This example demonstrates a common way that Serer merchants, who controlled much of the bulk trade in the Kédougou downtown market, related to the (mainly) Pular-speaking retail merchants.

Through the term joking relationships, ethnologists lumped together these practices with other similar routines of systematic license around the world (Lowie 1912; Radcliffe-Brown 1940; Brant 1948; Bradney 1957; Freedman 1977; de Vienne 2012). In earlier anthropological work, these relationships were frequently seen as forms of conjunction and disjunction that balanced social structures. When anthropologists like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1973) described things like joking relationships, they saw relatively static mechanisms of social structure. However, I have argued elsewhere that these practices function more as productive mechanisms of creative social negotiation than mere frameworks of social order (Sweet 2021a). This is possible in the first place, because individuals were creative in negotiating the relational grounds on which joking relationships were performed. For example, West Africans often drew on poetic or conceptual equivalencies between particular names or ethnic groups to expand the list of individuals who might build such a relation with one another. Joking relationships have offered significant resources for regional and international migrants from West Africa. Bruce Whitehouse (2012), for instance, identified in his population study of West African migrants in Brazzaville, Congo, that these groups were held together partly through a shared understandings of joking relationships. As such, joking relationships offered these West African migrants a productive social idiom through which they could trace belonging and community.

Viewed more granularly, joking relationship routines offer more or less shared social principles—narrative settings in time and space—that make legible stereotypical characters and the kinds of appropriate actions they might take (Bakhtin 1981). These narrative frames thus allowed individuals from across West Africa to insert themselves into this performative social encounter. Joking relationship routines were successful partly because interlocutors understood that confrontations with their sanaku joking partners was a form of play. As such, anyone who encountered a purported sanaku relationships would often know how to enter into this interactional performance by drawing on existing understandings of the plots, settings, and characters (Sweet 2021a). These chronotopes often included established scenes like nighttime thefts that were purported to have been perpetrated by joking partners who are animated by characteristics like gluttony.

Although the principles for joking relationships were based on ethnic or patronymic identification, the possibilities for engaging in relational play in the idiom of joking relationships were not narrowly constrained. For instance, individuals from ethnic groups who do not originally figure into joking relationship correspondences have managed to implicate themselves into these routines by creatively building poetic bridges between names (Sweet 2021a). This was possible partly because of the existence of equivalencies in which particular last names were held to be the same, offering grounds for more expansive plays of relationality. In many cases equivalencies were motivated on the basis of a shared occupational niche, a perceived ethnic link, or a poetic similarity between names. This entextualized set of equivalencies meant that certain patronyms could “count” as the same. A group of Toucouleur vendors in the Kédougou market once explained it to me like this: “Ka et Diallo, fow ko gootuŋ” (Ka and Diallo are the same thing), such that they could be rendered equivalent in the performance of joking relationships. Even further, the Bassari (the autochthonous inhabitants of the Kédougou region) often inserted themselves into the game of joking relationships based on poetic parallelisms between their names and names that were strongly entextualized in joking relationship practice. Here Boubane might come to stand for Ba such that Boubanes (notice the poetic symmetry) might establish joking relationships with the Bas’ joking cousins, the Diallos (Sweet 2021a).

Name Play

Not merely a question of joking relationships, the use of patronyms to evaluate the identity and provenance of individuals was extremely important throughout West Africa. Patronyms are some of the most salient social signs that are invoked throughout social encounters. In a context where given names were often perceived as disrespectful toward parents or elders, addressing one another with last names was often an early question that figured in routines of greeting. Patronyms were often assessed for a migrant’s provenance and ethnic group (“Yette Souaré ko Pullo? Is a Souaré a Pular?”). Although Pular patronyms did not map neatly onto any clan membership and did not even unambiguously provide evidence of ethnic or regional origins, they were often the most significant first social index and term of address used by individuals meeting for the first time. In addition to being evaluated for potential joking partnership, patronyms were judged and interpreted with an eye to provenance, ethnicity, as well as a mismatch between name and language use. To discover that someone shared the same name as you (or even a parent or grandparent) was often a cherished connection that provided the grounds for important relational work in the context of mobility.

Two individuals found to be sharing the same last name could use this as a ground to purport some other shared grounds. For example, patronyms could be used to draw kinship connections in conversation as in the idiom of mussiɓe: “oo ɗoo ko Diallo, ko mussiɓe meŋ” (“This guy is a Diallo, he is our kin”), a migrant kola nut seller once said after hearing that someone shared his last name of Diallo. In this way, social actors routinely used patronyms to evaluate one another for social information. Knowing someone’s patronym as well as hometown, for instance, could often provide a better indication of an individual’s caste or lineage. While in many cases last names carried ethnic and other social information, reading identities from patronyms was in practice ambiguous.

Across West Africa, there was an indeterminate relationship between identity and patronymics, partly because individuals could change names in order to escape misfortune or death and posited equivalencies between names based on routines like joking relationships. In some cases, entire families or villages have changed their patronyms (often in favor of esteemed names like Diallo) in order to escape the less favorable connotations of certain names. Possibilities for social identification in the form of names was inherent to spatial mobility. Not far from Kédougou City, I once met a family whose father had given all of his male children female names. When I inquired about this, he told me of difficult times when he and his wives had lost son after son just weeks after birth. To confuse death and to throw it off the track, the man decided to give his male children female names. When he spoke to me, he talked of it in primarily spatial terms—that these new identities would prevent these children from being found. Notice here that identity and place are intimately entangled. Although this example concerns given names, similar strategies can be found concerning broader aspects of names, including patronyms. Across the region, naming children things akin to death or rubbish is a broader strategy of escaping misfortune. These fluid routines of naming and tracing connections among names provide mobile West African communities a greater range of possibilities for self-presentation. Mobility was thus an act of social transformation in which mobile West Africans built relational bridges with others in new places.

Sharing given names with others was thus a significant connection that could be activated to do social and interactional work. Names could be fleeting in certain interactions when interlocutors were momentarily rebaptized. For instance, face-to-face renamings, such as “hande aŋ ko Ba” (Today you’re a Ba), were a common joking relationship tactic that attempted to voice grounds that might be drawn on in that interaction for hours to come. Indeed, rebaptizing one’s joking partner often constituted a part of the joking cousin routine itself. For instance, I once visited a village chief who identified himself as my sanaku, playing on a correspondence between Kanté and Keita. Rather than call me by the name he knew me by (Kanté), however, he called me by his own last name (Keita) and used the rest of the encounter to compliment this name. I have observed similar strategies at other times. In this way, during joking relationship routines, joking partners frequently call one other not by their “actual” patronyms but rather by those of their joking partners.

As shown in this previous example, I was not immune to this relational name play. Although I was certain my name was simply Nikolas when I arrived in Senegal, by the end of my time in Senegal I wasn’t too sure anymore. I was frequently loaned local names by the families who hosted me throughout my many years in Senegal working as a Peace Corps volunteer, experiential education instructor, and anthropologist. Newly arrived in Senegal in 2006, for instance, I had tried to convince people to simply call me “Nikolas,” for which there was a common French pronunciation. I had even later met other Nicolas among the Bassari in Kédougou City. My first host family, the Barrys of Thiès, however, would have none of it. I was given the name Souleymane (and later known by the related nickname, Jules) in honor of my host father’s own father. Moments of social rebirth happen across a person’s lifetime.

The patronym I was known by in Senegal changed several times to reflect my connections to different people and households. For instance, while I served as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was known as a Kanté after living in a host family with this name. The Kantés were considered blacksmiths whose ancestors had emigrated from Mali. Later, as I spent more time in the Fouta Djallon borderlands, I slowly began to be known as Diallo like the family with whom I lived. Others were very keen to call me by these names and implicate me via these names into local joking relationship or namesake practices. Although this may seem exceptional given my position as an American expatriate in West Africa, the practice of extending names as way of implicating strangers as guests into Sahelian societies has a strong historical legacy (Brooks 1993; McGovern 2013).

Names were thus not merely something one acquired at birth but were lent, acquired, and lost throughout one’s life. Being known in terms of the names of your children (like Neene Wury, “mother of Wury,” often called teknonyms) was a rite of passage that marked individuals as vital life givers. Part of this pluralism in naming was a result of so many individuals sharing last names and given names. For instance, to share the real name of my close friend in this text—Mamadou Diallo—is not to risk revealing his identity in the slightest (and when I asked him, he told me to put his real name). Anyone looking for a Mamadou Diallo in the region of Kédougou will find an obfuscating abundance. Moreover, Mamadou is rarely what he is called. He was known by nicknames and kin terms, and as a result, he emerged as a somewhat different person through these different contexts in which he was defined in relation to others. One might even say that the preponderance of certain patronyms impelled a diversity in naming, in which individuals came to be known under different names in various contexts.

Patronyms were not the only grounds on which migrants might be able to find and evaluate a social link with others. Tanagol, routines of teasing based on generational distance, for instance, offered up interactional possibilities for those who might identify one another as honorary grandparents or grandchildren. In a context where respect to one’s elders was often carefully policed and enforced, such practices were commonly expanded and invoked to give individuals a wider range of interactional keys through which they might relate to others. Like ethnic or patronymic correspondences, negotiating affinity (in-laws) also became a realm of play whose very existence was itself the subject of creative linguistic performances. Beyond furthering social reciprocities between families allied through marriage, affinity was a very productive connection used to negotiate interactional parameters between individuals in a diverse number of contexts. In chapter 3, I examine the hometown visit of a returning migrant, who found himself managing relationships with those who he had left behind in the idiom of in-lawship (esiraaɓe). The status of whether they were in-laws or not became an object of contention and a central axis along which they came to understood one another after periods of absence in the wake of immigration to Spain. Likewise in chapter 6, I examine how the creative negotiation of affinity provided a way for peripatetic merchants and laborers in Kédougou’s downtown market to constitute the market as a domestic space from which they could share food and hospitality even as they were hundreds of miles from their hometowns.

Relational Identities and Techniques of the State

The first part of this chapter introduced some of the most important interactional routines of relational creativity that have provided a toolbox of mobility in West Africa. This relational creativity is not an apolitical, timeless social practice. Although many current practices likely trace origins back hundreds of years, West Africans have long used them to adapt to current social changes and contexts. More recently, these interactional routines helped locals navigate the contingencies of political, environmental, and economic change that Kédougou residents found themselves suspended in. Through steady incorporation into the Senegalese state, this mobile art of relationality was increasingly crosscut by political and bureaucratic changes. Principal among these were an increased enforcement of ID cards, birth certificates, surveillance initiatives, and a police presence that provided new stakes for identifying oneself and in a region undergoing social change.

Originally a shatter zone in which smaller scale, decentralized peoples strategically shielded themselves from political formations and oppressive tax regimes, the inhabitants of Kédougou were quickly becoming folded into the expanding Senegalese state. Beginning with the establishment of Kédougou as a region, this process led to a larger state apparatus and stronger connections to coastal Senegal that accelerated along the Dakar-Bamako international highway. Thus, while these more flexible forms of interactionally negotiated relations offered migrants tools for building relationships in diverse interactional contexts, new bureaucratic techniques of the state threatened to fix identities in place. As part of this process, administration initiatives aimed at counting and identifying residents of this region. Demographic knowledge of these borderland residents and their movement became increasingly scrutinized during the time of my research, as the Ebola epidemic in nearby Guinea raised the stakes of crossborder travel. As forms of biopower—knowledge as power over people as populations—bureaucratic technologies such as ID cards, birth certificates, land registries, and village rolls could regiment practices of identification and mobility (Foucault 1988).

At first glance, documents such as birth certificates and ID cards fixed into writing aspects of one’s identity which might otherwise have been negotiated in more flexible routines of social transmission. At the same time, however, these documents also offered new opportunities for the negotiation of publicly visible identities. Not merely documents by which states accounted for their populations, birth registries and ID cards, among others, were also drawn on by individuals themselves to negotiate their identity and self-presentation in various contexts.

In the wake of these political pressures to rationalize governance, possessing a Senegalese ID card in the region of Kédougou increasingly impacted one’s mobile pathways. In the context of the Ebola epidemic, having an ID card that identified oneself as a Senegalese citizen was critical in the borderlands around Taabe. Even in Kédougou City, not possessing an ID card significantly reduced one’s ability to move about town in particular time spaces. Previously quite rare in the region of Kédougou, nighttime ramsassages (roundups) limited the mobility of those who could not produce an ID card. Ramassages were clandestine operations in which police established checkpoints at key intersections of a neighborhood. Stopping any pedestrians and vehicles, they would systematically seize those that could not produce official paperwork. In the case of vehicles, motorcycles that were found to be without papers (i.e., proof of legal purchase and registration) were confiscated by police and often sold at auction at later dates. In a town with many black-market Chinese motorcycles, these operations could be a windfall for police departments. Word got around quickly, however, and motorists leaving these intersections would frequently warn those approaching of the risk ahead.

Individuals who were caught in a ramsassage without an ID card were taken to the police station, where they were released only upon paying a fine. These individuals were often called sans papiers, or in Pular, forodu, which comes from the French, fraude (fraud). To be sans papiers thus was to find one’s time-space opportunities significantly compressed. Even during the day, gendarmes were increasingly posted at the entrances of towns, where individuals would routinely be stopped. While there were often detours and side streets that sans papiers might take to avoid checkpoints, their status offered a more restricted set of pathways that they could inhabit at different times. By late 2015, I began to hear from individuals, particularly youth who wanted to circulate at night, that they increasingly felt afraid to go outside without an ID card. People living in rural parts of the region too began to feel these changes as well. Thinking in terms of language as infrastructure, the roads, borders, and other framework associated with mobility are built not only from their brute physical features but also out of routines of interaction. The lived experience of a border for an aspiring migrant is not the physical formation, such as a roadblock, alone. Mobilities are rendered possible through a discursive and material assemblage composed of interactional possibilities with officers and other mediators, physical border architecture, political and epidemiological discourses, and the pragmatics of proving one’s identity through ID cards.

It is helpful to think about the category of forodu alongside other rites of passage in West Africa where one is to become a person. Beyond birth, the first ritual that people undergo in becoming social persons is a naming ceremony in the week or weeks after birth. Called a denabo in Pular, this naming ceremony is an extremely important moment throughout West Africa. It is at this moment that babies who were previously referred to as a generic type, sanfa, become people linked to others in the community through shared names and lineages. A second important moment in becoming a person is a coming-of-age ceremony—held separately for boys and girls—in which one earns status as an adult and a fuller social person. These rites of passage enable opportunities to speak with certain people, to attend certain events, and for the participant to be accounted for as a person. Not unlike the identities acquired through naming or coming of age, an ID card likewise transformed their bearers into ratified individuals who might have access to particular social spaces and opportunities—schools, international borders, or cities at night.

Despite these recent ID card drives, many in Kédougou remained sans papiers or forodus for various reasons. This was not only a precarious legal status, but it was also a category type that became productive in local discourses. For instance, Kédougou youth often teased one another for being a forodu. In so doing, power emerged not only from the top down, as a lack of recognition in the eye of the state, but also as a form of horizontal capillary power (Foucault 1977). In teasing one another, residents were characterizing one another in the frame of play, teasing those without an ID card as forodu or as yokels from the country with no official status. Umar, a young man from Mamadou’s extended family who often lived with him in Kédougou, was often subject to such teasing. At several points, I came back to Mamadou’s house to find him in deep conversation with some peers about his fear of the police. Being a forodu, he said, meant that he couldn’t stay out late at night and go wherever he pleased. Worse yet, this status was starting to color the way his peers were thinking about him. As such, this designation put one in a precious position with both authorities, for legal reasons, and joking partners, for being the target of teasing and mockery. Even as he expressed his palpable fear, Umar nervously laughed alongside the lighthearted banter of his peers in a recognition of his liminal situation. Although a form of playful teasing among peers, these routines belied significant spatial limitations that confronted those who did not possess ID cards.

During the time of my fieldwork, ID card drives were being hosted all throughout the region. Many student and hometown groups hosted events like all-night dance parties that were dedicated to raising of awareness about ID cards. Yet even the acquisition of an official ID card was a process that entailed the effective navigation of social connections to administrative power brokers. In late 2014, I had scurried down the rocky hoore fello mountain path from Taabe to check out an ID card drive to be held in the village of Takkopellel. Men and women of all ages were lined up, dressed in vibrant wax fabrics. Everyday objects were often printed upon bright wax fabrics, and this year, oscillating fans figured prominently on the top and bottom matching complets of the patient crowd. If these individuals were going to have their likenesses rendered timeless on an ID card, they were going to look their best.

However, grumblings reverberated throughout the ranks of the sidelined Taabe residents, who criticized Takkopellel’s nepotistic favoritism of their own residents to jump ahead in line. For many from dozens of kilometers away, waiting was a skill one honed as an adult—particularly in interactions with the state. Many had been there since 5:30 in the morning. The hope was that these individuals would have their pictures and birth documents processed into ID cards that they could pick up within three months. This seemingly simple process, however, entailed numerous bureaucratic steps. Applicants needed first to bring a jibinande (birth certificate). However, a new version of this document was required (one ostensibly more difficult to forge), which was to be found in the nearby administrative center for a fee. As James C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias (2002, 32) sardonically remind us, “[the birth certificate] is a remarkable and very recent innovation; even in the West, people managed, until quite recently, to be born and die without official notice!” In addition to being used for official purposes by the Senegalese state, birth certificates were being employed by local leaders to solidify their followers. During this time, the procurement of birth certificates for the residents of Taabe became an important concern for the village chief. In the wake of this move toward regularization, Taabe’s chief frequently walked to the hamlets surrounding Taabe in an attempt to enroll individuals on the official register of Taabe, thereby boosting its official population. This also reflected a persistent concern to account for everyone. Yet in a context where many ostensible residents spent much of their time in Dakar, the Gambia, or Spain, it was not a straightforward task. Talk of where the borders between villages were to be officially recognized raised the stakes of these records and animated many nighttime conversations in the chief’s compound.

To secure jibinande for residents in the register of Taabe was thus an act of strengthening political boundaries, which were slowly becoming more grounded in official documentation. This was not a passive act of recording an existing reality, however, but an active campaign to persuade individuals to join the registers of Taabe. Jom Wuro often spent time in neighboring compounds, explaining the importance of birth registers and the prerogatives it would afford Taabe’s sons and daughters. This included the ability to own land in an official capacity, to secure loans, and to travel in security without fear of being arrested by police at travel checkpoints.

In the first part of this chapter, I argued that routines of social idioms like joking relationships have offered relatively flexible systems for self-presentation among West Africans in interactional contexts who would have occasion to travel and embed themselves in different communities. While last names might give the impression of fixed objects of reference through which individuals could be separated and identified, names frequently became affordances for building relationships and connections with others amid a rich poetic tradition that relied on forms of conversion and association. These combinatory principles allowed for the creative building of relationships with others based on affinity, joking relationships, or generational distance. This pluralism of naming includes teknonyms (e.g., “mother of Mamadou”), nicknames, birth order names, Saint’s names, or jammoore taboo names based on migratory experiences.

This diversity of names poses a problem for states who are in the business of identifying unique individuals in the context of law enforcement, taxation, or resettlement. The issuance of state identification cards and numbers has often served to monitor and control populations. To be able to identify a biographical individual with a set of information, including names, addresses, and social history, is an act of power that enables taxation and conscription. As biopower in a Foucauldian sense, these offer systems of recording, monitoring, and legislating human life through bureaucratic means (Foucault 1988). Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias (2002) have examined how naming practices fit into the state’s desire to identify individuals under its control in a systematic way, terming the process the conquest of intelligibility. Indeed, many of the villages founded in this part of the Fouta Djallon plateau came here to escape the sagalle, cattle taxes, as well as quotas for rubber collection in Guinean territories to the south. For many adults who had long traveled to and from Kédougou, Dakar, and mining centers, having an ID card was novel. Many villages on top of the hoore fello plateau, in fact, had changed from the Guinean to the Senegalese side and back. Some, in fact, had multiple ID cards. For most borderland dwellers, to become Senegalese or Guinean was not primarily a locus of identity but rather a strategic move to take advantage of a more favorable tax regime. Mining ID cards, which had been initiated since Macky Sall’s presidency, also provided a state-sanctioned form of identity that could facilitate admittance into mining areas.

At first glance, it is tempting to see these power imbalances between state agents and individuals as antithetical to the more flexible ways in which mobile Kédovins have traditionally managed relationships. In the former, state agents unilaterally determine the criteria through which individuals are to be identified that is evaluated through a fixed name entextualized on a physical ID card. However, these bureaucratic forms of identification were not merely a domain of the state. ID cards themselves became a textual part of these broader repertoires of self-presentation that too were taken up in creative routines of relation building.5 Taking these bureaucratic texts into creative interactions took many forms. For instance, ID cards were often traded among individuals of the same approximate generation, likeness, or origins to help them gain access to particular social domains. I knew many youths who commonly borrowed one another’s ID cards as a way to gain access to a football tournament, to register for an exam, or to guarantee safety during long-distance travels. Joking relationships of a kind also flourished between those individuals with ID cards and forodus, who were now freely mockable due to their liminal position. I also witnessed the strategic brandishing of ID cards during debates about relative age as proof of one’s status as elder—a distinction of utmost importance.

To be sure, the relationship between official modes of identification like censuses and ID cards on one side and lived forms of identification on the other are complex and multidirectional. However, it is important to consider the ID card as another potential mode of relational negotiation rather than a stable representation. Rather than definitive markers, the information on cards, such as birth dates, were subject to further discussions of whether they reflected the true date or were altered, as was common practice. Often names listed on ID cards smoothed over more complex dimensions of an individual’s social markers. For instance, Taabe’s village chief often had long conversations with individuals before he officially registered their information in which they mutually agreed on the simplest versions of names to be entered. Similarly, accounts of where individuals were from could be adjudicated through verbal rhetoric as well as the timely demonstration of an ID card (e.g., were they a true Kédovin?). Moreover, many birth registers and ID cards were produced from information that was collected years after individuals were born or married—as people could best remember. Identity cards were also not fixed in stone. For so many students who had lost years to farming or home labor, reducing their age on ID cards (jugement) was a strategic play to ensure they could continue along with their education.6

In the first part of this chapter, I endeavor to provide a sketch of the verbal creativity through which mobile individuals manage to present different “versions” of themselves in different contexts. They partly do this by juggling different names, identifiers, and categorical memberships through which they emerge as slightly different individuals in distinct times in places. Scholarship on mobility has primarily emphasized kinship structures as stifling or constraining for migrants who pursue mobile adventures to escape them (Diggins 2015). And while kinship, caste, and affinity do loom large in the social lives of West Africans, interactional perspectives offer a corrective view to what have often been viewed as constraining social structures. This chapter has explored how routines and idioms grounded in kinship, affinity, and mutuality also offer resources for navigating precarious contexts. Although West Africa witnesses a strong verbal tradition of creativity based on shared idioms like joking relationships, this is not a process that occurs outside of history, politics, or landscape. In discussing issues of birth certificates and ID cards, I sought to give a fuller texture to the modalities through which mobile individuals give evidence of themselves and their relationships with others.

Rather than a strict division between fixed, written forms of identification, such as ID cards, on one hand and creative, oral forms of relation making on the other, I have shown how ID cards are themselves brought into creative routines of self-presentation. However, establishing oneself in relation to others through an idiom of joking relationships or affinity is not the achievement of individual actors, but a process constrained by the interactional dynamics of multi-party encounters. The following chapter examines these interactional processes. Although the first and second half of this chapter might initially appear to be phenomena of a different order, they show that being mobile is enabled by forms of negotiated identity and relationships and, likewise, that social relations are built out of the labor of being mobile. Names—written on ID cards or spoken out in interactions—are affordances for being mobile and making new places your own by relating yourself to others.

Notes

1. 1. Like many other languages in the area, Pular uses a base-five system for counting money but a base-ten system for counting objects or individuals. As such, “bu sappo” (ten) means fifty francs CFA (five times ten) but “na’i sappo” (ten cows) refers to only ten cows.
2. 2. In this book I translate jokkere enɗaŋ as the “pursuit of relations,” drawing on the meaning of jokkere, which can mean “pursuit.” Jokkere, or jokkal, can also refer to a joint, or articulation, and thus might be thought of as the articulation of sociality. Although I only infrequently heard this interpretation, enɗaŋ also means “sap.” Other possible translations of jokkere enɗaŋ include “social ties,” “solidarity,” or, in some cases, “kinship relations.”
3. 3. It is useful to distinguish between two different levels of the term joking relationship. First, joking relationship can refer to the sociopoetic correspondence of patronyms that is posited between individuals across the Sahel. In a second sense, we can examine a joking relationship as the instantiation of such a correspondence in a face-to-face interaction (see Canut 2006). A takeaway from a performative approach to joking relationships is that the mere existence of such a correspondence does not guarantee its success in interaction. Part of the verbal art was indeed to deny, expand, or subtly shift these relationships in ways that suited the interactional goals of interlocutors.
4. 4. Fulɓe is the plural ethnonym, while pullo refers to the singular, which is associated with the language spoken, Pular or Fula.
5. 5. These new ID card drives were intended to provide biometric documentation to Senegalese residents, which was a broader strategy of the countries of the Economic Community of West African States. Whether or not this affects the ways in which individuals are able to bring them into routines of more flexible relationality remains to be seen.
6. 6. For instance, much is made of African football’s tendency to reduce the age of its players such that much older players might lead their countries to victory in the under-seventeen championships. Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and Senegal often stand out in the headlines. While a cynical perspective might merely view this as a form of blatant cheating, it is useful to see this alongside the other myriad ways in which West Africans have creatively performed themselves through the bureaucratic materiality of the state-issued ID card.