Chapter 4 Kola, Salt, and Stone

Of Trash Owls and Kola Nuts

The infant granddaughter of Taabe’s village chief had just been given a name at a naming ceremony. The ceremony’s hosts had distributed gifts of kola nuts to those in attendance as a mark of witnessing this important event. As they left the event, many attendees noticed a figure at the edge of the compound. With their face obscured by a long, flowing scarf, the cloaked figure emerged from beyond a bamboo fence and slowly approached a group of elders standing in the compound. The figure’s reliance on a long staff betrayed the stride of an elder. In cascading moments of recognition, cries of shock and laughter rebounded inside the small walled compound as the figure drew nigh. Shrugging off any hands that attempted to impede their advance, the cloaked figure thrust a staff into the earth, planted two feet beside it, and bellowed, “The name of this child has come, and it is Trash Owl!” The people standing about erupted in peals of laughter at this odd pronouncement that mimicked the austere naming ceremony of an infant.

The cloaked figure revealed herself to be Aunt Aissatou, the sister of the village chief who had narrowly missed out on the naming of her brother’s granddaughter. As I describe later in this chapter, Aissatou’s moment of performative reinterpretation was in defiance of her exclusion at a naming ceremony. Just moments before Aunt Aissatou’s satirical entry, the infant had been named Aissatou, or, as she was more commonly called, Aissa. As such, she shared a name with her “great-aunt” Aissatou, sister of the village chief. Baby Aissa occupied an important position within the village of Taabe. Each side of baby Aissa’s family represented one half of its leadership—the lineage of imams on one side and the lineage of chiefs on the other. Together, these two branches encompassed the village’s political life. A naming ceremony was a big deal among these predominately Pular-speaking villages along the Guinean border because, in addition to being the ritual through which infants become people, the naming ceremony brings together the father’s family, the takanɓe hosts, and the mother’s family, the futuuɓe in-laws.

Crossing paths with the chief and other authorities after the ceremony, Aissatou disguised herself as an imam and performed a parodic renaming in which she teased the infant, renaming her “Buubu Ñooge” (Trash Owl). The name Trash Owl referenced the bird form that witches adopt at night as they prowl the outskirts of human settlements. Allusions to witches were not often taken lightly. Aissatou had not received kola nuts—in effect a denial of participation in the ritual—and she was making an issue of it. This striking performance highlighted fissures between those who had been included in and those who had been excluded from the naming ceremony. In the following days, Buubu Ñooge was taken up by women, like Aissatou, who felt they had not received an adequate part in or invitation to the ceremony. Participation in the naming emerged not only from one’s bodily presence at the event but also through the giving and receiving of kola nuts, which were distributed to witnesses in the aftermath of a naming. Those who considered themselves shut out from the ceremony mobilized the practice of teasing the child’s family with this parodic name as a way to playfully extort kola from ritual organizers and thereby gaining greater representation in the event.

This encounter tells us an important lesson about mobility and how migrants and traders who were often absent maintained ties to communities distributed in space. Even more, it shows how we should conceive of community in the first place—not a clearly bounded entity but rather an articulated network of exchange that mediates participation across space. Moments of verbal art such as these show how increasingly mobile individuals like Aunt Aissatou could maintain a presence in the community despite being physically absent for much of the ceremony. Across West Africa, the exchange of gift objects such as kola nuts enables mobile individuals to insert themselves into hometown action despite their absence. Given her increased absence from Taabe, Aissatou’s satiric performances helped her maintain a strong presence in the community despite her periodic exclusion. This offers an unconventional example of what constituted broader repertoires of value creation by Senegalese women at naming ceremonies and similar ritual contexts. As Beth Buggenhagen (2011, 718) has demonstrated elsewhere in Senegal with the analogous example of fabric, “displaying and distributing cloth . . . were not forms of conspicuous consumption. Rather they were about seizing the occasion to make visible the strength of their social networks.” This chapter builds on these insights by tracking the ways in which language can mediate material exchanges as a particularly useful resource for dealing with systemic distance. Language as infrastructure thus offers a framework for better understanding the linguistic dimensions of promising future gifts, words standing in for material objects, or using creative linguistic performances to attract gifts themselves as strategies of mobility.

Aissatou was the wife of a fonio farmer and often traveled to and from Taabe to sell products across the region. Although her mobility is less frequently recognized in relation to those of her male counterparts, Aissatou was part of an increasingly active community of traders on top of the plateau. Sayings such as “goor dekkul fenn” (a man doesn’t live anywhere) were often passed as common knowledge in West Africa, where migrancy and travel often appeared to be a male-dominated sphere. However, these proverbs belie the significant mobility of women, who often worked as successful entrepreneurs across much of the region. Together, this chapter and other recent work demonstrate the capacity of Senegalese women to react to processes of social change and global economic volatilities through creative social labor (Babou 2008; Buggenhagen 2012; Hannaford 2017; Riley 2019). Aunt Aissatou had been actively participating in a regional trade network of fonio, a local grain that was increasingly becoming a cash crop instead of being domestically consumed. Aissatou’s husband was a respected farmer, and she had been visiting regional markets and those in the regional capital. Increasingly, a flourishing gold mining economy and the construction of a new international highway provided opportunities for aspiring traders. Being included in such life cycle rituals constituted a central concern for those, like Aissatou, who increasingly had opportunities to travel throughout the region.

Negotiating Participation through Gift Giving

On the part of guests, the roll call of those who made it back to hometowns for such events was intensely anticipated, whereas hosts were scrutinized for the status of their invitations, spread across capillary social networks through word of mouth, telephone, and text. Many events were put on hold so that certain key members living at a distance might be able to attend. During these naming rituals and other ceremonies, absent relatives would manage their inclusion through return visits, telephone calls, familial representatives, and gifts. Over the course of naming ceremonies, the arrival of in-laws and other guests was keenly anticipated. Kédougou was a region with an inconsistent cell network and challenging travel conditions; the steep mountain roads made auto travel near impossible. The need to account for distant relatives as well as alert kin and neighbors across the region therefore set a scene of high social drama for such events as naming ceremonies. As guests arrived from surrounding villages and neighborhoods, they brought along with them offerings of bars of peanut soap, onions, liters of oil, corn, and wax cloth, all carried in calabash dishes on the tops of women’s heads. The giving of gifts was a very important aspect of the naming ceremony, and it was customary for takanɓe hosts to offer return gifts to departing futuuɓe guests. In many cases, the farther guests traveled, the more they were feted at such events. Hosts were careful to not simply return the same kinds of gifts in what one man jokingly explained to me as okkindirgol, “giving the same stuff back and forth.”

At such events, kola nuts (along with cloth) were some of the most significant gift objects that could facilitate connections with new people. The shape of the nut, composed of two halves that join along a perfect seam, was often held to be iconic of social conjunction. Across West Africa, for instance, kola nuts were offered to the family of a woman as overtures to marriage. As social lubricant, kola were likewise a tool for the traveler in unknown lands. They were often presented to village chiefs as an offering of peace and respect upon a new visitor’s arrival—a material gift that provided an opening for introductions and future relations. More broadly, their trade demonstrates the mobility of West Africa at a regional level. Grown in forested regions such as Guinea-Conakry, kola nuts provide an important and long-standing trade product between the savanna and forest regions of West Africa. As I discuss in chapter 6, kola nut sellers also occupied a special place within West African markets. Trading in this ritually significant object, their privileged position often insulated them from the vagaries of the state’s intervention into local trade.

During a naming ceremony in rural areas like Taabe, a central concern for village chiefs and ritual organizers was to ensure a fair and representative distribution of gift objects, such as kola nuts, so that all social segments were represented. In the context of mobility, this often meant that migrants were accounted for amid established webs of kinship and domestic relationships. Hosts were careful to offer enough gifts and food since these redistributive rituals were centers of social gravity that could bring in far-flung friends and relatives. Connections between distant communities were thus forged through invitations passed from mouth to mouth and through the webs of reciprocity. Mobility was thus facilitated through these linked series of interactions formed through the exchange of words and gifts. Days after life cycle events, attendees reflected on ritual events based on the gifts and food they received. They often teased the hosts about the success of the event on the grounds of gifts given as markers of participation. Those events that were held to be successful and good (weelugol) were often ones from which attendees walked away with hands full of gifts and bellies full of rice. Because of this preoccupation with representation and subsequent reports of success grounded in the receiving of gifts, the distribution of kola nuts at naming ceremonies was keenly monitored. Given this broader context, it was consequential that Aunt Aissatou had not received a share of kola nuts.

Certain organizers, such as the village chief, often felt intensely responsible for making sure that appropriate parties got their share. These elders had to make calculations about how to appropriately distribute the kola in such a way that those who received gifts would “count for” nonpresent migrants and other kin. This could happen in one of a few ways. In some cases, those away from Taabe could be accounted for in ritual events when their remaining kin accepted kola or gifts on their behalf. Such calculations often happened along the lines of kinship and lineage, in which certain people fell under larger social entities. In a second sense, these moments also offered opportunities for individuals to evaluate whether a particular individual was in fact a steady resident or not. Was their absence more or less temporary, or was their primary residence now in a distant economic center? Amid cyclical migration patterns and a mobile populous, these calculations were not always evident. The pressures of redistribution were central to the social context of mobility in which individuals could be made to “count” as part of the community through the exchange of language and gifts.

Collective negotiations of presence and belonging were thus particularly significant in communities such as Taabe, where at any given time, much of the community was absent or dispersed across the region. While those present often had a claim to distributed gifts, those performing the distribution (sendugol) always had an eye on those migrants away from home who needed to be accounted for. As such, the distribution of gifts like kola functioned as a form of reciprocation for those present at community rituals as well as an extension of participation to those who might not have been originally present at the ritual action. Although a naming ceremony might appear to be local, it accounted for and traced out the mobilities of a broader diasporic community. Oftentimes, they were even financed and organized from abroad.

For instance, at another naming ceremony I attended several weeks before baby Aissa’s, kola nuts were put aside and entrusted to a third party, to be given to the imam for whom they were intended at a later date. In addition to being a sign of deference, this gift of kola also forged a material channel that allowed those present to enlarge the framework of participation to those who were absent. The kola nuts subsequently followed along intermediaries, from those present at the original naming ceremony, to the imam’s wife, and ultimately on to the imam himself. As such, they provided a material, linguistic mediation of his ratification as a witness for the naming ritual. Reports of what happened during the naming rituals traveled alongside the kola nuts, thereby positioning the imam as an individual who could authoritatively talk about the naming ceremony. In the days after the event, the imam invoked the chosen name and remarked on the occasion as a ratified witness instead of asking others for news of the event. In this way, kola exchange across time and space can be seen as a mediator of participant frameworks, bringing in and including individuals beyond the otherwise limited here and now of ritual action.

The Ritual Shaving

Baby Aissa’s naming ceremony, which began with a ritual shaving and then continued with the imam’s official naming was a site for these negotiations of inclusion. In the following section, I offer a more detailed analysis of this naming ceremony that Aissatou parodied with her cloaked performance. Shortly before acquiring her name (the part in which Aunt Aissatou had been excluded), baby Aissa’s head had been shaved by the women in her kin group as dozens of men and women crowded in anticipation. They attuned to the action by sitting on mats or standing on the outskirts. The management of seating arrangements occupied many of the participants, where prime locations were often reserved for honored guests and in-laws. Amid the audience, who sat in a semicircle around the ritual space, some played the roles of playful suitors who teased each other, the newborn, and her family on marriage prospects. Older adult men jokingly remarked on the baby’s beauty, wondering if they would have a chance to marry her. “Meneŋ ko paykuŋ meŋ faalaa” (We want the little girl [as a wife]) one man belted out to Rune’s brother, my dear friend Mamadou. Guests and neighbors bandied about in the space around the location where Rune’s baby was being prepared. Finding one’s place entailed not only determining a physical spot to sit among one’s social peers but also navigating status, with more honored guests provided chairs and benches.

While the name of the baby, Aissatou, was chosen over the course of discussions between elders before the ceremony, the imam announced the name of the newborn after her ritual shaving. Facing east with a wooden pole in two hands, he began with an Arabic incantation of blessings on the master Muhammad and declared the name of the child to be Aissatou in successive rounds of potent oration.

Blessings of the master:

Arabic in italics

Pular in standard font

Bismillahi al rahmani al rahimi.

Allah humma salli ala sayyidina Muhammad wa sallim.

Allah humma salli ala sayyidina Muhammad wa sallim.

Allah humma salli ala sayyidina Muhammad wa sallim.

Innde boobo no seeni ɗo yumma makko e ɓeŋ makko ko inni mo ko Aissatou.

Innde boobo no seeni ɗo yumma makko e ɓeŋ makko ko inni mo ko Aissatou.

Ko ɗuŋ windino ka alluwal Allahu.

Yo alla wurnumo barkina.

English Translation:

In the name of God, the gracious and the compassionate.

O Allah, send blessings on our master Muhammad.

O Allah, send blessings on our master Muhammad.

O Allah, send blessings on our master Muhammad.

The name of the child has come here, her mother and her father have named her Aissatou.

The name of the child has come here, her mother and her father have named her Aissatou.

This is what was written in on the tablet of Allah.

May God grant her blessings.

This text, originating from 33:56 in the Koran, is a traditional “blessings on the master” that is commonly cited throughout West Africa. In it, God and his angels send blessings upon the prophet: “oh you who believe, greet him in peace.” This invocation is particularly efficacious since blessings offered in this way are multiplied by ten based on hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad). As the imam concluded, several members of the father’s family pressed bills into his hands in exchange for his linguistic labor. Rune’s elder brother began to hand out kola nuts to those attendees closest to him, and soon kola nuts filtered their way through the grasping hands of those in attendance until all those present had received a share.

Just after the imam’s proclamation had been concluded, Rune’s paternal aunt (yaaye) Aissatou rushed into the compound where the naming had just occurred.1 There, Aunt Aissatou, the youngest sister of the village chief and aunt of baby Aissa’s father, found out that she had missed out on some of the most important part of the naming ceremony: the shaving, the ritual naming, and just afterwards, the distribution of kola nuts and biscuits. Even though she lived just on the other side of town, no one had alerted her in time. In places like Taabe, events don’t begin at a given time; they get going when those necessary participants and preparations fall into place. Aissatou’s relation to baby Aissa should have positioned her as a significant member of the takanɓe hosts, so the fact that they had gone ahead without her presence was striking to her. Aunt Aissatou’s absence was also significant because she shared names with baby Aissatou. Being a namesake (or tokora in Pular) is a special bond that is often broadly invoked and remarked on by Senegalese and West Africans. Newborns are often named after respected individuals in the family lineage, such as a grandparent, to connect new generations with forbearers.

After the main naming event, Aissatou redressed her exclusion with the elders. As a first wave of participants (including me) left the main naming site, we ran into Aunt Aissatou and another woman, Maty, the first wife of the village chief. Maty began to make an issue of her and Aissatou’s exclusion from the ceremony and slowly emerged as an instigator and ally to Aunt Aissatou. Intercepting the village chief as he came through the compound, Aunt Aissatou demanded to know if they had named the child already. She further insisted on her and Maty’s important roles in naming the child and made an issue of her absence from the ceremony. The chief, however, rebuffed these accusations and made it clear that he interpreted their comments as an overture for kola nuts: “Ah lanni hino geɓal moŋ ngal ka innde moŋ” (You already got your share, in your name [Aissatou]). In other words, Aissatou should be contented with this shared namesake connection alone. Not only an incidental gift, however, kola nuts could ratify individuals as socially sanctioned witnesses.

Aunt Aissatou and Maty grumbled about their exclusion from this naming with palpable frustration. In fact, it was Maty who first dropped the teasing name for the baby: Buubu Ñooge (Trash Owl). This was an effective jibe, partly because the name had poetic allusions to other common first names, such as Dudu. Buubu here refers to an owl (buubuuru), the reviled nocturnal bird that in the area’s folklore is believed to be witches’ animal form, while ñooge refers to rubbish, or trash.2 During this first encounter with the chief, Maty and Aissatou continued to use Trash Owl to refer to baby Aissa. At first, the name did not inflict any enduring ritual disturbance, and the elders were not swayed by their protestations. They continued to offer a stout defense for Aissatou and Maty’s exclusion. Aissatou soon left, appearing frustrated with her exclusion from the main naming event.

A Teasing Reenactment

The following encounter picks up at the opening scene of this chapter with the cloaked figure of Aunt Aissatou. After Maty and Aissatou had unsuccessfully teased baby Aissa, Aunt Aissatou returned only minutes later, bedecked in a long headscarf in the style of a devout elder with the very staff that had been used in Aissa’s naming ceremony. Her arrival on the scene ignited laughter and cries of surprise among those standing by. Planting first her feet and then the ritual staff onto the gravel courtyard, Aissatou lifted her head from underneath the flowing scarf and, facing east, recited the blessings of the prophet. She bellowed out the proclamation over and over again as overhearers protested, laughed, and half-heartedly attempted to stop her. Left out of the ritual proceedings, Aissatou had come to reclaim her place.

The imam’s original blessing had been performed in a quick, almost methodical recitation in which the boundaries between phrases were nearly imperceptible. In contrast, Aissatou’s performance drew emphasis to parts of the text by her pausing frequently and extending the final vowels in emphasis (for instance, “salli:m”). Whereas the imam’s tight oratory clusters appeared to be impenetrable to contestation, Aunt Aissatou’s blessings were interspersed with calls to stop, affective protestations, and chaotic laughter. As such, Aunt Aissatou’s performance was produced in concert with her interlocutors and almost invited interactions from others.

In the transcript shown in table 4.1, Aissatou’s recitation is interspersed by calls to stop from three separate elder men. She occasionally addressed the protestations directly, uttering “no” (“o’oo”) on line 15. In fact, the power of her performance lies not in her individual act but rather in the way in which it was protested and reacted to by the elders. Though humorous, their actions gave weight to the satirical performance of Aissatou. Rather than a mere representation of a text, her performance emerged in concert with her surrounding interlocutors. This embodied inhabitation of the figure of the imam—achieved through staff, scarf, and body posture, along with mastery of the honorific Pular and Arabic text—went well beyond the casual reference to Buubu Ñooge some moments before. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s (1990) wry terminology, I suggest that Aissatou had now created a scene, performing an over-the-top reenactment that offered a provocative alternative name for baby Aissa. This was a scene in every sense—not only as an interruption of the ritual action through a teasing performance but also as a performative infrastructure that encircled her audience. Though interspersing their interjections with bouts of laughter, the men in attendance successively called for her to be stopped and playfully grabbed for her. Amid these protests, Aunt Aissatou remained in character and repeated key parts of the text over the exhortations and shrieks of her audience.

The Stakes of Distribution

The name Buubu Ñooge emerged as a popular topic of conversation in the village of Taabe for days to come. Its utterance came to represent the dissatisfaction of those who demanded a share of kola nuts distributed after the official naming. For some time, Aunt Aissatou only referred to baby Aissa as Buubu Ñooge and performed the name in front of Rune, the baby’s father, “mi andaa mo [Aissa] . . . miŋ ko Buubu Ñooge mi andi” (I don’t know her, I only know Trash Owl). Such utterances were often accompanied by negative evaluations of the naming ceremony, during which Aissatou and some other women hadn’t received their fair share. During this time, the teasing name provided a way for other women in the community to voice their dissatisfaction with their level of inclusion in the naming ritual. For these women, uttering “Buubu Ñooge” interdiscursively harkened back to Aissatou’s original moment of dissent in getting passed over. Rather than overt challenges to their status within ritual hierarchies, these performative, teasing voices provided useful tools for mobile individuals to test the limits of participation and inclusion.

As the teasing name began to spread throughout the village in subsequent interactions, it soon became a rallying cry for other women who felt they too had been passed over during the naming ceremony. Articulating the dissatisfaction in such terms offered a political strategy that did not require any conspicuous organizing of women across the village. Aunt Aissatou’s teasing reinterpretations were about claiming not only a greater share of kola but also a ratified role for herself in the naming ceremony of her namesake, baby Aissatou. Without gifts of kola to ratify their participation in the official naming event, Aissatou and other disenfranchised parties disseminated Buubu Ñooge in order to rectify their exclusion. Eventually, their linguistic extortion paid off. In the evening of the day after the naming ceremony, I asked the village chief about baby Aissa, and he told me that the name, Buubu Ñooge, had finally been removed: “They [Aissatou and the other women] were given kola; they were given corn, they were given rice, they were given soap. Now it’s baby Aissa. Now they forgot the trash part. That was removed now, we got rid of that now.” I visited Aunt Aissatou soon thereafter and found her content with the resolution. I never again heard the name Buubu Ñooge.

While this teasing reenactment and extortion demonstrated a virtuosic individual performance, they should be viewed as part of a broader repertoire of economic and social strategies employed by women in Senegal. Amid exchange relations in Dakar during which cloth became a primary object, for instance, “exchange was not about relations between things, but rather about construction relations between persons” (Buggenhagen 2012, 31). As with the cases described by Buggenhagen, cloth, like kola, was an important item exchanged by women across affinal lines in Taabe. However, the importance of these dealings lay not in the acquisition of objects, like cloth or kola, but in making visible the relationships they facilitated. Aissatou’s teasing performance demonstrates a creative example of the ways in which individuals rendered themselves visible in contexts of increasing mobility. Although this episode offers only one example of a woman’s creativity in expanding opportunities for herself in the context of mobility, there is a rich literature on how Senegalese women in transnational contexts have been building economic success by expanding and occupying new social niches (Buggenhagen 2012; E. E. Foley and Drame 2013; Hannaford and Foley 2015; Hannaford 2017).

One’s participation in a life cycle ritual was marked not merely through physical copresence but also through the giving and receiving of gifts such as kola. Distributed objects such as kola nuts thus held the potential to mediate inclusion in community events for mobile populations. Distributed to witnesses just after the naming of baby Aissa, gifts of kola thus mediated a person’s ability to report on an event and to be a ratified authority on a naming ceremony. Rather than simply assuming bodily presence to be coterminous with participation, this encounter reminds us that participation is possible through chains of spoken witnessing and material objects like kola nuts. It is through such mediated connections that migrants could participate and maintain a presence in hometown activities. On a smaller stage, the chains of giving and knowing evidenced in this example demonstrate the social issues faced by many other African migrants living across Africa, Europe and North America who must continually negotiate their presence in faraway hometowns.

For a community spread out across Senegal, West Africa, and beyond, participating in important ceremonial encounters such as baby Aissatou’s naming ceremony necessitated the maintenance of bonds constructed through gifts and efficacious language. Hosts like the village chief attempted to incorporate people into the village through the just distribution of gifts. Greetings, pledges, and other forms of “standing in” at a distance were integral to bringing a large range of people into the influence of the community. Those who, like Aissatou, had missed out on life cycle events could resort to creative use of relational routines to cement their place within a community. Participation was not merely a question of whether someone was there or not but an issue of how people mediated material, discursive connections through talk and exchange. Exchange enacted through the materialities of talk and gifts constituted social relations, thereby implicitly invoking the question of who counts and who might be forgotten. Mobility thus entails a verbal art of negotiating connections with a range of people who maintained various levels of contact and multimodal presence in each other’s lives.

The example of baby Aissa’s naming ceremony demonstrates the importance of hometowns as ritual anchors that mediated the inclusion of residents and migrants who only occasionally spent time in places like Taabe (Piot 1999; Kane 2011; Whitaker 2017; Whitehouse 2012). Dispersed communities of kin, colleagues, and neighbors across regional economic centers have increased the stakes of distribution in ritual ceremonies. Across Africa and much of the world, villages like Taabe have become points of origin for cyclical rural migrations in which many residents spend much of the year in regional economic centers. Such hometowns have increasingly become ritual and communal anchors for peripatetic residents who spent much of the year in more economically vibrant areas such as Kédougou City or the gold mining concessions.

For decades now, villagers in Taabe have perceived a collapse in the social life of the village, with fewer youths remaining amid the draw of work in Dakar, in gold mining areas, and in the Senegambian border area. While the naming ritual might appear to happen in a contained village, it provides an important site through which individuals measured, maintained, and built relationships with dispersed populations. Within this context, Aunt Aissatou balanced her involvement in agricultural trade with her participation in community rituals.

Aissa’s teasing performance can therefore be seen as an articulation that actively shaped her place within the community, not mere linguistic representation. More broadly, teasing was thereby used to reveal social stakes and prompt others to insist on the value of social ties. Given the levels of in- and out-migration from rural zones across Africa, the perspective of teasing provides an unconventional perspective on how individuals prompt others to participate in natal communities. Deployed as a form of comic coercion, teasing can have far-reaching impacts across space. Baby Aissa’s uncle (in Pular, older father) Mamadou—who left the village for long periods of time—was often teased about not being from the village, a charge he often had to counter with highly monitored repartees. Arriving in Taabe after a long period of absence, Mamadou often had to parry these tongue-in-cheek accusations of being a “stranger” who no longer had business in Taabe: “aŋ a jeyaaka ɗo” (you, you’re not from here). These everyday forms of teasing formed a linguistic web of playful entrapment that was spun in casual exchanges by individuals coming in and out of Taabe. Such manipulative talk about people’s whereabouts demonstrates the subtle ways in which language as infrastructure mediated connections to places and shows how acts of mobility emerge through the performance of verbal art.

Mobile traders frequently leveraged ritually sustained connections between people to facilitate connections and privileges in different places. As demonstrated by the naming ceremony, tracing name-based connections with others was consequential social work in West Africa. Although never automatic, sharing a name with someone could provide the grounds of a privileged relationship with them. In many cases, it carried along shared qualities across generations. One of Taabe’s most prolific fonio traders, Neene Bouba, had used these linguistic affordances to build a social network with key entrepreneurs in Kédougou City. Drawing on the power of sharing names, she had named her eldest daughter after the female leader of a powerful women’s group in Kédougou who coordinated interregional trade in fonio. As a tokora of this powerful women, Neene Bouba thereby benefited from connections between her family and this economic and social network. Through this onomastic affordance, the powerful groupement leader from Kédougou had been socially pressured to travel with gifts and companions to Taabe for the occasion of her namesake’s naming ceremony. This name-based connection fueled a reciprocal exchange of greetings, visitations, and goods. Thinking of this example alongside Aissatou’s teasing demonstrates the capacity of language to mediate distance and open communicative channels between people. Viewed in this way, both Aissatou’s performance and namesake connections show how language can be usefully viewed as a form of infrastructure. Linguistic practices opened up enduring pathways of talk, movement, and exchange that sustained connections between people separated by many kilometers.

Across Senegal and West Africa, it was common practice to offer return gifts (neldaari) to family and friends upon one’s arrival back home. While often analyzed in terms of remittances from migrants abroad, these gifts were not merely a source of economic support or a way to build one’s status. More fundamentally, they were a medium through which returning migrants could make distant places palpable to their kin at home. For instance, it was important that return gifts be from and carry connections to these distant places. Some migrants slyly flouted these expectations by buying expensive-looking, name-brand knockoffs at local markets immediately upon returning home. Just as to receive kola at a life event was to become ratified as a witness who could speak authoritatively of particular events, to receive gifts from travels was often to become linked with these places and thereby ratified to report on them. As one market seller once explained to me, if you don’t bring something back from one’s travels, it’s like you were never there. Gift giving and the surrounding talk through which it was rendered meaningful were not just a question of redistribution in terms of resources or social status but also a spatial question of navigating one’s place within a dispersed community.

A House Built of Blessings, Salt, and Stone

Like Aunt Aissatou and so many other mobile men and women who made their way to and from Taabe regularly, I was confronted with basic questions of how I would invest myself in time and space. With responsibilities to visit, greet, and reciprocate with families across Taabe, Dakar, and Kédougou City, how would I honor relationships of individuals who had opened their lives up to me? At times, my career as an anthropologist felt like a way to fulfill these obligations as much as an end in itself. The pressure to maintain phone calls, send notes, and share resources across these boundaries was immense. Mobility was partly a product of negotiated greetings, reciprocities, and admonishments from their kin to return and remain connected. Visitations happened along pathways built out of the exchange of gifts and greetings.

Not unlike those of Mamadou and Aunt Aissatou, my absence from Taabe also became an object of frequent evaluation and (largely good-natured) critiques. Would I not spend more time in Taabe? What was keeping me away? Why would I want to spend so much time in Kédougou City? Even when I could not physically be in all places at the same time, steady messages and small gifts were highly valued means of keeping up relations with people who had invested so much of their lives in me. As with the distribution of kola nuts at naming ceremonies, doling out small gifts and greetings helped cultivate a social network around me. Although some of my fellow Western visitors balked at these oftentimes monetary investments, they were the same strategies through which any mobile individuals maintained their distributed lives in a diasporic context.

I spent the majority of my first year of fieldwork in the village of Taabe, where I focused on in-depth fieldwork with a more limited number of individuals. This, I ventured, would give me a solid ethnographic foundation—a chance to polish my Pular language skills and cultivate a social network that I could build on in my second year. As ideologies of language, rural villages like Taabe were said to be places where so-called “deep” or “good” Pular was spoken, unlike the so-called “mixed” Pular spoken by urban residents.3 I spent one year doing linguistic ethnography in these rural borderlands, with only occasional trips back to Kédougou City to recharge batteries, restock supplies, and eat more varied food. And as had Aunt Aissatou, I did my best to avoid missing major life cycle events and to maintain my “presence” in disparate communities even while I was absent.

After one year, I expanded my research out from Taabe, exploring the regional capital of Kédougou City, the trading cities farther along the Gambia River, and the mining areas that attracted the hopeful from across the region. Using the city of Kédougou as a base in this second year, I rented a large hut that was part of a family compound of a Bassari family I had known for some time. In this area, Bassari were understood to be the autochthonous residents of Kédougou who had lived here before the later arrival of Fulɓe and Maninké. Whenever possible, Bassari built most of their dwellings out of the ferrous volcanic rocks that littered the landscape. Skilled Bassari stonemasons expertly fit these rocks together like giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The masters of this building method thus required very little mortar to build the walls.

This upscale hut that I lived in was in fact owned by a Canadian couple who had grown up in Kédougou in their youth as the children of missionaries. The broader compound that they shared with others was inhabited by an eclectic cast of characters. One was another Canadian child of missionaries who had been initiated as a Bassari member and now worked as a mechanic between Canada and Kédougou. He spoke Oniyan (the language spoken by Bassari) fluently and appeared to be more at home here in southeastern Senegal than in Canada, the land of his parents. The first time I met him, he told me of days roaming the forests with other Bassari children. One day something emerged suddenly and bit him in the leg. Having just sustained the bite of a venomous viper, he lost consciousness, only to awake later in a hut: his leg had ballooned in size; he was bleeding out of his eyes, ears, and mouth; and he was being force-fed salt water. Somehow, he survived, but thereafter, he felt illnesses more acutely. His protégé was a charmingly grumpy mechanic who spent a large portion of his time shouting up at the undercarriage of well-loved Mitsubishi Pajeros.

This Bassari family provided a welcoming and supportive place to trace the mobilities and linguistic practices in the broader region. I found it a comfortable refuge, partly because I considered it a place where I was not first and foremost an anthropologist. During the time I spent here, I took no field notes. I didn’t feel self-conscious about whether I was “getting it”—whether I was understanding the layers of interaction or engaging in thick description worthy of anthropological investigation (Geertz 1973). Instead, I felt more comfortable letting myself sit and be. This experience taught me that it is important to operate at several levels of attunement rather than always attempting to furiously record everything. Sometimes it is more important to merely be present. At any rate, this mental rest was necessary. Only in the months and years after fieldwork did I realize how exhausting it can be, especially when you are in a linguistic and social context so different from your own.

Rather than speaking Pular, we spoke French together. After years of studying French, I had developed a best approximation of a continental French accent honed in dedication after many trips to France and college-level classes. After spending years in West Africa, however, I had, through no conscious effort, acquired more and more staccato rhythms and trilled rs that followed Senegalese French sound patterns.4 I enjoyed learning bits and pieces of Oniyan but put no pressure on myself to learn it as a linguistic anthropologist. I developed close friendships with several young men in the family: we thatched rooves together, drank tea in the afternoons, and skimmed Frisbees across the rocky ground. Although most residents in Taabe and Kédougou City knew me by my adopted Senegalese name, Souleymane, here I was called “Niko,” a shortening of Nicolas, which was not an uncommon name for Bassari men.5 Every so often, we’d slaughter a pig, buy a case of beer or find some good palm wine, and invite others from all over the neighborhood for a party. As I did yoga in the courtyard of my room, the young Bassari children did their best to imitate my strange poses.

In my second year, however, I came upon an opportunity to acquire a bit of land not far from this Bassari family. Mamadou and I soon began to think about building a small compound that I could use as a field station. He planned on using it as guest lodging when he welcomed tourists from abroad. My aspiration was to build a small research station that I and other colleagues might use to continue to invest ourselves in this part of the world. Although our initial plans were modest, I expanded the huts somewhat after a colleague’s archaeological field school needed a more reliable research space. Mamadou, who also worked as a tourist guide, would be able to co-own and manage this complex and uses it to house welcome Spanish tourists.

The land we had acquired sat a bit on the outskirts of town and was dotted with the ferrous, volcanic rocks that the earliest residents had first used to build their homes. It is these rocks that we used to build the main huts, a project that was led by a local Pular mason, Salam (Bassari masons would often critique his work). One day, as I dropped by to check on the work, I found him in a state of tense uneasiness. I was surprised to see Salam, who usually maintained a droll disposition, so concerned. While the entire outer wall and the first hut had gone up seamlessly, the construction of the second hut revealed a bad omen. Three times, Salam said, he had attempted to place a stone, and three times, this stone had fallen all the same. Although he talked about it obliquely, Salam took this to be a sign that there was an uneasy relationship with the spirits that dwell in this area. He immediately suggested that we perform a sadaka, a gift or sacrifice (of livestock) to put us on firm footing in this land.

As part of the rapidly expanding neighborhoods surrounding the older city, the land we were building on was recently claimed from the quail hunters who used it in recent memory. As newcomers in an emerging neighborhood, we turned our attention to those around us who had already developed relationships with the people and land we were settling in. We needed guides to help us mediate this uneasy relationship with the land. The closest occupied area to us was the village of Hodo, an older settlement that was originally founded as a leper colony on the outskirts of town. Half a century ago, residents had been looking for a place for people with leprosy to live away from other populations, and this village, a few kilometers from downtown Kédougou, became their final home. As the elders tell it, early residents defended themselves against hyenas in the wild bush. But this once distant outpost was becoming integrated as a neighborhood of the expanding city of Kédougou.

As with mobility, the work of establishing oneself in a community is a relational one. Rather than introducing oneself independently, in Senegal it is generally best to become acquainted with others through an intermediary. Just as mobility is a relational practice mediated through language, most Senegalese feel more comfortable expanding social ties along existing networks. It is for this reason that building ties with others is also implicitly a spatial exercise of mobility. In our case, old man Jango, who lived down the road from us, acted as the representative from our nascent neighborhood. He led us to the house of Hodo’s imam, who would know how to make peace with the restless spirits underneath our dwelling. As instructed, we brought kola nuts, a large bag of salt, and a metaphorical “belt” (boggol) of cash money to bind all of these gifts together.

After a short introduction to the imam, we explained our problems with the new construction. I did not relay these concerns to him directly, but they were passed on to him through a chain of discourse. The imam listened to our concerns and welcomed us to the neighborhood. He reiterated that a sadaka, a sacrifice or gift offering, would help remediate our relationship with this bit of land. Sitting quietly on the floor of the imam’s large compound surrounded by many neighbors and kin, we allowed the recited blessings from the Koran to soak into our bodies and the offerings we had bought.

As with those in the baby Aissa’s naming ritual, these blessings were not merely a proposition to be interpreted symbolically. Instead, they forged a physical connection with the people who already dwelled here and, by extension, to the places we would inhabit. Such Koranic blessings are best understood as inherently beneficial rather than as symbolic words that have positive meanings. Work by Rudolph Ware (2014) on the deep history of Islam in West Africa shows that these kinds of recitations from the Koran are not merely to be interpreted for their meaning; they are the essence of goodness in and of themselves. A Muslim scholar who could recite the Koran from memory is known as a hafiz and can be understood as an embodiment of these qualities or, as Ware describes it, a walking Koran. For many in Kédougou, the act of uttering these positive blessings from the Koran was fundamentally impossible to those who were not themselves good Muslims: “Nafiq waawataa hunjaade” (Someone who is evil cannot recite [them]). It is for these reasons that ink water washed away from Koranic tablets was ingested as a direct instantiation of these blessings. Across Kédougou, practitioners frequently talked of the direct ability of Arabic blessings to affect others. The recitation of blessings could help control or calm the body. They could also bring children to sleep through their inherent qualities. It is also in this way that Islamic scholars, often called serignes, were able to facilitate migration. The Mouride brotherhood, for instance, has played a significant role in Senegalese diasporas around the world and has leveraged the religious community to build a significant transnational economic base (O’Brien 1971; Diouf and Rendall 2000; Riccio 2004). However, Muslim scholars and leaders enabled migration through more than brokering their followers’ financing, international travel, and employment prospects; their blessings enabled mobility through the direct power of the words (Tall 2002; Gemmeke 2013; Kleist and Thorsen 2017). Viewing physical objects and language as material infrastructure in the same frame helps explicate these dimensions of mobility.

As with the baby Aissa’s ritual naming ceremony, kola nuts were distributed to those present for the Hodo imam’s benediction. In addition, the large bag of salt we had brought was divided into smaller bags that were passed out to those present. The imam’s wives were then tasked with distributing out small bags of this salt to everyone in the neighborhood after our departure. In the days that followed, bits of this blessed salt infused the soups and stews of our fellow neighborhood residents. Like the kola nuts distributed during baby Aissa’s naming ceremony, these objects expanded the number of people who were connected to this powerful ritual moment. As neighbors received and ingested this salt, they became invested in our concerns and aware of us as ratified newcomers to their neighborhood. This offering can also be thought of as a gift of sorts to the spirits that occupied this land before us. A powerful tool used across much of West Africa, these kinds of sadaka could be used to attempt to bring into the realm of human action those things that we otherwise might not appear able to control.

Not merely metaphorical, the linguistic performance of these blessings could be understood as a material mortar that held together the walls of this hut. The efficacy of the blessing-infused salt lies in the inherent qualities of these Koranic sayings. In other cases, blessings from the Koran could be contained in amulets (gris-gris in French or talkuru in Pular) to grant specific physical or interpersonal qualities to the wearer. As I mentioned previously, consuming slate water becomes a useful way to embody qualities, given the real and physical properties of the written word in this Islamic tradition. The distribution of salt provided a material channel in which engagement with these blessings was spread across the neighborhood and, through this, a relationship with spirits that mediated our belonging on this piece of land. In a related context, Sabina Perrino (2002, 250) has shown that saliva, used in encounters between patient and healer, “serves as a carrier or vessel in which the phonated Qur’anic verses can be placed, verses that can then bring the patient into communicative contact with the transcendent power of Allah.”

These blessings from the Koran and the assemblage of offerings can thus be seen as one instantiation of the verbal art of mobility. At key moments like the baptism of a newborn or the founding of a compound, migrants exchanged gifts and words strategically to account for nonpresent others and to weave themselves into the lives of others. These migrants and travelers resorted to linguistic exchanges to help negotiate relationships not only with human neighbors, but also those autochthonous spirits that originally inhabited the land. It is through such negotiated relationships of reciprocity, built on sadaka, that individuals across West Africa were able to spread out and build their homes in area that were previously occupied by spirits rather than humans. The house that Salam built—one that would become my field station—was formed not only from stone and mortar but also through the collective concern of my neighbors as articulated through linguistic blessings.6

In this section, I have shown that the infrastructures of houses were built on a foundation of linguistic exchange. Although the previous example concerns a compound I built with my friend Mamadou and his community, other migrants regularly encountered these same issues as they etched their lives into new places. Even the materiality of the houses built by migrants was an important factor in their mobility. For instance, in the case of the village of Taabe and most other dwellings in the region, residents made ingenious use out of freely available resources. With clay, cattle dung, earth from termite mounds, and water made into a sticky syrup by the lakka plant, a sturdy hut could be built by a group of three or four in a matter of days. This meant that individuals could, with little financial investment, maintain flexible living arrangements in Taabe in addition to homes in more distant economic centers. While concrete-walled huts with tin rooves increasingly marked one’s status, long-standing techniques using clay and dung maintained a far cooler indoor climate during the dry season heat. Although construction techniques may appear to be small details, considering the materiality of homes has strong implications for how anthropologists have come to understand kinship and relatedness. Whereas the study of kinship used to entail an almost mathematical calculation of kinship terms as an abstract system, anthropologists later realized that the materiality of homes was an important constitutive factor in how people conceive of and enable relations between one another (Morton 2007; Melly 2009; Leinaweaver 2009). Being able to move, subdivide, or otherwise rebuild houses was an important social resource among individuals who were continually negotiating relationships with mobile neighbors and kin. In this view, the strength of a home is less a function of its building materials and more a question of the social and linguistic labor through which individuals interweave it and themselves with the concerns of their consociates.

Not merely a physical substance, concrete bricks can be understood as the material condensation of migrant labor. As such, they constituted an important social strategy of savings. Funds remitted back to Senegal were frequently turned into such building materials. In many cases, individuals might only have the funds to buy cement for the construction of bricks that could be stacked up and left out for years before they were finally put to use. Locked away in concrete, these resources defied any individuals who might want to make demands on a migrant’s funds. In urban areas like Kédougou, individuals regularly locked their savings into the walls of their dwellings. For many families, these excess funds are used to construct cement walls around one’s home or rooms that are added on to a central structure one at a time. While ten years ago most of Kédougou’s concrete buildings were to be found in the market, these days families with sufficient funds are increasingly building multi-story buildings with cement.7

Language—viewed as a material infrastructure—also has the capacity to bind people together across great distances. Both examples in this chapter have demonstrated how linguistic practice enables migrants to enmesh themselves into the lives of others. These processes happen through the exchange of objects and language, which should be understood in the same analytical frame. Special occasions, such as the naming ceremony or ritual founding of my field station, offer particularly powerful ritual centers through which such connections can be reified. Viewing language as a form of infrastructure helps us understand how blessings offered from one place might help others become a part of a growing neighborhood and helps track the pathways of teasing, greetings, and gift exchanges through which migrants maintain their presence in distributed communities across West Africa.

Notes

This chapter is derived, in part, from the article “Ritual Contingency: Teasing and the Politics of Participation,” published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology on November 25, 2019.

1. 1. Earlier in the day she had come by carrying a small calabash filled with an assortment of old junk: broken flip-flops, shattered pieces of an old radio, a dirty sock, and shards of hard plastics. These were offerings to satirize the gifts of rice, cloth, and oil that were brought in by Rune’s many in-laws from surrounding villages, so her intentions were perhaps satirical from the beginning. Alongside the teasing nickname, these gifts can also be viewed as an act of protecting incipient social beings from evil eyes and jealous gazes.
2. 2. Although Buubu Ñooge might appear to be a cute nickname, to many West Africans, for whom owls are very real and terrifying incarnations of witches, this was perhaps a shocking moniker. I once witnessed a frenzied call to arms after an owl flew into a domestic compound one evening. With a piercing shout, the man next to me began to look frantically for his slingshot and soon sent sharp stones whirring into the branches around the owl. Many believed owls’ presence could foretell the death of a family member.
3. 3. Locals often used such terms to distinguish Pular that included more French or French-derived words. In a linguistic sense, these more “mixed” urban varieties are not inferior to other forms of Pular, since loan words and borrowed constructions from other varieties is a normal part of how language works. All varieties of language are systematic and rule-based. However, speakers may have strong feelings about such issues, and many have historically tried to insulate their language from other varieties understood to be foreign.
4. 4. By this time, I could often pass for a Senegalese speaker of French on the phone. Once I encountered a French reporter in Kédougou who, upon hearing me speak, laughed at my accent for a solid two minutes before she could bring herself to talk again. While this could be considered good-natured teasing, these attitudes also betray a broader linguistic racism based on implicit assumptions of what constitutes legitimate French. Standard language ideologies rooted in the colonial experience have long stigmatized speakers of French deemed to be “nonstandard” despite the fact that their varieties are just as systematic and rule-based as Parisian French. My experiences are nothing compared to generations of Caribbean, African, or southern langue d’oc French speakers, whose varieties are deemed deficient—an assessment that often provides the basis for discrimination and exclusion.
5. 5. Niko sounded just a bit better than the nickname I was accustomed to, “Nik,” which, in French, can sound like a slang term for “fuck” (e.g., the French hip-hop group Suprême NTM, derived from “nique ta mère” [fuck your mother]).
6. 6. The role of language as a discursive infrastructure through which buildings and homes were founded can also be seen in Rudolf Gaudio’s discussion of modernization campaigns that sought to demolished unauthorized housing in Abuja (Gaudio 2021). In this case, the fixity of a building was to be found not merely in its material foundation but also, more importantly, in the social relationships owners cultivated with project administrators as well as in the social categories of autochthony they could embody.
7. 7. Constructing buildings too large for one’s immediate family unit has certain advantages. For one, surplus rooms that are not immediately needed can be rented out to a larger market of migrant renters. Since access to land has become relatively scarce, it is no longer possible for most incomers to find land and use locally sourced materials to construct adequate lodging. With this wave of increasing migrant labor, many of Kédougou’s teachers, administrators, gendarmes, police, traders, and porters, therefore, have had to rent rooms in Kédougou. As such, an important savings strategy has been to convert surpluses into forms that are resistant to fluidity, thereby withstanding any claims by associates or kin. These kinds of strategies were important for migrants who found it harder to amass resources the closer they were to their home communities and kin, where the pressures to redistribute money was greater.