Chapter 6 Kédougou Market

A Place of Wares and Words

In 2014, Hadji Cissé, a well-known businessman and reform candidate, had just won Kédougou’s mayoral race. In a region whose gold mining boom presented both pitfalls and opportunities, Cissé had built a thriving business out of importing used construction equipment from Europe. Central to Cissé’s platform was a pledge to “regularize” Kédougou’s economy and politics. This was a blanket term for reducing corruption and bureaucratizing processes that had long run through “informal” social networks. For the so-called informal migrant traders who worked from the sidewalks and makeshift tables across the market across Kédougou market, however, this was a risky proposition. Even before Cissé’s term, migrant traders existed in a liminal position. However, Cissé’s pledges to clean up the market put many in an even more precarious position, particularly given tensions between certain store owners and informal sellers who could often sell at a reduced price.

Indeed, in the months after Cissé’s election, these administrative initiatives dislodged migrant merchants from the places they had been trading for many months or even years. Suddenly, my lived market landscape was upended. I had a hard time finding migrant sellers who had previously served as communal cairns in their habitual trading spots. Only the kola nut sellers, traders of a prized ritual good that imbued them with clout, proved to be relatively unaffected by these upheavals. Despite this precarity, migrant traders continued to inhabit the market, leveraging this instability as best they could. This chapter tells the story of how migrant market sellers negotiated their uncertain position during a time of change. Examining the routines of creative linguistic interactions helps show how migrants maintained their place in a changing market. While migrants are often studied in light of their mobility, a key to their success in places like Kédougou market was the ability to strategically root themselves in place for a time. Particularly in a time of Ebola where Guinea was held to be a source of contagion, the movements of Guinean migrant merchants who dominated Kédougou’s market were highly scrutinized. While “ethnic solidarities” has often been used to explain how migrants associate in such contexts, an interactional approach to migrant lives shows that ethnic commonality was only the tip of an iceberg. Idioms such as kinship or affinity, which are often assumed to be structural and inevitable, were often useful resources for productively mediating relationships with a range of others.

Migrant merchants who sold Chinese goods imported from Guinea used a range of linguistic and interactional tools to negotiate their emplacement in the market. The Guinean migrant traders of Kédougou are a part of larger migratory patterns of Guinean Fulɓe Fouta seeking economic opportunities across Senegal and the broader region (Fioratta 2020). I highlight the experiences of kola nut sellers, who prove themselves to be relatively resilient actors in this time of upheaval. We will also meet other migrants, such as an elderly porter, Djiby Diallo, who resorts to numerous performances of relationship building to cement a stable community around him. A strong factor in the success of migrant market sellers was the cultivation of relationships achieved through the exchange of wares and words. Given these redistributive networks, succeeding in the market entailed the ability to invest in social networks while safeguarding one’s money and goods. These migrants practiced the verbal art of being mobile, an infrastructure that emerged through situated linguistic practice. Through the cultivation of in-law relations, joking cousin correspondences, and other relationships, traders shaped the market around them into a place where they belonged. This last chapter, therefore, offers a reinterpretation of a classic topic in migration and mobilities: the market. I draw on all of the concepts developed throughout this book—mobility as verbal art, language as infrastructure, and the articulations of everyday encounters—to show how migrants negotiate their precarious position in times of change.

When I first arrived in 2006, Kédougou was a sleepy border town that was home to only a handful of motorcycles. But by 2016, hundreds of Chinese-manufactured motorcycles roamed the streets of Kédougou, employing a throng of mechanics. Sitting in southeastern Senegal at the crossroads of Bamako and the trading cities of northern Guinea, Kédougou City as well as the broader region were in the midst of a protracted economic boom. Although Kédougou’s populations had long seen migrant and settling populations from Mali and Guinea, large numbers of Guinean migrants now flocked to Kédougou. These day laborers, merchants, and transporters came to pursue the economic opportunities that a new Dakar-Kédougou-Bamako highway and the mining economy afforded. These migrants often came to places like Kédougou far away from their kinship networks so as to avoid the pressures of redistribution. Even in distant markets, however, migrants needed to develop keen interactional strategies to protect their wealth while at the same time cultivating social networks.

While Kédougou was only loosely connected to the rest of Senegal by unreliable laterite roads until the 1970s, the Dakar-Bamako road that now routed through downtown Kédougou in 2009 further invigorated the downtown market area. This roadside market had become a trading and traveling nexus, offering economic opportunities for migrants who worked as porters, traveling merchants, and middlemen in what was a thriving regional trade. In recent years, it had increasingly served as a transport hub for the gold mining concessions and offered an important stop for those merchants and miners in transit. This new highway, the gold rush, and an increased connection with western Senegal all offered unprecedented challenges and opportunities for market goers and sellers. Not dissimilar from Julie Kleinman’s (2014, 288) study of West Africans in Paris’s La Gare du Nord as “a coming together of various trajectories from various places,” Kédougou’s downtown market was situated as a nexus for many forms of social and economic self-realization. While the traces of Kédougou’s social and economic change were sometimes slow to detect in its more distant neighborhoods, the town’s rapidly increasing connections with regional and international networks was most visible in this bustling district.

The market was one of the first places where artisanal miners and villagers from surrounding areas would stop on their way into town. The newly paved road ran alongside the border of Kédougou’s labyrinthian inner market, composed of small alleys, makeshift tables, and corner stores. While a skeleton of permanent structures was hidden at the market’s center, migrant merchants and peripatetic workers were its lifeblood: an infrastructure of people built through sociality and exchange. The alleys that crisscrossed its main streets were lined with sellers who had built their improvised displays into the sides of roads and buildings. Some sellers paraded their wares around in their arms or pushed custom-built carts that allowed them to travel across the markets and neighborhoods in search of clients. Other sellers anchored themselves to pedestrian zones and built relationships with neighboring shops and sellers to stake their claims. As such, the effective range of migrant sellers was often underwritten by social connections negotiated with the shop owners, whose stake in permanent structures could grant access and shared space to others. Friendships cultivated among wholesale and small-scale merchants has helped solidify a trust that was paramount to sustaining successful economic activities (Warms 2014). This was a market built of wares and words.

Viewing the linguistic exchanges and social relations featured in this chapter as material channels of infrastructure resonates with ways in which economic anthropologists have examined exchange more expansively. Julia Elyachar (2010), for instance, describes the kinds of social relationships of women in Cairo as “phatic labor,” which produces channels along which semiotic and economic value can flow. Not only can these processes be understood in a symbolic sense, but they can also, for Elyachar, be equated to material infrastructures: “In Cairo, ‘phatic labor’ creates a social infrastructure of communicative channels that are as essential to economy as roads, bridges, or telephone lines” (452). Linguistic interaction and exchange, in this sense, constitutes forms of infrastructure that enable the circulation of other material and symbolic forms. What many have described as “informal economies” can be understood as epiphenomena of these broader forms of phatic labor cultivated by women and migrants in places like Cairo and Kédougou.

A Linguistically Constructed Environment

Existing scholarship on African markets has shown them to be complex systems that are organized through patterns and relationships at different levels—spatial patterns made by the habitual movements of ambulatory sellers; broader (inter)national policies and economics; and interpersonal dynamics negotiated in interaction. Gracia Clark (1995, 3), for instance, describes Ghanaian markets as composed of processes that “create contradictory interests and pressures inside the marketplace . . . it is these very contradictions that constantly renew and transform the full range of trading relations, including their constraints.” The linguistic practices I describe in this chapter present one complex patterning through which the market can be understood—both for analysts and for market goers. In what follows, I describe how linguistic practices as infrastructure were central to tracing the built infrastructure and spatiality of the market. For new incoming migrants who had yet to understand some of these broader relations, establishing themselves within this complex nexus required an effective use of linguistic and social capital. In this chapter, I describe how the interactional practices constitute a significant means through which individuals established themselves in the market and, in so doing, contributed to the spatiality of the market through their practices.

Rather than merely floating above the market as detached communication, language helped constitute the market in a material sense. As such, language can be thought of not only as a means to convey valuable information or even to build relationships but also as a force for shaping the place around them. As infrastructure built through linguistic exchanges, the downtown market emerged through the exchange of talk, food, and situated interactions. By likening people to infrastructure, Abdou Maliq Simone (2004) has argued against the design logic of architectural infrastructures and instead orients our attention to how people make use of and refashion aspects of their lived environment. People as infrastructure, is particularly apt in describing Kédougou’s downtown spaces, and it demonstrates how humans creatively shape urban spaces, flexibly transmuting the built environment to suit their needs. Infrastructure can thus be thought of not only as walls, lines, and cement but also as the situated actions of people who break up and reshape any supposed teleologies of public space and urban planning. For instance, after a renovation of the market that coincided with the paving of the Kédougou-Bamako road, migrants repurposed a paved parking structure area at the entrance of Kédougou’s downtown market. Sellers and porters had turned this area into a bustling business area that was the place to go if you wanted to purchase affordable goods like caps, radios, or flashlights of Chinese manufacture.

Market people creatively repurposed the environment around them to suit their needs. Much of this happened through not only individual action but also the intersubjective and shared practices of language use. Migrant sellers frequently shifted participant frameworks by assembling makeshift furniture in various formations or altering centers of social gravity through the sharing of tea. Participant framework here is a term that helps explore how interlocutors manage roles and responsibilities of interaction in space. Not merely a place of buildings, stalls, and carts, this market was also constituted through migrant interactions. Visiting at different times, I noticed how individuals slowly shaped the frameworks for interaction, creating circular spots that seemed to invite intense discussion on some days through the arrangement of chairs and selling carts. Other times, I would return to find these small oases of intense social interaction evaporated. These spots shifted between more closely managed conversations to relatively open configurations where tea or greetings might attract a new client. Market sellers often arranged themselves such that walking up to brick-and-mortar stores first entailed navigating the human pathways of mobile sellers who attempted to draw customers into interaction. Occasionally, this symbiosis between brick-and-mortar stores and mobile sellers was brought into question, with the former occasionally resenting the latter’s ability to siphon off customers with lower prices and conversational finesse.

The participant frameworks of Kédougou’s downtown market were contingent achievements, composed of shifting arrangements between small stools, umbrellas, and the temporary stages created by the bodily alignments of idle workers. Lurking on the edges, overhearers could pick up words here and there, thereby jumping in and out of modes of (over)hearing and participation (Goffman 1981a). Individuals might maintain conversations while seated at great distances from each other; at other times, they might yell greetings to passersby while they were simultaneously engaged in intimate conversation in close quarters. When regulars approached their usual spots, they were often greeted by their jammoore nicknames called out at a distance: mundane mysteries such as “France” or “millet man.” These nicknames often made no sense to strangers, but they frequently harkened to migratory misadventures. Broadcast over the market, these secret nicknames were often addressed to a friend-in-the-know and sifted out those who had no knowledge of these secret stories and monikers.

The exchange of these names and gifts incited further exchange and movement. Once placed on a bed of charcoal embers, a pot of tea became a redistributive affordance for those who could create or draw on existing connections with the tea patron. Who was to count as deserving of tea in an environment where individuals were continually on their way in and out was often a recurring background negotiation in market interactions. Refreshments, snacks, or prayers that were publicly displayed similarly drew in people around them. While the exchange of greetings was often required payment to admit others into interaction, rights to sit and participate were generally monitored by implicit hierarchies among migrants, at the top of which sat kola nut sellers.

Greetings, nicknames, and the built infrastructure of the market thus all provided linked ways of managing access to resources and information. For market sellers, the display and management of their wares was a communicative art form that invited clients. Every morning, merchants displayed reams of flashlights, clothes, and other accessories and each evening, they carefully folded this merchandise away into compact blocks. Using rope or rubber straps cut from recycled bicycle tires, they tied plastic sheets and rice sacks around their stalls into tight bundles that kept their wares secure overnight. In the event of a rainstorm, merchants performed a more hurried improvisation of their habitual technique and quickly dashed off under the nearest roofed structure. Early in the wet season, rains were first announced by swirling dust storms. With an intuitive sense of the weather, traders responded more to the changes in barometric pressure and temperature than to the sky, which was often obscured by the cluttered market. These early season storms appeared first as a flurry of scurrying humans and livestock seeking shelter, who were soon set upon by plumes of dust and the stout first rains. Those unable to make it back home were swept up into corner shops, covered patios and private compounds. Laborers, shopkeepers, and shoppers suddenly found themselves thrust in atop one another. United against the dust, they were often brought into these improvised moments of greeting and commiseration—a sudden social effervescence witnessed through the loud din of staccato conversation bouncing off the cement walls.

Cultivating a Domestic Space through In-Law Talk

African markets have often been described as chaotic (Ferguson 1999). While such a description might betray an outsider’s perspective, migrants also frequently spoke of markets as precarious places where you could get lost (in Pular, for instance, majjegol). Newcomers often navigated these places through the cultivation of social relations and everyday connections with others. Although much of these connections were assumed to happen along ethnic and kinship lines, my experiences indicated that the connections migrants mobilized were much more diverse and manifold. Much of this labor was performed through the exchange of goods, greetings, and entangling oneself in the fates of one’s consociates. For instance, as I discussed in chapter 3, many migrants formed inchoate communities through the exchange of teasing nicknames related to migratory misadventures that bound them together through a shared precarity (Sweet 2021b). Success as a migrant thus rested in large part on the verbal art of building relationships. Linguistic routines drawing on social idioms such as kinship, affinity, and joking relationships (cousinage in French, or sanakuyaagal in Pular) were key to the cultivation of these relationships. Sellers thus succeeded in staying put by using greetings, reciprocal talk, and the exchange of social idioms to cement themselves into the social landscape.

Connections through affinity (i.e., in-laws, esiraaɓe in Pular), for example, offered many migrant sellers an opportunity to build a domestic space from the surrounding alleys and crates of Kédougou’s downtown market. As such, repeatedly exchanging in-law talk with others in the market was not only relationship or identity work in a conceptual sense; it could also change the kind of place that migrants found themselves in. Inhabiting a domestic space rather than a foreign market these sellers could dispense hospitality and speak from the position of host, a powerful role across West African societies. Being someone who could offer food, give out blessings, and speak to the others as a host was one important strategy that helped market sellers cement their position.

Djiby Diallo, a middle-aged porter from a faraway village whom I came to spend time with, frequently employed the idioms of joking relationships and affinity to connect with others in a busy market. Djiby owned a wheelbarrow, which he made use of to unload goods from the lorries that brought supplies from coastal Senegal. In addition to being a tool for his livelihood, however, Djiby’s wheelbarrow became a site through which he shaped the spaces and possibilities for interaction. From this site, he enacted displays of hospitality and generosity by using language of the domestic sphere and likening his wheelbarrow to his home. “Mi eggi taho, Souleymane” (I’ve moved, Souleymane), he told me one day as I came upon him slumped in his wheelbarrow deep in the interior of the Kédougou downtown market.

One day as I was passing time with Djiby between work shifts, an elderly man ambled across our view. Djiby leapt up and began to arrange the flattened cardboard lining the bottom of his wheelbarrow as if he was making a bed. Putting on the final touches with meticulous attention, Djiby addressed the man effusively, exclaiming, “He, ko esiraaɓe aŋ!” (Hey, it’s my senior in-law!). Djiby continued, “Esiraaɓe bismillah moŋ esiraaɓe jooɗee, jooɗee esiraaɓe goɗɗo wernay esiraaɓe muuduŋ” (“In-law, welcome to you, in-law sit down, sit down in-law. A person should offer hospitality to their in-laws”). Along with his embodiment of deference and the placement of his respected in-law in a place of honor (the wheelbarrow), Djiby employed honorifics such as jooɗee (-ee, plural/honorific) instead of the familiar form, jooɗo (-o, singular). After Djiby urged his “esiraaɓe” to sit in the wheelbarrow seat of honor, the other man reluctantly obliged. “Wona fii jooɗagol mi ari” (“I didn’t come here to sit down”), his guest hesitantly countered, alluding to business with another man at the market. Djiby’s deployment of affinity in this context not only articulates the relationship between himself and his ostensible in-law but also reshapes the kind of space they find themselves in.

Sitting not only entraps a person in a particular place, but it moreover demonstrates a bodily technique of honoring one’s in-laws and visitors, individuals who are often beckoned to sit down upon their arrival in a compound or family house. Djiby’s verbal honorifics combined with a deferential comportment contributed to a domestic chronotope (space-time setting) from which guests could be welcomed, seated, and even fed. Djiby’s use of esiraaɓe here draws on a relational idiom that brings others into interaction in a busy market. His esiraaɓe’s compulsion to sit down and spend time with Djiby, despite the former’s unwillingness, attests to the compulsion of affinity in performance.

Kola Nut Sellers

While porters like Djiby resorted to broad strategies to situate themselves at the heart of the action, Guinean migrant kola nut sellers leveraged their important ritual wares to succeed in the market setting. They occupied nodal figures in Kédougou’s linguistic economy. Kola nut sellers not only managed overland truck shipments, but they also loaned money, exchanged currencies, and traded in other big-ticket items such as motorcycles. Selling kola nuts was possibly one of the most difficult networks to get into, and its sale was very profitable with respect to other forms of commerce in the market scene. Many of the same kola nut sellers that I had known at the Kédougou market in my time during the Peace Corps from 2006 to 2009 were still present in 2014–17 when I conducted ethnographic fieldwork. The same could not be said for their peers: porters and small-scale sellers of other products. While some kola nut sellers had left for Congo or Angola, their spots were only to be replaced with another kin member or friend. Places like Congo and Angola represent important nodes in intra-African trade networks and had significant migrant communities (Whitehouse 2012; Gaibazzi 2018). While much literature on migration in Africa has emphasized international migration, intra-African migration to places like Angola, Congo, or Kédougou is frequently overlooked and constitutes the vast majority of migrations (Schapendonk 2013). Consequently, this book recognizes that the scales and distinctions across migration is held to happen can be partly studied through interaction.

As key nodes in the front market complex, kola nut sellers were rooted in their habitual spots from sunup to sundown, returning home only for evening rest. Most kola nut sellers rented small rooms in neighborhoods close to the market, where they often shared lives together. Many had wives and children back in Guinea, to whom they sent monthly remittances, though not all Guinean migrants were so successful (Fioratta 2015). Often working together as a unit, kola nut sellers organized regular transports of kola nuts and other merchandise. They frequently used these trips as opportunities to spend time with their families in Guinea, although many of these circular patterns of trade and reciprocity were disrupted during the time of Ebola.

Kola nut sellers exemplify the social strategies of migrants across Africa in which distance from kin networks is used as a strategy of wealth accumulation (Jonsson 2012; Whitehouse 2013). While the pressure to share with kin can be very great close to an individual’s local networks, economic activity abroad can make it easier to amass and hold on to wealth. This physical distance from one’s homeland also made available a broader range of social and interactional strategies. Bruce Whitehouse (2013), for instance, describes how migrants who find themselves far from home are often able to engage in otherwise “demeaning” activities such as small-scale trade, which are understood to be below their social station. Free from more rigid social expectations, physical distance often enables migrants to articulate themselves in new and more flexible ways.

While some kola nut sellers sat clustered in groups of three or four, others claimed small alleyways in the market for themselves. Those who sat in larger groups could draw a larger crowd, but they also increasingly relied on their ability to create special relationships with kiliyans (clients) who might seek out specific kola nut sellers again and again. Kola nut sellers’ spots could be minimalistic arrangements of a single sack, behind which they sat on simple stools with a moveable umbrella to protect against the sun. Bringing in other chairs and clustering on small benches, kola nut sellers could quickly create a large space for others if need be. Market goers relied on verbal baiting and other strategies to sift through a diverse group of circulating individuals in the market. In order to stand out, market sellers created privileged relationships with market buyers, using a range of relational idioms to nurture kiliyan. A reciprocal term that sellers and buyers called each other, to be a kiliyan was to have a built a relationship with a seller to whom one might return over and over. In return, buyers could hope to get preferential prices or credit, drawing on established trust with sellers.

When providing long-term kiliyans with kola, for instance, Thierno, one of the most senior sellers in the front market, had a way of presenting the nuts in his open palm that made a demonstration of the choice merchandise he had selected for a particular kiliyan. He often began such an interaction by asking, “Ko kilo jelu faaleɗaa?” (How many kilos do you want?), even if the anticipated sale was often just a few kola nuts. With an initial assumption of a large order, buyers often had to construct palliatives that made excuses for smaller purchases. If Thierno noticed blemishes on a kola nut, he would remove it and search over the surface of his wares for a suitable alternative. Through a performance of meticulousness, he would often pause on three or four kola nuts before choosing a replacement. After being selected, kola nuts were then placed into clear plastic bags. Kiliyans were often given extra kola nuts in a separate bag. Since kola sellers could subtly reduce the quality of a kilogram of kola, long-term, friendly relations often won out over hard-nosed bargaining in buying kola nuts. As such, rather than bargaining over price, sellers would alter the quality and composition of kola to match the price as well as the relationship they had with their clients.

The migrant kola nut sellers proved to be the cornerstones of a living infrastructure that formed Kédougou’s downtown market. During a time when a regularization campaign forced out and shuffled many other migrants, kola nut sellers managed to remain rooted. Achieving immobility in the market was a survival strategy for individuals who have otherwise been characterized by their mobility. Their success under these conditions could be found in a number of different factors. For instance, kola nut sellers frequently mobilized the ritual significance of their wares by leveraging gifts of kola and alongside them, blessings that materially ratified relationships with others. Repeated exchanges of wares and words could thus constitute a network of reciprocation that cemented their position in the landscape. This was achieved by building client relationships with surrounding market goers, by spreading kola alongside Koranic blessings in order to increase good fortune, and by building a domestic sphere in this area through in-law talk and feasting.

Like Djiby, mentioned previously, kola nut sellers in part managed to bolster their presence in the market by cultivating a domestic sphere and by performing familial relations with others. Most kola sellers were from Guinea and rented rooms in the vicinity of the market, which most returned to only during sleeping hours. However, through the performance of in-law talk and hospitality, this market area itself often became a domestic home where they enjoyed considerable social gravity. For lunch, kola sellers would pool their money and have their female kin and friends cook for them. From their cooking spots deeper in the market, these women could carry half a dozen large, stacked bowls on their heads. All the while maintaining their center of gravity, they nudged their waists around the edges of protruding elbows, stools, and umbrellas. Soon small pods of kola nut sellers and their colleagues would form on the ground to eat, with most sitting in the style of Muhammad, who held one knee up and one folded beneath.

From this position, these migrants could share their meals and invite others in an idiom of hospitality. Having home-cooked meals brought over thus afforded kola nut sellers opportunities for performing a hospitality that was unavailable to those who snuck away to low-cost eateries tucked into corners of the market. As with other analyses of patron-client relationships, the giving of food, particularly as a form of household hospitality, has been a powerful force for ordering social relations in West Africa. The importance of these kinds of family meals is not to be understated. While in other parts of West Africa, restaurants and street food may be more common, most I met in this part of West Africa overwhelmingly preferred eating at home.

Inhabiting a flexible spot built up with shade umbrellas and small seats, kola nut sellers were able to outlast regularization campaigns partly by building places of social gravity where people came together. In the front market, kola nut sellers like Ibrahima, Thierno, and others I had known for a decade had managed to establish themselves as central market players. During the market regularization campaigns that saw most other small-scale traders removed from their tables and stands, only the kola nut sellers managed to initially retain their spots throughout the market. This flexible mobility, along with their trade in a ritually important item,1 were likely factors that contributed to their not being removed in the waves of regularization campaigns in which other “informal” merchants were successively withdrawn by the municipal government.

The Verbal Art of Baiting and Protecting Wealth

For migrants who often traveled far away from their hometowns to accumulate wealth, building relationships and reciprocity with others while also safeguarding one’s resources was a fine balance. Offering hospitality through food, blessings, and kola was a double-edged sword that entailed potential risks as well as benefits. While extending one’s influence through the exchange of names, greetings, and blessings and gifts was at the heart of their success, these same strategies of patronage and reciprocity could render one’s own wealth vulnerable. The art of carefully protecting one’s resources while at the same time building relationships with others required a great deal of interactional shrewdness. For migrants, safeguarding one’s wares and money all while remaining open to opportunity and collaboration was a key to succeeding as a migrant.2 This occurred not only through the building of relationships such as kiliyan, as previously mentioned, but also through a manipulation of the space through linguistic practice—the art of language as infrastructure.

In the market, a kola nut seller’s wares were particularly susceptible to claims. Sellers each sold from their own bag of kola nuts, wrapped in the large leaves of the kola tree. During small outings to take care of other business, other friends or sellers replaced them and took momentary charge of their goods. Sellers generally cut or folded down the giant sack as they sold down their wares. After opening a new bag, sellers spent the first several days peering from behind its towering form. As their wares diminished, their presence slowly came to overshadow the diminishing bag in front of them. Care was taken to ensure that kola nuts always lay flush, spilling over the top level of the bag. However, the largest and choicest kola nuts were displayed prominently on the top surface. With such desirable wares sitting out so openly, kola nuts were often the target of friends on the lookout for a freebie or those seeking alms.

With strong ritual importance, kola nuts were a particularly vulnerable target of alms and charity. Offered to market officials and clients, kola alongside Koranic blessings could provide pathways for cementing a seller’s position in the market. It is in this way that many casual selling spots became destinations that people would be drawn to. Nevertheless, the management of kola required a subtle balance of dispensing and protecting these ritually significant goods. Those seeking alms often announced themselves by repeated calls on their daily trips to the downtown market: “sadaka ngiiri Allah” (alms for the sake of Allah). Like other market customers, alms seekers often headed toward their kola seller kiliyans, but they relied on the exchange of prayers rather than cash. When they received goods like kola, sugar, or coins, alms seekers would say a prayer for their benefactors. On a Friday morning as a kola nut seller and I sat under the shade of his umbrella, an elder strolled by the stand. “A ƴakay?” asked Thierno (You chew?). The elder held out his hand and, as he was walking away, responded, “Mi yahay ka julirde ɗoo, si a yi’ii laŋ a anday” (“I’m headed over here to the mosque, and if you see me you’ll know”), hinting at the prayers that would be coming Thierno’s way.

Sitting in positions of potential vulnerability, kola nut sellers nonetheless benefited from the prayers they received in return for their valuable wares. These forms of linguistic-material exchange not only demonstrate the materiality of language in a palpable way but also exemplify long-standing strategies through which West Africans accumulated wealth by investing in social relations (Berry 1989; Guyer 1995). These examples are understood as the kinds of multifaceted economic practices of Atlantic Africa that Jane Guyer (2004) describes as marginal gains—ways in which individuals translated value across different regimes to create wealth. Drawing on the example of a transport hub in Abidjan, Simone (2004, 410) similarly describes how “regularities thus ensue from a process of incessant convertibility—turning commodities, found objects, resources, and bodies into uses previously unimaginable or constrained.” Not merely different kinds of material and monetary wealth, the market practices I describe show how wealth in the form of people, relationships, blessings, goods, and money were all exchanged and rendered equivalent in trading markets such as Kédougou.

In Senegal and more broadly across West Africa, Islamic prayers provide a liquid form of exchange that could be offered in the immediacy of a quick conversation. Prayers as material word were often given in exchange for good deeds, presents, or support. As such, they provided fluid currency that could be used as part of exchanges in everyday negotiations. Contributions of alms to wandering talibé, who recite the Koran in exchange for coins or food, is another important example (Ware 2014). Considered as a prayer economy, many scholars of West African Islam have explored the role material gifts play in the devotion of members of West African brotherhoods toward their leaders (Soares 2005). Even as kola nut sellers benefited in the clout of prayers offered by well-wishers, I also heard Koranic blessings pass from kola nut sellers to tax collectors in everyday interactions. These exchanges were also significant for kola nut sellers from northern Guinea, speakers of Pular, who had a deep history of Islamic scholarship and piety.

At a broader level, the exchange of wares and cash were potential targets for redirection as they passed from hand to hand. In this market of crisscrossing exchanges, migrants attempted to accumulate and maintain wealth—if even in small increments—while limiting its access to others. These practices provide one aspect of conflicting strategies of what has been called sharing and hoarding, which constitute the precarious nature of managing one’s wealth in West Africa (Shipton 1989). A central aspect of these strategies is described by Parker Shipton (1989, 257) in his work on Gambian saving: “saving strategies are mainly concerned with removing wealth from the form of readily accessible cash, without appearing antisocial.” The market thus provided a setting for elaborated forms of verbal and physical play in which migrants attempted to unearth or divulge each other’s resources. As a verbal strategy, market goers attempted to render their wealth inaccessible through the monitoring and parrying of prying language.

Over the longer term, making wealth inaccessible entailed material transformations, for instance from cash into cement (see chapter 5). In the everyday, this entailed the monitoring and management of one’s speech over the course of conversational routines in which one might be tricked or baited into indexing one’s holdings. Market goers not only protected wealth through measured speech but also baited each other to divulge resources through conversational play. Even money exposed to public trajectories over the course of errands and exchanges was frequently subject to playful but probing attempts at redirection. For instance, upon spying a bit of loose change in the corner of a kola nut sellers’ bamboo chair, a porter nearby announced to others present, “Dee ɗoo ko miŋ jeey?” (This here, is this mine?), in a subtle bid to protect the unclaimed coins.

In Kédougou’s market, it was therefore necessary not only to watch one’s kola and pockets but likewise to monitor one’s speech. In Erving Goffman’s (1967) analysis of face, engaging in communicative interaction entails risk. For the purposes of this context, risk entails the divulging of one’s possessions or positionalities, which might be exploited by one’s interlocutors. In a first instance, the habit of downplaying one’s achievements during casual conversation fits this pattern. Migrants frequently were drawn in conversational routines that endeavored to bait interlocutors to reveal or defend material possessions. Those who knew taboo jammoore nicknames (see chapter 3) would often playfully bait unratified individuals to speak them and then extort money from their victims. Through such routines, interlocutors prompted and parried attempts to reveal the material standing of others, whose success could garner small gifts, tokens, or concessions.

In the context of the Kédougou market, viewing language as infrastructure helps us understand how market traders were able to successfully navigate a shifting market. The encounters from this chapter show language to be not merely a symbolic medium through which information is exchanged at a virtual or ideational level. Instead, linguistic practice brought people into physical contact, providing an interactional resource for influencing space and the trajectories of objects. This spatial and material role of language should be seen as a form of infrastructure that shapes the possibilities of contact and interaction. In this vibrant market, objects were intensely contested in linguistic practice through the conversational tactics of protection and solicitation. For many market goers, the strategic performance of social idioms offered a way to make connections with others in a jumble of action. Words here can be viewed as akin to the walls, doors, and physical structures that mediate the capacity of people to interact with one another.

Phatic Connections through Language

A common strategy of connectivity in the Kédougou market is something that can usefully be called phatic baiting: the act of relying on relational idioms, unavoidable questions, or other hooks to draw others into interaction. Phaticity is a term frequently used in linguistic anthropology to conceptualize the way in which language is used to establish contact between people or channels of communication.3 Many greetings, for instance, aren’t best understood as the exchange of information necessarily but as a way to draw attention to the presence of another.4 Analyses of language have tended to focus on its ability to refer to things—a referentialist language ideology—at the expense of how linguistic practice mediates space and copresence. For instance, literature on joking relationships has attempted to characterize its primary functions as a mediator of positive social relations or, alternatively, as interethnic tension (Canut 2006). However, routines like the joking relationships I examine in chapter 2 were so powerful precisely because they could effectively capture the attention of others and lure them into interaction. More broadly, phatic language in the market setting shows how people draw on linguistic routines to manipulate space and impact the mobilities of others.

Djiby the porter’s attempts to draw the attention of those he positioned as his in-law offer a good example of this kind of tactic. He also commonly drew on joking relationships to bait passersby into his orbit. Lying down in a wheelbarrow between jobs, he would often call out the name of his joking partners to an open market, hoping to bait someone into uptake: “Hee, aŋ ko Ba?” (Hey, are you a Ba?). By calling out this common last name into the crowded market, Djiby was often successful in baiting Bas into a joking relationship based on the correspondence Diallo-Ba. After this initial connection was achieved, it was difficult for those individuals to ignore him.

Not only enabled through language narrowly conceived, Djiby also set up his wheelbarrow between rows of kola nut sellers at the entrance to the front Kédougou market. Those wanting to pass into the depths of the market needed to pass by him on their way through. As such, Djiby’s verbal performances combined with his bodily alignment positioned him to be able to capture social relations in the market. For instance, one morning as Djiby sat at the narrow entrance to an alley, he managed to waylay a young man who was squeezing his way through. Djiby quickly grasped his hand, asking him about his last name: “Ko Diallo kaa?” (It’s Diallo, right?). “Ba,” said the young man softly. Diallo and Ba formed one of the most common joking relationship correspondences that pitted these two against each other.

As the young man awkwardly attempted to distance himself, Djiby continued to play on bodily exchange between joking partners seen to be a source of pollution, exclaiming, “He faut mi sooɗo” (I need to wash my hands now). After these and similar exchanges, Djiby would often ask those he met for a small contribution, “Addii goɗɗuq” (Give me something). Djiby’s use of first pair part questions which beg a response (such as questions, demands, or even claims of joking correspondences) demonstrates an extreme strategy of mobilizing responses from a chaotic market. The placement of his body along the axes of foot traffic to and from boutique shops furthermore demonstrates a future-oriented strategy of eliciting response and participation.

“This Guy Went to Dubai”

Given these tactics of capturing attention and wealth, monitoring others’ impressions of your personal wealth was imperative among West African migrants, particularly those who had made it to places like Europe, North America, and the Middle East. As I discuss in chapter 3, coming back to natal villages or Kédougou often entailed an evaluation of how successful itinerant migrants had been. Theirs was a fine balancing act between performing success while at the same time not giving evidence of deep pockets that could readily purchase gifts for family and friends back home. In the exchange in table 6.1, for instance, a man comes up toward a cluster of porters and kola nut sellers who sit between the road and a bulk goods shop. As a well-dressed man greets the group, a voice soon calls out from the crowd, “This guy went to Dubai!” By invoking this place associated with lucrative commercial opportunities, the shouter marks the well-dressed man as a potential patron. In the transcript on line 6, Djiby the porter bluntly asks the man if he brought back any money. Beginning to respond, “I did,” the man slowly gets sucked into revealing signs of potential wealth and resources. Right after line 8, he remains silent and leaves, no longer able to maintain the conversation without divulging his assets to Djiby’s insistent prodding. Silence and departure offer the man a last-ditch strategy to insulate himself from compromising interactions. Though potentially effective in the moment, this kind of abrupt leave taking also carries the risk of disrespecting others, thereby leading to future interpersonal costs.

Other baiting techniques could be as blunt as “Ko honɗuq adorɗaa laŋ?” (What did you bring me?). This question alludes to neldaari, host gifts that were expected after migrants and travelers returned home. Responses could be disarmingly blunt in return. When a boy once asked an adult friend of mine, “Ko honɗuŋ adorɗaa laŋ” after returning from a trip to Spain, the latter responded with a stock insult: “bottere maa” (your balls). A common insult between young boys, such a response as strong rejection could be successful only across great distances in age or familiar relationships. Another possible response was silence or unintelligible speech. “Diallo, ko honɗuŋ maruɗaa laŋ, ko eq ñaatigi” (Diallo, what did you save for me, we are friends) elicited only a mumbling, unintelligible response. Not responding or tactfully avoiding such a direct question were two strategies for eschewing direct engagement with these solicitations or to conceal having come back empty-handed. These kinds of baiting questions were often posed to migrants returning from abroad. Mining areas, seen as a destinations where one could make money, were also a trigger for similar searching questions.

I was not immune to these kinds of probing solicitations since my appearance gave off obvious signs of connections with places of privilege. Having parked my new motorcycle in the market one afternoon, a market porter came up to me and, after greeting, casually asked for my motorcycle: “okkaŋ moto maa” (give me your motorcycle). Someone less versed in these conversational routines might have been offended by such a solicitation. However, this form of appeal is not reserved only for strangers from away. This ubiquitous practice offers an interactional test of how one’s interlocutor would respond. One of the most effective ways to parry such a request was to name the desired object after the person who requested it in a fleeting naming ceremony. This response powerfully demonstrates the commensurability of things and language as material substance. Such a solution was nevertheless valuable to both parties, constituting a material and relational channel through language that could often lead to future exchanges and opportunities.

This chapter has explored the verbal art of migrants in Kédougou’s downtown market, highlighting the linguistic practices that allowed them to cultivate connections with clients, build relationships with fellow migrants, and bring others into one’s orbit. All of this occurred during a time of social change that was felt most intensely in places like the downtown market. Kola nut sellers proved themselves to be particularly resilient. Rooted in place like the kola trees themselves—which maintained relations with those who planted them regardless of landownership—the kola nut sellers of the Kédougou market defined the space around them through strategic language, blessings, and reciprocity. Performances of hospitality formed the part of broader strategies that allowed migrants to root themselves in the space around them in a time when such informal selling spots were vulnerable. Not merely relational work in an abstract sense, these linguistic practices enabled migrants to shape the very market around them.

Notes

1. 1. Often offered as a gift to open up channels of communication with strangers, kola nuts exemplify the overlaps between physical presents and linguistic exchange. For instance, when I first traveled to Taabe to ask if I could study language practices, I opened with a gift of kola and a statement of my purpose that locals referred to as hunagol laawol (showing the way). As such, kola nuts can be seen as an interpersonal mediator of participation and ratification. Kola nuts are also used as advance wedding gifts to show that a party wishes to pursue serious negotiation and provide an icon of marriage through the two halves of the kola, which fit together seamlessly. Kola have been central to trade between Sahelian and forest parts of Africa for centuries and have thus spurred large-scale patterns of mobility (Curtin 1975; Brooks 1993; Dilley 2004; Gestrich et al. 2021).
2. 2. Using more specific terminology, sociologist Erving Goffman examines how interlocutors must protect what he calls their “face,” or public persona, and understands this to be a central aspect of face-to-face interactions (Goffman 1967).
3. 3. Beyond language as mere reference, phaticity (as contact and channel) is an example of the many possible functions of language as outlined by Roman Jakobson (1960). Roman Jakobson and later Michael Silverstein (1976) were among the first to emphasize this dimension of language beyond mere symbolic reference, a key perspective that this book draws on.
4. 4. Charles H. P. Zuckerman (2016) has pointed out that phaticity need not be only positive and often encompasses negative, or disruptive, qualities.