Chapter 1 Navigating Change in a Rural Borderland

Limping across the Border

My right leg had been aching for kilometers. It wasn’t the kind of pain you get from muscle fatigue. It was the pain of a joint giving out. Not the casual fatigue that slowly crept in after a hard day’s hike, this was an existential exhaustion that fixes your gaze no further than a few inches in front of your feet. Local speakers of Pular (a lingua franca in southeast Senegal) have a word for this form of extreme exhaustion—they call it mboggegol. This word was not infrequently heard in the inaccessible plateaus and mountains of the Fouta Djallon range in southeastern Senegal and northern Guinea. Borderlanders used it describe their long journeys up and down steep inclines to access markets and go to school. We had been navigating these paths from sunup to sundown, and my walking companions and I had grown desperate. But seeing small, thatched goat paddocks next to a cleared path, I knew we could not be far away from the village. We mustn’t be because I couldn’t go any further.

This was the second or third time I had set foot in the village of Taabe, but I had never been more thankful to recognize a place. As I at last glimpsed a few human outlines in the dark path ahead, my right leg collapsed on the rocky earth. A familiar face emerged out of the shadows calling my name, and I have never been happier to see anyone in my life. It was Mamadou Diallo, my friend. Hobbling over to a bamboo platform, I frenetically began to tell the news of our arduous trip across the border. Nervous laughter flowed out from my throbbing body. In the hopes of putting this all behind us through a ritual of deprecatory storytelling, I began to tell him of our ordeal.

I had just walked nonstop from Maliville, Guinea, to Senegal with two former Peace Corps colleagues, Robyn and Steve. Robyn had a later plane to catch in Dakar, and we had hoped to walk from Guinea to Kédougou City by that evening. Given the sporadic public transportation on the border and the enthusiasm of our youth, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Although some trucks with massive ground clearance were able to navigate the roads across the Fouta Djallon mountains, the road from Maliville to Senegal was frequently little more than a muddy track. We set out well before sunrise from the hills of Maliville, hoping to make it across the border to Senegal by nightfall. We had walked what we later estimated to be over sixty kilometers in one day—much greater than the true distance due to our frequent backtracking. However, this wasn’t some heroic feat. We had begun the trek with a group of local merchants who were transporting woven indigo fabrics from Guinea to Senegal on their heads and slung across their sides. Along with them walked a man and his young daughter, a girl no older than eleven or twelve. Although we separated from this group early in the trip, this man and his daughter likely crossed the Senegalese border at Takkopellel by sundown, just as so many before them had done. Although there were Guinean and Senegalese border stations between Maliville and Kédougou, a web of quicker and more efficient routes bypassed these official posts. Without the aid of maps or GPS, these travelers drew on an accumulated knowledge of the terrain to make their way to Senegal.

Confident in our local language skills after two years in Senegal, we thought we could manage on our own. Although we set off with a few other Guinean travelers, we weren’t concerned when we split up. When we were unsure of which path to take, we asked for directions from those we met. In the end, we probably followed every detour, dead end, and cattle path between Maliville and the Senegal-Guinea border. Since we did not know the most efficient route, we relied on guidance along the way from farmers and villagers, whose accommodating directions resoundingly assured us that the next town was “not far,” no matter the distance that remained. Although “not far” often meant many weary kilometers to go, these assertions offered a palliative attempt to accommodate strangers rather than information that should be assessed in terms of its truth value. To this day, I imagine these surprised Guinean farmers telling stories about the time three Americans suddenly turned up in their fields, flustered and confused. One might have called our adventure a survey of some of the loneliest cows in the borderlands. The few liters of water we brought with us were soon consumed, and in the kilometers between habitations, we quickly became thirsty. When we eventually made it to the border, we were dehydrated and on the verge of utter breakdown. Meanwhile, the families we set out with had seemed to navigate the journey with ease, passing from village to village, where they drank water and rested until the next stop.

I remember thinking halfway through our trip that I couldn’t go any further. And then I realized what a body does to continue when it has to. To this day we joke that Steve’s mind slipped halfway through—his talk turned into loopy riddles, and he began quaffing water out of muddy puddles. But maybe I’m not remembering things clearly either. Sometimes I forget if we were just teasing him or if this all really happened. Thinking back now, you might even say that we were possessed by garandaaru, as Didi was said to have been. We soon realized that we needed to keep talking to keep the exhaustion at bay. Chatting together helped us keep our minds sharp and reminded us to remain present in our bodies. Talk was integral to keep us moving.

In this sense, language is not merely something that is layered onto movement and mobility but a constitutive part of them. Jason De León exposes the hardship and mortal danger faced by border crossers on the US southern border who are set up to fail in a context where the desert does the dirty work of broader policies of exclusion and xenophobia (De León 2015). Although my friends and I were crossing the border as part of a trip of exploration, border crossers in the United States must navigate precarious borderlands just to maintain connections with fragmented families. De León’s work shows that linguistic practices of border crossers—the jokes they tell themselves along the way—help them reshape their mobile experiences. They make the best of their journeys by telling each other that they are having a picnic or using humor to rearticulate their experiences (De León 2015, 94). Not only can such linguistic exchanges be thought of as conceptual forms of representation, but in an important sense, they can also materially impact the travelers’ experiences. Words can quite literally help people move ahead; they can reshape the land. More broadly, we talk and sing to each other during periods of work and physical hardship to move ourselves along. It is in this way that language can also be understood as an embodied practice that has real, physical impacts on body and landscape.

On Mobility, Language, and Nature-Culture Boundaries

West Africans traveling in the bush (Pular ladde or buruure) from Senegal to Guinea do not often bring water, food, or other backwoods amenities with them. They don’t need to. Instead, they move from village to village, using islands of human settlement as relay stations as they trek across what outsiders might perceive to be great natural expanses. The most important thing is not necessarily to know the way as an independent traveler but to follow the footsteps and the advice of those who do. In every village that we came across, polite greetings were returned with offers of water and rest. The moment of arrival at a village is therefore significant. Extended greetings often involve the exchange of one’s last names, accounts of one’s destinations or origins, and declarations of one’s intent. “Ko honto wonudaa yahde?” (“Where are you headed?”) we often heard travelers asking one another. Their answers often intertwined people and communities, placing fellow travelers into social frameworks. These greetings—a recognition that you were occupying the same world—were followed by hospitality in the form of food, water, and sharing of news. At moments such as these, West African travelers also fill up on water. Rather than taking small sips, most guzzle a liter of water from giant plastic cups in one fell swoop. I can still taste its earthy minerality—water steeped in large clay jars that remain cool even in the hottest temperatures. Hydrologic systems are not just a function of streams, lakes, and other natural formations. On the journey from Maliville to Taabe, water slowed not merely along depressions in the earth but also along the channels of reciprocal human interaction and exchange.

Although this first story ostensibly happened en brousse—in the so-called wild spaces in between—these transborder travelers employed the same strategies that allowed other migrants to succeed in the more densely inhabited regional hubs, mining villages, and European cities that many mobile West Africans now call home. Rather than a practice of self-sufficiency in a natural environment, movement entails the critical skill of navigating social relationships to leverage one’s mobility across vast spaces. Anthropological perspectives show no untouched nature remaining free from human influence. Nature-culture distinctions instead offer situated perspectives on the world as part of constructed human categories (Descola 2013). There are other ways to divide up the world. To call something a natural disaster is to practice the erasure of systemic social issues that distribute calamity (Cox and Cox 2016). Most of those traveling in West Africa don’t pretend to be self-sufficient travelers who charge through an untouched forest. They instead rely on existing oases of relationality, bootstrapping from place to place as they navigate the social landscape. The work of being mobile is not primarily the capacity to move about but the ability to traverse relationships within a world of others. This is the work of mobility as a verbal art—of creatively inserting yourself into a social scene, making oneself intelligible as a person, and growing out from these pockets of human sociality.

Viewing mobility as social negotiation achieved through the verbal art of self-presentation helps us get away from existing approaches that focus on the movement of things, people, and objects independently of their social situatedness. Attempting to sift out the inherent social from mobility has important consequences for our interdependent societies. While explorers and colonial agents often imagined themselves to be traveling through uncharted, wild places in the New World and across Africa, they were in fact moving through intimately inhabited, social worlds. Rather than building ties with communities along the way, many imagined themselves to be self-sufficient, with only the occasional need for “resupplying” and “restocking.” Their (willful) ignorance of these networks is perhaps reflective of their broader imperial ambitions. Tracking mobility through the verbal art of social negotiation helps us cut to the heart of what mobility is all about.

Introducing the Village of Taabe

Mamadou Diallo, my savior in the village of Taabe at the end of this grueling trip, ultimately became my closest friend during my time in West Africa.1 Although I visited his hometown of Taabe only a few times in my time in the Peace Corps, I came back to this small Senegalese village on the Guinea border for longer stretches during my fieldwork, using it as a base to explore mobility and language practices in the rapidly changing region of Kédougou. By the time I had met him, Mamadou was beginning to develop a reputation as a knowledgeable guide for Spanish and Catalan tourists who occasionally made their way as far inland as Kédougou. His linguistic and professional capacities—the ability to speak to tourists and figure out what they wanted out of a week in West Africa—had enabled his own mobility. He was someone who frequently traveled between coastal Senegal and Kédougou, and through this became known as an important individual who could mobilize people and things.

Our friendship started when I began to give Mamadou English lessons and help him conceptualize his expanding guest lodging in Taabe, a small compound of huts on top of a plateau where he welcomed tourists looking for a rustic experience. When Mamadou later managed to buy a parcel of land just outside the nearby city of Kédougou, we used his new place to hang out during his trips to town. We would sit underneath a small baobab tree on a plastic mat, brewing green tea and chattering away in Pular, English, and French while gazing on a star-filled sky free from light pollution. Years later, this land at the edge of town where we used to find the spent shotgun shells of quail hunters would become a bustling and expanding new neighborhood for the growing families of people like Mamadou.

Mamadou’s hometown of Taabe sits on one of the northernmost mountainous plateaus in the Fouta Djallon mountains along the border between Senegal and Guinea. Mamadou and most others in this area (and into Guinea) considered themselves ethnically Fulɓe Fouta. Inhabiting the first rises in the Fouta Djallon mountain range that spilled over into Guinea, the Fulɓe Fouta here spoke a dialect of Pular that was very similar to the varieties spoken across the border in Middle Guinea, an area that was often held to be the authentic origin of these Pular varieties. Residents here frequently had business with family across the border in Guinea. The hoore fello (on top of the mountain) included Taabe and several linked villages sitting on a plateau in these northern reaches of the Fouta Djallon mountains. Covering an area of approximately fifteen kilometers, these villages were interspersed by fields of mushroom-like termite mounds, low scrubland, and patches of forest. A web of paths was etched into the savanna, many branching off toward small hamlets or fields that were reclaimed from the surrounding vegetation. Taabe’s residents were primarily agriculturalists who grew fonio, peanuts, and corn on the rocky, ferrite-rich soil of the plateau. A prized grain that is often eaten throughout West Africa on special occasions, fonio provided the most important source of revenue for these farmers. Its cultivation necessitates a great deal of coordinated labor and these agriculturalists traditionally relied on support from extensive in-law networks and work parties at critical times of the harvest. As such, mobilizing people and labor was a central concern of Taabe residents in an area where moving around was hard and people had a tendency to leave.

Yet it would be a mistake to view these farmers merely as provincial residents. These same individuals balanced farming with seasonal work in Kédougou City and Dakar, and in mining areas throughout the region. Taabe represented one node in a broader network of places held together by the repeated social and material investments of mobile individuals inhabiting distributed communities. Across these sites, those connected through Taabe could be found mining gold, selling grains or manufactured goods, or laboring in the expanding suburbs of Dakar. Many of the residents of these villages can trace their origins throughout the region and most settled here to escape the same kinds of repressive economic and political conditions that impelled Fulɓe Fouta across Guinea to seek opportunities elsewhere (Fioratta 2020). With Taabe sitting only a few kilometers from the border between Guinea and Senegal, residents also traveled back and forth to the regional capital of Kédougou City. Beginning around my arrival in 2006, the region of Kédougou witnessed accelerating social, economic, and political change at the intersection of infrastructure development, political decentralization, and a mining boom—all compounded by the Ebola epidemic of 2014–16, which threatened Senegal during the period of my field work.

During my time in Taabe, I lived with the family of the village chief, Jom Wuro, who was the younger brother of my friend Mamadou’s father. It was Mamadou’s deceased father, Diao, who had been the village chief before his younger brother. Diao was a remarkable leader who rallied the entire plateau around him. In a place where the machines often came to die, eaten away by dust and overuse, he put an array of technological advances to productive use. His was a creative mind; for example, he was the first to experiment with plowing and food processing technologies in the village. At the same time, he held the mantle of village authority and commanded deep respect across the plateau. When I had the honor of meeting him during one of my first visits, his compound was a dense social node. People from all over the plateau were in attendance, discussing his recent farming innovations and sharing in his artful storytelling.

I found the shards of this great village chief’s personhood in the subsequent generations still present in Taabe. Many young boys in village were named after him and this connection was not merely a symbolic one. To share a connection with a powerful namesake was to inherit a part of this person’s character—an inheritance not only of blood but also of name as linguistic substance. A son of Diao’s younger brother was one of those who carried along his Diao’s name and was often referred to with deference for these reasons. I saw various qualities of the deceased village chief distributed across his three sons, Mamadou, Ibrahima, and Rune, who were generous with their friendship during my time in West Africa. Sometimes I think that each of them was gifted with an aspect of their father’s vitality. Mamadou inherited his father’s long-term vision and seriousness of purpose. Rune embodied his playfulness and his love of life and storytelling, while future-oriented Ibrahima expanded on his father’s ambition through his own economic ventures and ambitious plans to travel abroad.2 The generosity of this extended family immeasurably enriched my life in West Africa.

To walk through the village of Taabe was an act of social navigation. Rather than throughways, the paths winding throughout the village often led from one door of a family compound to another. These traces led to people rather than to places. You had to account for these relational geographies if you wanted to go anywhere. Directions were given in terms of people and habitations as much as street names and landmarks. These paths were not drawn as marks on a map but rather worn into the ground through the overlapping footprints of those seeking out or avoiding one another. As such, one could not simply walk north and east to reach the other half of the village. One had to travel first through the compound of Goro Talla (a respected, yet often lonesome elder who relished long greetings), then through the field of many cashews owned by the Barry family, and finally along a path that led between the homes of Old Man Diallo and his brother’s wife (a place where one was often ambushed for news of the wider world). The choice of which path to take was a decision about which family networks one would encounter on one’s way: people in places and places into people.

In talking about Taabe’s history with its longtime residents, I learned that many saw the past decades as a period of decline. The population had decreased as residents increasingly turned to work outside the village, and recruiting a network of villagers capable of cultivating extensive fields was becoming an increasingly challenging activity. Whereas scores of youths had previously participated in regularly occurring initiation ceremonies, now these rituals only happened every few years, with fewer mentors able to take up the mantle of leading them. Or at least so it seemed in the memories of Taabe elders. As many as five Koranic schools used to be active in Taabe, with now only half as many available. The vitality of the Koranic schools could be gauged by the state of the fire pits around which talibé studied at night. Many still burned bright, while young students recited Koranic verses among the shadows that flickered on massive baobab tree trunks, but some were now dormant and kicked over with sand and dust.

Accounting for Taabe’s population, however, requires understanding matters of time and cyclicality. Taabe had become a new kind of hometown for many who now spent months if not years in other towns trying to make new livelihoods. As in other West Africa contexts, mobility was distributed across a person’s lifetime. Children often grew up in a rural village, experienced mobility in their youth and young adulthood, and then chose to return to their village or build a livelihood elsewhere as they grew older (Jonsson 2012). Tracing social formations across the rural-urban axis has been a preoccupation of many scholars of West Africa for some time (Geschiere and Gugler 1998; Gugler 2002; D. J. Smith 2004). Other anthropologists have discussed how families have negotiated kinship and affinity transnationally (Buggenhagen 2012; 2011b; Yount-André 2018; Fioratta 2015) for whom the hometown became the social arena even while they were abroad (Kane 2011). These incomers—not without some pressure from folks back home—could triple the population of Taabe overnight during holidays, at which times Taabe reclaimed some of its past vitality of legend. As I spent more time there, I learned to look past these narratives of decline. I began to see a nexus of distributed communities, drawn together at different moments by the push and pull of life and held together by the verbal art of maintaining relationships in a state of mobility.

Although most Taabe residents farmed during the rainy season, many also spent significant time outside of the village in order to explore economic or educational opportunities. At times this meant that they would try their luck at jobs away from the village for several seasons, only to return and work the land again for several years. Most men had learned trades and continued to practice them in spaces between Taabe and Kédougou. The village chief, for instance, had worked for many years as a baker in southwestern Mali. Many enterprising women supplemented their farming income by selling grains and other products across the region. Although game was becoming increasingly scarce, some hunted deer and other small mammals in the bush for food. Mouth-puckering bush fruits such as tamarind and laare (Saba senegalensis) also provided side incomes for families, which often meant that intermediaries from the surrounding villages traveled broadly to Kédougou and mining towns to sell products.

Given this social porosity and mobility, how should one conceive of community? Rather than positing the existence of community as bounded or singular, anthropologists have increasingly studied the processes through which communities are conceived of and constituted (Barth 1969; Irvine 2006). Here, the interactional art of managing relationships becomes an important entry point into exploring how increasingly mobile individuals constitute communities across dispersed spaces. Earlier anthropological work often relied on village studies that took them to be representative of larger culture groups. Even further, rural cultures were often held to be the traditional, pristine forms of cultural practice, “unadulterated” by influences from other communities. These ideologies were not entirely foreign to Kédovins (residents of Kédougou), who often contrasted the diverse cultural and linguistic forms of Kédougou City with purer forms in the countryside. Anthropologists have long abandoned these premises, however, and increasingly engage in multisited work that takes transnationalism and mobility to be central to the study of social formations (Amselle 1990). While this book draws from these new approaches, it also shows that there is much to learn from village settings, which must not be ignored merely because older work overemphasized rural contexts. Taabe was hardly a sclerotic site of unchanging traditional practice. This rural place was the site of creative linguistic practice and mobilities. Not only a defining feature of metropolitan and European diasporas, mobility and movement are at the heart of rural life in West Africa as well (Wright 2010).

I soon realized that I had to change my conceptualization of a village like Taabe as a fixed and stable community. Taabe serves as an important cultural touchstone for individuals who anchor their sense of belonging and roots there. During important holidays, marriages, and funerals, these rural homelands attract many individuals who may never have lived there for long and who may not even have been born there. Taabe was a nexus of mobile pathways that required social labor to maintain as a social anchor. It was impossible to count the residents of Taabe with any precision, as each family had several if not a dozen or more family members who were away at any given time, pursuing education or economic opportunities across Senegal, West Africa, and Western Europe. To understand Taabe the village, I needed to understand these broader connections. Often life cycle rituals and holidays offered intense moments of sociality that could multiply the population of the village by two to three times over the course of a couple of days. Negotiating relationships with one’s hometown was thus a part of the art of being a successful migrant.

Although the village appears to be a fixed and secure entity, it in fact requires ongoing social labor to hold it together. This art of bringing people together through linguistic and ritual exchange was often called jokkere enɗaŋ or the pursuit of relations. (I discuss this understanding at greater length in the following chapter.) During my fieldwork, Taabe’s village chief, Jom Wuro, was a master of the art of jokkere enɗaŋ. When he was not farming, Jom Wuro would travel across the plateau area, greeting kin in surrounding villages or checking in with hamlets allied with the village. Much of this took place after the harvest, when he would comb the surrounding area to drum up support for work parties and to maintain a census of the area’s residents. This work of generating social capital for the village was practiced through the verbal art of social negotiation. Expertly switching between keys of teasing, deference, and political debate, the chief labored incessantly against centrifugal forces that threatened to pull Taabe apart. Engaging community members such as in-laws and colleagues through performances of verbal art—greeting, teasing, and storytelling—was a central practice of cultivating social networks. It is through these everyday linguistic practices that increasingly mobile residents of Taabe were continuously cajoled, prodded, and encouraged to maintain relationships with their hometown. At a time of political expansion in the wake of Kédougou’s change from a department to a region, the chief used the bureaucratic methods of statecraft like censuses and birth certificates to inscribe and solidify these connections.

Even in its narrowest configuration as a cluster of dwellings, Taabe as a community defied a constitution based on linear physical boundaries. For instance, in the nearby village of Mariwuro, only six kilometers away from Taabe, lived several family compounds who were in fact part of the village of Taabe. These individuals attended assemblies and counted their names in the registers of Taabe and not Mariwuro. They regularly traveled to Taabe for ritual events and sat out on political discussion in the village of Mariwuro. Similar arrangements can be found in other surrounding villages of the plateau. This might at first seem to be an anomaly. However, this diffusion is a reality that defines West African communities more broadly. This dispersal of families with negotiated links to hometowns is characteristic of what Kopytoff (1987) called the African Frontier. At moments of political division, groups would often splinter off from previous settlements, founding new villages but maintaining overlapping relationships with previous communities. Rather than taking the existence of a singular community for granted, villagers must negotiate how to maintain connections in the context of centrifugal social forces often propelled by increased mobilities.

A Context of Social Change

Mobility has long been a fundamental feature of the deep history of West Africa. Communities spread out along riverine networks and separated by hundreds of kilometers of Sahel were in fact long part of mobile networks that were activated through host-stranger hospitality. These links were rendered possible by the diffusion of relational idioms that were shared across vast areas: “Western Africans opportunistically redefine their identities in response to changing circumstances. Removed, even fictive, kinship ties, special bonds between groups such as ‘joking relationships’ indeed any social or cultural advantages one can claim or contrive have for centuries facilitated human relationships and expedited trade, travel, migration, and settlement in Western Africa” (Brooks 1993, 28). Viewed from such a long durée perspective, these words are as representative of today’s forms of mobility as they are of historic populations. However, the reality faced by borderland Kédovins over the past decades is one of massive social change brought about by a cluster of interrelated political, environmental, and epidemiological factors.

The reassignment of Kédougou from a department to a region generated the first massive shift in the area. This administrative change had significant cascading effects that brought government officials into a place that had previously been at arm’s length from administrative and police oversight. Most significantly, this recategorization increased the ability of the state to count populations and manage how landownership happened. This resulted in a more formalized land market. Chiefs such as Jom Wuro began to feel pressure to formalize census and land registers. Whereas land could previously be claimed and effectively owned after material improvements had been made to it in the tradition of homesteading, the expansion of the administrative oversight slowly impacted the way land was controlled and allotted. It became increasingly zoned, monetized, and managed by bureaucratic institutions like the land management office. Even the land around villages, whose boundaries had previously been unformalized, was increasingly being surveyed and brought into a formal land market. This shift of policy essentially gave more power to those who could accumulate capital and enabled coastal Senegalese or foreigners to buy up land in Kédougou and other larger towns. In many cases there were different prices for locals and nonlocals, which reflected ongoing tensions around autochthony in the region.

The update in status of Kédougou also brought with it the expansion of the police, from a skeleton crew of border guards who only monitored major international crossroads to a comprehensive police force. This increase had significant impacts on mobility. Furthermore, with these two bureaucratic changes came an increased emphasis on ID cards (cartes d’identité) for all residents. Particularly during the COVID pandemic, documents were increasingly used to control the movement of travelers in town and throughout the surrounding areas. This administrative change thus meant that the state was increasingly counting populations and issuing ID cards as a condition for being a state subject. It managed the access to educational opportunities, transportation, and medical services. The issue of ID cards and population census reveals a tension within the flexible forms of social identification that were long commonplace in this borderland region. Whereas routines of verbal arts, such as joking relationships, and the fluidity of naming long meant that West Africans could flexibly adapt the presentation of themselves to others, these new state mechanisms, if only at first glance, appeared to solidify these identities.

Secondly, an unprecedented mining boom fueled by an industrial mine drew in large numbers of artisanal miners to Kédougou.3 They came from across coastal Senegal and from neighboring countries, such as Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria. During the most intense phase, mining towns of tens of thousands of miners appeared in what had been a village of only several hundred. National newspapers I collected at the time often presented Kédougou as a kind of hell on wheels mining town, a place defined by banditry and environmental degradation.

Although mining has been a long-standing practice in West Africa (d’Avignon 2022), the acceleration of industrial mining in Kédougou radically changed the economy, offering opportunities as well as pitfalls for its residents. By the time of my fieldwork in 2014–16, the pace of the mining boom had temporarily slowed down. At this juncture, Macky Sall, who became Senegal’s president in 2012, was instituting a policy of regularization, or formalization, of the mining sector. These policies in many ways attempted to redistribute the wealth generated from mining away from foreign workers and toward Senegalese. This mining economy spurred increased levels of cyclical mobility as residents of Kédougou City made daily trips to surrounding mining towns where they sold food and manufactured goods or got involved in various forms of extraction.

The construction of a major highway that linked Dakar, Kédougou, and Bamako offered a third driver of social and economic change. As a result, Kédougou’s downtown market transformed from a relatively calm setting to a hectic constellation of mobile sellers, loaded lorries, and speeding motorcycles. While there have always been a community of transnational migrants working in the market, this economic boom attracted an even larger migrant population from neighboring West African countries. Some Kédovins viewed this economic boom with ambivalence. Although it bought new opportunities for some Kédovins, many others felt left behind. While painstaking and often dangerous, artisanal mining could bring in previously unheard-of funds and was relatively accessible to individuals of any education level. However, those Kédovins who benefited less from the boom-time economy found themselves with a higher cost of living. Issues of autochthony also crept into the city of Kédougou as many debated whether Kédovins were, in fact, benefiting from the new economy or if only foreigners and other coastal Senegalese were. A 2008 youth riot (soulèvement) that led to the death of a young man and the burning down of a municipal building were motivated by the central issue of whether the benefits of growth were accruing to outsiders rather than locals.

The experiences of individuals caught in these processes offer important glimpses into Kédougou’s waves of change. In what follows, I offer two short snapshots of how people have been navigating these transformations. There were significant differences in what I observed during my time in the Peace Corps from 2006 to 2009 and my return trip for fieldwork from 2014 to 2016 (and indeed in 2024). The first individual who encapsulates many of Kédougou’s changes is a young woman I call Jaja. Jaja was a middle sister in the family who hosted me during my first time in Kédougou City. Having immigrated from Mali many decades ago, the family lived in one of Kédougou’s older neighborhoods. Jaja was a close friend and companion during this time. When I first met her, she was still in school, but soon she dropped out to help cook and care for her extended family, which included several younger dependents, with few adults around. Jaja’s mother was the matriarch of the household, since her father had passed many years ago. Back then, Jaja’s two older brothers were around, but as time went on, they increasingly spent time in other parts of Kédougou or Senegal to pursue economic opportunities. Jaja was an exceptional hair braider and spent many long evenings transforming her female peers’s coiffures for holidays and parties.

As time went by, their family’s changes could be partly interpreted through the architecture of their compound. Mud and thatched huts began to give way to concrete and tin roofing—renovations begun but never completed. A woven bamboo fence—one that fell on my head when I was sick and using the outdoor restroom in the middle of a storm—was replaced with a solid concrete wall decorated with shells. After I left, one brother made it to the United States when he married a Peace Corps volunteer and began working in the northern Pacific deep sea fishing industry. From there, he was able to finance occasional house improvements. Meanwhile, the eldest brother began to focus more on the mining areas, where he mobilized labor and financing to try his luck in the gold boom.4 In a familial situation where economic opportunities abroad and in mining camps drew away most of the men, Jaja and her sisters found themselves increasingly in charge of the compound. The burden fell especially hard on Jaja and her sisters after mother passed, precluding other opportunities for them. Jaja had long dreamed of studying hair braiding more formally and potentially pursuing it as an entrepreneurial endeavor in Dakar or, even more lucratively, in the United States. Now, however, she was caring for her young son and found herself rooted in place by family responsibilities.

Jaja and her sisters managed the best they could to make money for daily expenses within these new opportunities and challenges. They bought refrigerators and made large ice cubes that they sent on trucks to the mining areas. They sold watermelons (a fruit that is native to Africa) at the market, leveraging their brothers’ fish selling spots. Before big festivities like Tabaski, Jaja bought fine cloth or shoes and used her expansive social network to tempt people into new outfits, often until three o’clock in the morning. I sometimes followed her on frenetic, ambulatory trips through the market, where she sold fabric on credit. In one breath, she would leverage her social ties with people to sell them cloth and in another try to coax money owed to her from former clients. She traveled to some of the nearby mining concessions, where she set up a small food stand and sold lunches and snacks to miners. It was her skills as a hair braider that exemplified the tensions within a place where more and more facets of social life were being monetized like land, labor, and building materials. Jaja’s hours-long braiding sessions were often done in kind or for small amounts of money. Yet, increasingly, this work was becoming part of the market economy and could be extremely lucrative, especially abroad (Babou 2008). With prices for basic goods increasing along with demand, Jaja and her sisters did their best to make money during the mining boom, riding its ups and downs. When I visited during my anthropological fieldwork, Jaja often sat at the edge of the road across from their house, yelling quick staccato directions to household members while strands of hair were intertwined with her slender fingers. From underneath their neem tree, Jaja and her sister recognized and interpreted people from a distance through their hairstyles and hair textures.

The struggles of a young tailor’s apprentice offer a second snapshot of Kedougou’s changing social and economic landscape. When I met him in 2006, Samba was learning to sew local outfits in a downtown workshop. At that time, Kédougou’s market was still a sleepy place where many men gathered to play pétanque or boule every day over the course of many hours; however, by 2014, these courts had been taken over by a cluttered grid of food stalls, temporary merchants, and motorcycle parking. When I saw him again that year, Samba had given up being a tailor. As many like him had, Samba had tried his hand at gold mining. With his first modest success, he had invested in a metal detector that someone from Dakar had sold to him. Yet Samba couldn’t read the instructions on the machine, so he experimented with the buttons as best he could to comb over the mining sites in the outskirts of Kédougou City. He preferred this pic-à-pel method of mining to the more dangerous shaft mining that required machinery and risk. In pic-à-pel, individuals pick through previously excavated areas to find the remaining gold left over from earlier excavations. Working as a metal detector operator, Samba received one-third of every discovery he made, with the other two-thirds reserved for the diggers. His family had a compound on the quickly expanding edges of Kédougou. While they had managed to build a nice cement house with a wall around it, they still were in an area with no running water and no electricity. The city had grown too quickly for the utilities to catch up. Taking the electric grid into his own hands as so many others had, he began investing in solar panels. With some of the money that they had made, Samba’s father had been able to go on hajj to Mecca, which was a great honor. Despite some modest successes, Samba expressed increasing disillusionment with the opportunities that the gold mining boom had to offer. What good was having more money when everything simply became more expensive?

These short vignettes demonstrate some of the shared experiences Kédovins were navigating in a time of heightened social and economic change. While new developments were enabling mobilities and economic opportunities, the Ebola epidemic from 2014 to 2016 rendered this mobility increasingly problematic. Most significantly, the Senegal-Guinea border was closed for a majority of the Ebola epidemic to isolate Senegal from contagion. This rendered cross-border travel illegal, despite the continuing and necessary movement in trade and persons. Taabe for instance, maintained close relationships with communities in Guinea that were only a few kilometers away.

Given these increased opportunities and disjunctures, how would a village like Taabe continue to be a place? How would Jaja maintain her household whose members were now spread out over thousands of miles? How would people maintain connections across communities to take advantage of these new opportunities? I suggest that viewing language as a constitutive element of mobility helps us answer these questions and similar ones about how individuals navigated these changing contexts in southeastern Senegal. In the next chapter, I examine long-standing sociolinguistic practices—idioms that draw on joking relationships, affinity, and namesake connections—that have offered migrants a set of tools for mobility that aid them in navigating significant political, economic, and environmental changes.

Notes

1. 1. Taabe, like all other personal names and place names in this book (with the exception of large cities like Kédougou) are aliases to protect the identities of individuals.
2. 2. Personhood in much of West Africa is interpreted through a range of relationships and mediums. Anthropologists have historically focused on important kinship relationships and responsibilities (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950), wherein individuals often traced their place in relation to others; this often was more important than individual achievements. In the case of Fulɓe, corporate belonging was often traced through (often patrilineal) lineages or relatedly, caste groups (e.g., blacksmith, noble, or potter) (Derman 1969). In praising a person, for instance, griot (casted oral historians and musicians) often connected individuals to the achievements of those in their lineage rather than noting their own accomplishments (Irvine 1973). Names also provided an important dimension through which personhood was articulated: last names (patronyms) linked people to lineages through the men in their family (i.e., patrilineal ties), but first names could pass on character traits through the generations. Likewise, people often held that personal traits (jikko) were largely inherited through women. Whereas concepts like sense of humor can be used in the West to describe a person’s personality traits, these were often distributed to social groups in Sahelian West Africa (Sweet 2019). For instance, certain Fulɓe lineages were held to be easily offended, which demonstrates the inherited nature of these supposed personality traits.
3. 3. While I use the terms industrial and artisanal here to illustrate distinct parties within the regional mining economy that were also locally legible, Robyn d’Avignon (2018; 2022) has argued that “artisanal mining” is a racialized category. The two types of mining are intertwined in that “industrial” mining is possible only through exploiting long-standing “artisanal” mining knowledge across West Africa.
4. 4. The eldest brother once found me at the compound, where he feverishly asked me for something from the United States to be a part of a sacrifice prescribed by a local Koranic cleric. Combined with ritual objects, practitioners could perform ritual language to initiate exchanges with the subterranean entities that controlled the gold. These practices of exchange and sacrifice form part of long-standing mining practices in West Africa’s auriferous regions (d’Avignon 2022).