and pasts of journeying Songhay traders from Niger).48 These notions are being updated and transformed in present contexts, such as the recent resurgence and new significations of the term “bush-falling” to describe Cameroonian migration to Europe.49
Islamic religious commitments shape the adventures examined in this book. They provide a moral template for how to act in foreign and fraught situations: Lassana’s father guided him to use the Qur’an to “find the pathway” through Islam while abroad, in order to avoid trouble that could disrupt his voyage. It was thought that going to Qur’anic school was the best training for succeeding abroad because it provided moral discipline. Amadou and Jal referred to the importance of “din” (religion, from the Arabic) in helping them stay on the right path in France. Seeking knowledge and (self-) discovery through travel is based on Islamic traditions, whether in pilgrimage to Mecca and other sites of religious learning, such as Timbuktu, or in voyages to the non-Islamic world, as the writings of the great fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta testify.50
Colonial rule did not introduce mobility, but it would transform the pathways of many adventurers as they became wage laborers.51 Many Soninke continued their mobile traditions by seeking work across the French empire. They took grueling jobs cultivating crops in Senegal or working on the docks in Marseille not because they were forced to by the real burden of French colonial taxes or because they were desperate and disenfranchised, lacking land or wealth and seeking to escape. Rather, as historian François Manchuelle illustrates, migrants were often village nobles who left with the goal of strengthening traditional authority and their own status.52 Voyages have long conferred prestige to migrants.53 There is a saying that I heard several versions of in Soninke and Bamanakan that reflects this notion: “If he who has visited 100 places meets he who has lived 100 years, they will be able to discuss.” In other words, knowledge gained through travel abroad can disrupt a rigid hierarchy based on age, allowing a younger man to exchange and converse at the same level as his elder.54
The adventure has further transformed as structural readjustment policies implemented in the 1980s led to diminished buying power and stagnated social mobility across most of the continent.55 In rural Senegal and Mali, droughts of the 1970s and 1980s compounded the precariousness of rural communities. Transnational migrants sending remittances became “national heroes,” as anthropologist Caroline Melly puts it, taking the place of the diminished state to provide new possibilities for rural communities to survive.56 In addition to house-building, contributing to diaspora village associations to build mosques, schools, and infrastructure such as water towers and electricity in a display of what Daniel Smith calls “conspicuous redistribution” became a mark of having “become somebody” as an adventurer.57
The notion of migration as adventure and the personhood of the adventurer as an alternative to the abject refugee or the subjugated wage laborer offers a compelling counternarrative to state policies aimed at controlling and defining migration and migrants. Migration, in this tradition, is not a problem to be solved but a mechanism for social and economic reproduction; it is not only a choice made to combat poverty or dire circumstances, but a pathway toward social becoming.58 As much as it has changed over time, the notion of adventure serves as a hermeneutic, guide, and moral beacon for West Africans abroad, a lighthouse that they seek in times of trouble.59 From the perspective of adventure, migrants are embedded in a social system in which confronting risk through the migratory journey helps—not hinders—their transition to adulthood. From the perspective of adventure, migrants are not seeking settlement, citizenship, and dependence but rather the conditions of possibility for continued mobility and exploration.
LASSANA’S PATH
Lassana was fourteen when he began making plans to leave his home. The following year, unbeknownst to his family, he jumped onto a truck and went from village to village doing odd jobs until he made his way to Bamako, the Malian capital. His father sent his brother to get Lassana to return. Instead, Lassana refused, saved up more money, and left for Côte d’Ivoire. This dramatic and secretive escape from the clutches of parental and elder sibling authority, as he tells the story, set the stage for his ensuing adventure across West Africa and into France.
He had grown up in a village I will call Yillekunda, ten kilometers from the town of Diema in the region of Kayes, the largest sending region of Malian immigrants to France. He grew up in a multiethnic and multilinguistic environment dominated by Soninke speakers. The village depended on millet and other grain harvests from collectively owned agricultural land as well as on remittances from migrants abroad, and it had experienced severe droughts in the 1970s and 1980s. As in other parts of the Senegal River Valley, his village was plagued by a lack of access to water for irrigation, as well as a lack of state presence and infrastructure.60
Lassana’s family was part of the ruling elite in a village divided between “nobles” and those in professional castes (such as blacksmiths).61 He was the first son of his father’s second wife and had three older step-brothers (the children of his father’s first wife). Lassana’s position within his family would have several consequences for the trajectory his life took. As the son of a second wife, he had to do the bidding of his half-brothers and accept the beatings he got from them without complaint. His mother died when he was ten years old and his older sister left to marry a Malian living in France, leaving him and his younger brother alone to fend for themselves against them. There was a public school with instruction in French located near his village, but like most of his brothers who would be leaving on adventure, Lassana attended Qur’anic school. Qur’anic school, according to his father, would prepare them for a difficult and disciplined life on the road and help them to stay on the right path of Islam while abroad.
Lassana’s departure on the truck signified his leaving of the world of lineage and his entrée into the liminal world of adventure. Far from being outside the bounds of kin reciprocity, however, he relied on help and finance from family members while on the road. Once successful, he would have to help kin with their migratory projects. Leaving has become an expensive business, entailing high fees for identification documents, visas, and travel tickets or large sums paid to traffickers. While some families may save money to help fund migration, it is often kin abroad who have the capital to help their family members depart.
To get out of West Africa, Lassana needed a national ID card, for which he would have to pretend to be over eighteen. Bamako, he intimated, was not distant enough to be part of a “true adventure,” and he knew he had to move on or risk being sent back to his family. He worked odd jobs for Soninke cousins until he had enough to go to Abidjan. Lassana stayed in Côte d’Ivoire, moving to Daloa, a center of the cacao trade, until he saved enough money to get a passport and apply for a merchant visa that would grant him a temporary stay in France. He had proved himself on the road, and when he was eighteen, he got his father’s blessing for the trip to France. He returned to Bamako to get his papers in order.
His father, who had ventured as far as neighboring Senegal, visited him there and taught him the secret rituals he had to practice once in Europe to avoid misfortune. His older sister in France sent him a plane ticket. He did not go back to Yillekunda before he left for Europe. Returning home would have been anathema when his adventure had barely begun. In 2001, he boarded an Air France flight with a three-month visa, imagining that he would stay for two or three years and then move on or return to Mali. He would not leave France for almost a decade.
MAP 1. The West African home region of many adventurers at the station, showing the route Lassana took from Yillekunda to Abidjan before coming to France. Thomas Massin.
Tunga te danbe don, nga a be den nyuman don: this is the Bamanakan (Bambara) proverb of the adventure, which anthropologist Bruce Whitehouse argues is key to understanding West African migrants and which he translates as: Exile knows no
