wife. Physical desire and emotional compatibility figure into marital calculations, yet ideal husbands must be goor jaarin—men who fulfill their marital duties to their wives by providing them with material support (Hannaford and Foley 2015).
The fallout from privatization and structural adjustment reforms in the 1980s has meant the disappearance of jobs in the public sector and the formal economy, including the role of the Senegalese civil servant—once an archetypical goor jaarin. As elsewhere in the region, the decline of the public sector and the apparent “end of salary” (Mbembe and Roitman 1995) have produced disruptions in social life, including the aforementioned delaying of marriage among men. For women, this means a parallel and unwelcome delay despite the continued importance of marriage for women as a means of obtaining social adulthood and financial security. A Wolof proverb states that “a bad husband is better than a good boyfriend,”12 emphasizing the indispensability of marriage. As the Senegalese sociologist Fatou Binetou Dial points out, although “the ideal model of a good husband no longer corresponds to the realities of marriage, … women continue to believe in it” (Dial 2008: 181). For many women, contemporary challenges and the increasing inability of men to fulfill the traditional role as breadwinner has prompted innovation within and outside of the institution of marriage, including through long-distance marriage to migrants.
Though Mariama had been dating another man for more than a year, she had lost hope that he would ever propose; and, at 30 years old, she felt that her window of desirability was closing. When Serigne—a distant relative by marriage and a migrant home on vacation from Italy—proposed to her, she felt compelled to say yes. Though Serigne was many years her senior, of rural origin, and not nearly as flashy or handsome as her Dakar boyfriend, Serigne was offering Mariama something that no other boyfriend had—the social status of wifehood.
Desiring to marry a goor jaarin, a man who can provide, is not in itself a new phenomenon for Senegalese women—yet marrying migrants represents a change in the conception of goor jaarin for Senegalese women and their families (Hannaford and Foley 2015).13 Changing dynamics surrounding migration and class in Senegal facilitate the increased desirability of migrant spouses, overturning other older strictures of social order that once determined these choices. The following examines the way that changing understandings of social class and what constitutes social capital make migrant suitors more desirable—though not necessarily better—spouses.
Class, Courtship, Marriage, and Migration
Bruno Riccio noted a profound ambivalence surrounding the figure of the visiting migrant in Senegal, with the dual perception of the migrant as both a “hero” and a “trickster” (2005). Although not explicitly employing class terms himself, Riccio described a class-based division between returning migrants of rural origin displaying and exaggerating their newfound wealth, and educated, (middle class) non-migrant men with more limited access to cash and consumer goods. Non-migrant men such as Momar and Lamine, who live in middle-class urban neighborhoods and consider themselves above their rural counterparts, accuse these migrants of rural origin—or “modou modou,” as they are commonly called—of ostentatious display. They see modou modous’ vulgar spending and peacocking as a weapon against their feelings of social inadequacy vis-à-vis their more elite and educated urban counterparts.14
What this phenomenon reveals is a complicated rupture in Senegalese understandings of social class. Whereas the urban, educated, and French-speaking15 elite were—and to some extent still are—considered cosmopolitan, Senegal’s contemporary “culture of migration” increases the standing of even the least-educated rural migrant to levels that make urban, educated non-migrants very uncomfortable.
In recent years, modou modou as a category has expanded as more middle-class and educated men turn to migration. Though modou modou was the shorthand for rural-born migrants who do manual labor abroad, the term has widened to encompass a range of different migratory identities and trajectories. With few viable economic opportunities in Senegal, urban, educated men are taking their chances on migration and moving abroad to do the same types of work as uneducated rural men do—including ambulant selling and factory work. Simultaneously, some young rural men with limited education who migrate to Europe and the United States as modou modous are continuing their education, even getting university degrees and moving into professional jobs (see Hannaford 2008). As is the case in many stories of migration, class categories in the host country often do not correspond with class categories in the community of origin.16
The lines between men of rural origin with little education and urban-born men from middle-class families are eroding when it comes to migration. Both aspire to leave Senegal; both have goals of achieving masculine high status by providing for their families, marrying, and establishing a reputation in Senegal as pious, financially successful, and generous men. The term “immigré” is starting to eclipse the term “modou-modou” and its class-bound associations. Both the restaurant owner in Normandy and the key chain vendor in Milan fit into the category of immigré. Consequently, their wives all could be considered “jaabaru immigré,” with the accompanying expectations among non-migrants in Senegal about their access to wealth.
Yet, because so many of Senegal’s migrants still hail from rural regions, important distinctions and class-based divisions do remain, and these significantly impact the experience of transnational marriages between migrants of rural origin and urban women. Fatou Binetou Dial in her study of marriage in Senegal observed that most marriage matches are made in light of class and even neighborhood homogamy; spouses usually have grown up near one another and their families have similar class backgrounds. When a mismatch occurs, it has traditionally been the husband practicing hypogamy, or marrying a woman of a lower class (Dial 2008: 70). Antoine et al. in 1995 also noted that, for generations, Dakar-based women had rarely married men from outside of Dakar (1995: 67). In recent years, however, it has become increasingly common for middle-class, Dakaroise women to marry rural men of lower-class origin when they are overseas migrants (see M. Tall 2002, Riccio 2005).
The perception among many marriageable women and their families is that purely by virtue of being a migrant, a suitor is in a better position to provide for his wife than a non-migrant, regardless of his education or upbringing. Non-migrant middle-class men find it hard to compete on the marriage market and that is a large part of why they, too, are turning to menial labor overseas. Migrants—almost regardless of their rural/urban origin, caste, pre-migratory class status, or actual job/migration status overseas—find themselves in a position to marry Senegalese women who might not even have looked in their direction before they became migrants.
That international migrants expand their opportunities for marriage is in no way a purely Senegalese phenomenon. Other studies in vastly different places have shown this type of hypergamy due to migration; otherwise ineligible spousal candidates become marriageable because of their location in the diaspora.17 Thai’s study of Vietnamese brides and migrant grooms illustrates how a Vietnamese woman might marry an undereducated man or a man from a less respectable family because his location in the diaspora elevates his marriageability (Thai 2005, 2008).18 In both the Vietnamese and the Senegalese cases, women and their families are making new choices about marriage and class due to the pervasive cultural influence of migration.
Senegalese transnational marriages are distinctive from those in Thai’s and other studies of marriage migration, however, because women who marry migrants do not themselves migrate. Wives of migrants acquire status and social personhood through attachment to men who are mobile, rather than through mobility for themselves. This fact underscores two key features of Senegal’s culture of migration. It shows that the imagined topos of the West is so powerfully associated with wealth and power that mere attachment to it through marriage or blood relations imbues status and power, and it shows just how vaguely the Senegalese understand what actually goes on abroad. Status and social personhood can result from association with any Senegalese migrant living
