Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration This volume examines the relationship between hope, mobility, and immo- bility in African migration. Through case studies set within and beyond the continent, it demonstrates that hope offers a unique prism for analyzing the social imaginaries and aspirations which underpin migration in situations of uncertainty, deepening inequality, and delimited access to global circuits of legal mobility. The volume takes departure in a mobility paradox that characterizes con- temporary migration. Whereas people all over the world are exposed to widening sets of meaning of the good life elsewhere, an increasing number of people in the Global South have little or no access to authorized modes of international migration. This book examines how African migrants respond to this situation. Focusing on hope, it explores migrants’ temporal and spa- tial horizons of expectation and possibility and how these horizons link to mobility practices. Such analysis is pertinent as precarious life conditions and increasingly restrictive regimes of mobility characterize the lives of many Africans, while migration continues to constitute important livelihood strategies and to be seen as pathways of improvement. Whereas involuntary immobility is one consequence, another is the emergence and consolidation of new destinations emerging in the Global South. The volume examines this development through empirically grounded and theoretically rich case studies in migrants’ countries of origin, zones of transit, and in new and established destinations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Latin America and China. It thereby offers an original perspective on linkages between migration, hope, and immobility, ranging from migration aspira- tions to return. Nauja Kleist is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Dorte Thorsen is theme leader on gender and qualitative research in the Migrating Out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium, University of Sussex, UK and associate researcher at LPED, Aix Marseille Université–IRD, France. Routledge Studies in Anthropology For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com 24 Magical Consciousness An Anthropological and Neurobiological Approach Susan Greenwood and Erik D. Goodwyn 25 Diagnostic Controversy Cultural Perspectives on Competing Knowledge in Healthcare Edited by Carolyn Smith-Morris 26 Transpacif c Americas Encounters and Engagements Between the Americas and the South Pacif c Edited by Eveline Drr and Philipp Schorch 27 The Anthropology of Postindustrialism Ethnographies of Disconnection Edited by Ismael Vaccaro, Krista Harper and Seth Murray 28 Islam, Standards, and Technoscience In Global Halal Zones Johan Fischer 29 After the Crisis Anthropological thought, neoliberalism and the aftermath James G. Carrier 30 Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration Edited by Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen 31 Work and Livelihoods in Times of Crisis Edited by Susana Narotzky and Victoria Goddard 32 Anthropology and Alterity Edited by Bernhard Leistle 33 Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacif c Islands Edited by Farida Fozdar and Kirsten McGavin Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration Edited by Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Kleist, Nauja, editor. | Thorsen, Dorte, editor. Title: Hope and uncertainty in contemporary African migration / edited by Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, [2017] Identifiers: LCCN 2016017845 | ISBN 9781138961210 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315659916 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Africa—Emigration and immigration—Case studies. | African diaspora—Case studies. | Hope—Case studies. Classification: LCC JV8790 .H67 2017 | DDC 304.8096—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017845 ISBN: 978-1-138-96121-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-65991-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315659916 Typeset in Sabon by ApexCoVantage, LCC Contents Preface vii NAUJA KLEIST AND DORTE THORSEN List of Contributors xi 1 Introduction : Studying Hope and Uncertainty in African Migration 1 NAUJA KLEIST 2 How to Extract Hope from Papers? Classificatory Performances and Social Networking in Cape Verdean Visa Applications 21 HEIKE DROTBOHM 3 Sticking to God: Brokers of Hope in Senegalese Migration to Argentina 40 IDA MARIE VAMMEN 4 Zouglou Music and Youth in Urban Burkina Faso: Displacement and the Social Performance of Hope 58 JESPER BJARNESEN 5 The Lack of Liberty Drove Us There: Spatialized Instantiations of Hope and Contested Diasporan Identity in the Liberian– American Transnational Field (1810–2010) 76 STEPHEN C. LUBKEMANN 6 Prospective Moments, Eternal Salvation: The Production of Hope in Nigerian Pentecostal Churches in China 94 HEIDI ØSTBØ HAUGEN vi Contents 7 Hope and Uncertainty in Senegalese Migration to Spain: Taking Chances on Emigration but not Upon Return 113 MARÍA HERNÁNDEZ-CARRETERO 8 The Migratory Adventure as a Moral Experience 134 SYLVIE BREDELOUP 9 Death of a Gin Salesman: Hope and Despair among Ghanaian Migrants and Deportees Stranded in Niger 154 HANS LUCHT 10 Returning with Nothing but an Empty Bag: Topographies of Social Hope after Deportation to Ghana 173 NAUJA KLEIST Index 193 Preface Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen This book started with a walk. On a warm afternoon in March 2008 Nauja, one of the co-editors of this volume, met Sam. She was heading across the campus of the University of Ghana, when a young man addressed her. ‘Hi, are you from the States?’ ‘No, why?’ Because, Sam explained in a broad American accent, he loved America but was deported a few years ago. What had started as a promising stay had gradually turned into an ill-fated adventure, mainly because he could not regularize his papers. Now Sam was studying business but badly wanted to return to the United States again, always on the alert for possible connections or opportunities to help him realize his dreams. Nauja studied Ghanaian migration policies at the time, but Sam’s story added to her growing puzzlement about the gulf between policy-makers’ ideas about well-managed migration and the sense among ordinary Ghanaians of feeling unable to realize their migratory aspirations. She was intrigued. Meanwhile Dorte, the other co-editor, was doing research with adoles- cent boys from rural Burkina Faso who audaciously set off on migration to neighboring Cte d’Ivoire, sometimes without knowing where they would sleep on arrival and sometimes with insufficient money for the entire fare. They talked about being housed and fed temporarily by strangers and help extended by migrant relatives, but their accounts also dwelled on suffering. The boys were not pioneers but followed in the footsteps of older brothers, fathers, and grandfathers in trying to broaden their opportunities and move out of poverty. Dorte was astounded by her young interlocutors’ disregard of barriers to their migration and how they had to negotiate border control, whether they had the right papers or not. Gradually, our initial curiosity grew into a research program on new geographies of hope and despair in West African migration, developed and conducted with Ida Maria Vammen. We set out to explore the effects of restrictive mobility regimes for West African migration, taking our departure in a contemporary mobility paradox: that images and ideas of the good life, often taking place elsewhere, are circulated all over the globe, while access to legal international mobility circuits is a scarce resource for most people with non-Western citizenship. We then asked what this mobility paradox means viii Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen for hope for West Africans migrants and their families, approaching hope as an analytical perspective that highlights anticipation and the simultaneous potentiality and uncertainty of the future. Finalizing this book, the topic of hope, uncertainty, and migration seems more topical than ever. The emergence of the so-called refugee crisis, with one million people crossing the Mediterranean in 2015, has brought unprec- edented public and political attention to migration. Poignant images have gone viral of the small body of Aylan Kurdi, washed ashore, and of the many men, women, and children on highways walking from the southern and eastern borders of the European Union. Meanwhile, most European states have implemented increasingly restrictive asylum and migration policies.