Migration, Soninke Young Men and the Dynamics of Staying Behind (The Gambia)

The Gambian Soninke are a very diasporic group with a long history of international migration to Africa, Europe and North America. Young men should ideally be the most mobile section of Soninke society, travelling to support their households and to attain socio-economic success. However, they suffer from restrictive visa conditions in the West and other destinations that force them to stay. This condition of immobility causes frustration and threatens their ability to become self-reliant and respectable members of their society. This thesis explores how the young men who stay behind cope with this situation. It tries to go beyond the view of young men’s immobility as a mere absence of geographical (and social) mobility, the by-product of immigration policies in the West and the lack of socio-economic means to emigrate; it instead argues that immobility can be deliberately organized. The Soninke integrate sedentary activities with mobility, creating interdependent relations between movers and ‘stayers’. Thus, although young men remain oriented towards emigration, they have ways of participating in migratory processes other than by travelling. Young men farm and manage the household as a way of complementing and substituting for the absent migrants. Thanks to tightly-knit social networks straddling national borders, some young men are able to find employment, establish partnerships in transnational enterprises and take advantage of remittance-linked activities in Gambia. The thesis explores staying behind as an active process, highlighting young men’s multiple trajectories at home as well as the contradictions and constraints that the collapsing rural economy and the changing migratory dynamics create in their lives.