The Rank Effect: Post-Emancipation Immobility in a Soninke Village

The end of internal slavery in West Africa is generally associated with an increase in labour mobility. This article complicates this picture by showing that the effects of status - the rank effect - on people's ability to migrate often outlasted emancipation. In Sabi, a Soninke village in Upper River Gambia, economic migration intensified and globalised from the 1950s onwards. Although they have since been free to move, the descendants of slaves have migrated less than those of the freeborn. The article attributes this relative immobility to the enduring dynamics of socioeconomic marginalisation based on slave descent.