Political Repression,Refugee Crises and Labor Migration from Post-Colonial Mali

Abstract

This article zooms in on the ways in which forced migration articulates with labor migration in urban West Africa. Precisely, it reflects on how the refugee crisis contributes to labor migration and, inversely, how labor migration is used as a strategy to respond to the predicament induced by the adverse and often deeply humiliating living conditions of exile. To this end, we situate the article within broader scholarly debates on migration categories. We use the notion “exile” to refer to the social conditions induced by political persecution-related relocations from Mali to Niger and Senegal. Our discussion draws on data collected from freeborn Tuareg from Mali in Niamey and former Malian students who fled the dictatorship of Moussa Traoré. The results prompt a reflection that prioritizes the empirical connections between forced and labor migrations over their differences, something that is often taken for granted in the academic literature and in political narratives.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, critical perspectives in migration studies have successfully reflected on how forced migration induced by inter-ethnic warscapes and state politically induced persecution have shaped labor migration in urban Africa (Lubkemann, 2008; Malkki, 1995; Sommers, 2001). Liisa Malkki’s seminal work on Hutu refugees from Burundi pioneered this trend in Africanist anthropology of forced migration (Malkki, 1995). Her study addresses two groups of Hutu refugees from Burundi in two locations in Tanzania. One group lived in the refugee camp of Mishamo in rural Tanzania. The other was composed of the self-settled forced Hutu migrants in Kigoma, urban Tanzania. As her study illustrates, while the Hutu living in Mishamo relied on humanitarian aids for survival, those settled in urban Kigoma (outside the camp) sought daily jobs to sustain themselves in response to the predicament of exile. Like Malkki, Marc Sommers’s work tells the story of Burundian youth who moved from remote camps such as that of Mishamo in rural central Tanzania to work in the capital city, Dar es Salaam (Sommers, 2001). According to Sommers, these youth moved out of Mishamo in search of work in urban Tanzania to send remittances to their parents left behind in poor living conditions in refugee camps.

Though Malkki’s and Sommers’s studies highlight how the refugee crisis informs labor migration in urban Tanzania, the authors do not draw the methodological and theoretical implications of their accounts for the study of migration categories. In this regard, Stephen does a great job by proposing a methodological framework with theoretical implications (Lubkemann, 2008). Lubkemann’s study examines the living conditions of Mozambican refugees in Zimbabwe who relocated to South Africa as labor migrants to support their parents left behind as internally displaced in Mozambique. To understand how labor migration and the refugee crisis articulate with each other empirically, Lubkemann suggests that scholars should focus on the biographies of labor migrants. For him, empirical and analytical attention to life stories of the migrants, allows us to understand labor migration as empirically entangled with the refugee crisis in Africa. For instance, in his research context, this focus allows us to understand why Mozambican refugees moved from Zimbabwe to South Africa. As a result, he proposes to view forced migration as “a social condition” which includes labor migration as a coping strategy (Lubkemann, 2008: introduction). Conceptualizing forced migration as a social condition in this way, Diallo (2018), drawing on Lubkemann (2008), suggests, to view exile as a social context in which refugee actors live simultaneously across spaces: their ordinary sites of living before exile, their social and political contexts in exile, and to where they return after exile (Diallo, 2018: 185).

Amanda Hammar’s contribution extends Lubkemann’s argument (Hammar, 2014). To understand how the refugee crisis informs the labor migration, she proposes to focus the analysis on the economic life of the forced migrants. For her, this permits scholars to better understand the paradoxes of creativity in the context of forced relocations. Taken together, this conceptual debate on the migration categories is reminiscent of broader trends in migration studies in postcolonial Asia and Europe (Samaddar, 1999; Van Hear, 2011). Ranabir Samaddar (Samaddar, 1999) argues that even migration considered as labor or economic migration is, in many respects, structural condition-driven involuntary mobilities. To capture this entanglement, Nicolas Van Hear (2011) proposes the concept of “mixed migration” and argues that the motivations for and flows of migration are usually mixed and the underlying causes for forced and voluntary migrations are the same or related. However, we argue that the notion of “mixed migration” risks maintaining the problem it attempts to address as it reproduces the distinction between labor migration and forced migration. Taken together, these critical perspectives characteristically depart from studies that strongly emphasize a sharp distinction between forced migration and labor migration, thereby failing to address how these are empirically related and inform each other (Agier, 2008; Blavo, 1999; Cohen and Deng, 1998).

This article draws influence from Malkki’s, Sommers’s, Lubkemann’s and Hammar’s studies that place migration back into the flow of social history by working at the multiple ends of displacement stream. This analytical framework prioritizes empirical processes by which forced migration is constitutive of labor migration, and inversely labor migration is entangled in forced migration. To this end, we examine two processes that are result of postcolonial state-orchestrated violence in Mali (Mann and Lecocq, 2003; Raineri, 2019). What the two cases have in common is that the individuals in both contexts forcefully left Mali as refugees in response to the state-induced violence. To alleviate and mitigate the predicament of the social conditions of exile, they all became labor migrants in the West African diaspora. One of the cases deals with the life trajectories of freeborn Tuareg from Mali in Niamey. The other addresses the students who fled Mali to Senegal in the late 1970s. Our aim is to cast light on how these forced migrants adopted urban labor migration as coping strategy under adverse and often deeply humiliating living conditions of exile. Our argument proceeds as follows. Firstly, we will sketch the history of these migrations within West Africa. Secondly, we introduce the life stories of some migrants and reflect on the interaction between forced migration and labor migration in West Africa. Our empirical focus is on men. One reason for this focus is that the students from Mali who relocated to Senegal in the late 1970s were all men. The second reason is that the Tuareg men from Mali in Niger had to work as labor migrants to provide for their families. Their wives are housewives. By focusing on these groups of men, the article can be read as a gender study with a focus on men and not on women (Sommers, 2001). However, the aim of the article is not to make an explicit argument on gender. Rather, our aim is to contribute to the debates on the migration categories central to this special issue.

The article draws on data collected between 2012 and 2022 by two scholars working in two contexts in West Africa. One author works on Tuareg refugees in Niamey. The other works on former Malian students in Dakar and Bamako. Fieldwork methods in Niamey (25 months in total) consisted of participant observation, narrative interviews, and focus group discussions. The narrative interviews and focus group discussions were conducted in Tamasheq, French, and occasionally in Bamanankan with Tuareg who have served in the Malian army or as school teachers in Mali prior to their migration to Niamey. The research stays in Niger were built on previous fieldwork carried out between 2007 and 2011 in Djecbok (Gao), Kidal town, Essuq, and Adiel hoc in the region of Kidal (10 months in total). Fieldwork in Dakar and Bamako (24 months in total) consisted of narrative interviews and focus group discussions with former migrants in Senegal who returned to Mali after the downfall of Moussa Traoré in March 1991. The methodological focus on the biographies of forced migrants is informed by Lubkemann (2008).

Historical sketch of Tuareg migration from Mali to Niamey and the forced emigration of Malian students to Senegal under Moussa Traore

The capital of the Republic of Niger, Niamey, is a useful site to examine how the effect of the state-orchestrated violence is constitutive of Tuareg forced and labor migration in West Africa. ¹ Niamey has always been an important destination for thousands of Tuareg refugees fleeing hunger, political persecution, and recurrent ethnic conflicts as well as rebellions in northern Mali (Boilley, 1999; Bonnecase, 2010a, 2010b). Originally, these Tuareg inhabited the northern regions of Mali (Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal). They fled to Niamey between 1963 and 2022. While some arrived in Niger between 1963 and 1968 due to the Tuareg’s first rebellion against the Malian state in 1963–1964, others fled Mali due to the well-known devastating droughts in 1973–1974 and 1983–1984, and the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s and later since 2012. They live interspersed with non-refugee residents in urban Niamey. Some work as guards in private domiciles and others as drivers or local experts for transnational NGOs. ² Since 2012, those who arrived already in the 1960s and subsequent decades, created jointly with Songhay refugees from Gao, on their own initiative, a structure known as the commission de crise in French. The committee works since 2012 in the following manner: the freeborn Tuareg members of the committee are in charge of identifying and recording their fellow freeborn Tuareg in Niamey. In their part, the Songhay members of the committee deal with Songhay, Bellah-Iklan slaves, and Fulani. Since its creation, the main task of this committee has been to persuade NGOs of the urgent need for humanitarian assistance for several displaced groups in urban settings. Whenever the committee receives donations for its members, it immediately sets the dates for distributions. ³ The distributions take place in the courtyard of the former Mali consulate in the neighborhood of Koira Kano.

As for the students who fled Moussa Traoré’s regime, their migration started mainly from the era of the strikes in the late 1970s. Thus, between 1977 and 1981, Mali went through a series of violent student demonstrations that quickly marked a decisive turning point in the country’s history. The reasons for these protests dated back to a series of measures adopted by the government to reform the sector of education. One of these measures is well known as the Palme-Belloncle reform of education (named after the two UNESCO experts mandated for the reform). This reform took place in a context of structural adjustment which had affected the state’s capacity to deliver several basic services (Ferguson, 2006). As a result, the Malian state took a series of unpopular measures among them, including the introduction of an exam to access higher education.

This measure was the most controversial one. It sought to limit the number of students accessing higher education. To this end, the Malian state proceeded to limit the flow of baccalaureate holders. This limitation of entry flows to higher education also implied a reduction in the number of study grants to be awarded to students. Accordingly, the state introduced an exam to enter the higher education, which the students opposed at the cost of generalized bloody repression. These reforms, suggested by French experts hired by the Malian government, sought to reduce public spending in accordance with the measures of structural adjustment programs (SAPs).

For instance, in an interview, one former student leader, renamed here T.D. put forward that

The government of the military regime through General Sékou LY (Minister of National Education at the time) decided to introduce an exam to become a civil servant. He also announced the abolition of the common core in secondary school and the exam to access the higher education. . .

These decisions prompted the students to organize themselves to deal with reforms which they saw as compromising the future of several generations. These reforms envisioned several key actions to be taken in the education and public service sectors. Until the student protests of 1977, access to the civil service was opened without an exam to all higher education graduates. To meet the requirements of the SAP, the Malian state had to reduce costs, a large part of which was intended for the emoluments of civil servants. A World Bank report drew the attention of the Malian public authorities to the fragile state of the country’s economy and the need to adopt the structural adjustment policies under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The implementation of these reforms produced more social unrest than it resolved. Despite the tense situation, the Malian government maintained its position on the exam to the civil service.

As the protests gained ground, the situation hardened, and the regime proceeded to the forced incorporation of some students into the army and the closure of schools. Another controversial point was the exclusion of all school girls who became pregnant. This exclusion deprived girls from continuing their education even after giving birth. The “girl-mothers” which was the term used to designate students with children, who were systematically expelled from schools. This regulation, inherited from the French system, requires pregnant secondary school students to leave schools, with no hope of reintegrating them later at the same level. Excluded from school due to pregnancy, most girls entered early marriages. Furthermore, the students requested an end to the exclusion of a significant proportion of students from obtaining the baccalaureate. As a result, many student leaders had been arrested in Bamako, but several of them also managed to flee the capital to find a refuge in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast.

As we shall see below, the life trajectories of freeborn Tuareg refugees from Mali in Niamey and of Malian students who fled Moussa Traoré’s regime to Senegal in the late 1970s, offer useful ethnographic sites to explore how the refugee crisis informs labor migration in urban West Africa. What this article refers to as freeborn Tuareg consist of non-noble and noble freeborn Tuareg. They stand, respectively, in the middle and at the top of a hierarchically ordered Tuareg society above the Bellah-Iklan social status group perceived to be of inferior status that includes Tuareg former slaves and their descendants. (cf. Boilley, 1999; Bourgeot, 1990; Grémont, 2010; Hureiki, 2003; Klute, 1992a, 1992b, 2003; Lecocq, 2005, 2010a, 2010b). In contrast to the Bellah-Iklan, conceived as racially black, and of unfree birth (Hall, 2011a, 2011b; Lecocq, 2005), both noble and non-noble Tuareg groups are perceived racially as “white” or “red,” and of free birth. Ideally, while freeborn men occupied themselves with pastoral affairs, trade, religion, warfare, the Bellah-Iklan, considered as unable to understand religious duties, performed domestic work and herding for their masters (Berge, 2000; Lecocq, 2005: 55).

Scholarly accounts concerned with freeborn Tuareg status groups whose former nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyle has been irreversibly altered over the course of the 20th century, examine how the recurrent periods of conflict, drought, and famine in the last half century have induced exile, and how the persecution or simple neglect of northern populations by the Malian central state has affected freeborn Tuareg self-understandings (Ag Litny, 1992; Boilley, 1999; Bouman, 2010; Diallo, 2018; Hall, 2005; Hawad, 1990; Klute, 2013; Lecoqcq, 2002; Lecocq, 2004; Lecocq, 2010). Though existing scholarship documents narratives and musical performances in which Malian Tuareg refugees reflect on their decades-long experiences of displacement, politically induced hunger, persecution, and (temporary) return, little has been said on the implications of their forced migration for labor migration in urban West Africa

Similarly, little has been said on how the forceful migration of Malian students under Moussa Traoré’s regime has been constituting of labor migration in West Africa. These students were members of the student union (l’Union Nationale des Elèves et Etudiants du Mali, UNEEM), who opposed Moussa Traoré’s military regime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These former students also became key actors in the democracy movement that led to the downfall of Moussa Traoré in March 1991.

The coping strategies of the UNEEM leaders in Dakar and the Tuareg in Niamey

When it comes to their strategies to overcome the predicament of exile, the forced migrants took up various jobs in Niamey and Dakar. Talking about Senegal, T.D., stated:

I know comrades who have become teachers in Niger and Côte d’Ivoire. With their Baccalaureate, they did short training courses and became teachers, especially these teachers were attractive on the job market in the sub-region of West Africa.

According to T.D., while some were lucky to become teachers, other unlucky, had to sustain themselves by taking up menial jobs such as dock workers at the port of Dakar. T.D. was among those who did not have a fixed job. He moved from one temporary menial job to another. A.T.D. who was a central figure of the student union, wrote letters for Malians living in Senegal who could not write letters by themselves. He received small amounts of cash from those whose letters he wrote. He lived from these earnings. The letters were to be sent to relatives in France and in Bamako. A.D. became a menial worker at the port of Dakar. D.K. worked in a library in Dakar.

In contrast to the students exiled in Dakar who did not receive donations from humanitarian organizations in Senegal, the Tuareg settled in Niamey did receive some supports from NGOs. However, most of the town Tuareg refugees in Niamey could not sustain their families with food received from these donations and low-paid jobs such as security guards in private domicile in urban Niamey where recent global economic processes affected domestic relations (Youngstedt, 2013). For instance, the SAPs launched in the midst of the 1980s had terrible consequences on Nigériens in general and on Niamey’s inhabitants in particular: characteristically, skyrocketing prices for Western biomedical pharmaceuticals and hospital admissions and the elimination of scholarships and increased school fees (Youngstedt, 2013: 43). This resulted in frequent school closures over the years, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and a higher unemployment rate.

Moreover, present-day marriage predicaments, typical for inhabitants of Niamey, are a result of these broader social developments. Many young men, frustrated by their inability to secure the funds necessary to get married, are forced to postpone marriage, the step that grants them adult status as husbands until their late twenties and thirties. This stemmed from the inflated costs of—particularly staple—food, which has caused a decline in the standard of living and in spending power (Youngstedt, 2013: 43–45). Domestic relations for freeborn Tuareg have also been reshaped by these changes. The Tuareg male informants portrayed themselves as those whose living conditions had turned them into a “life of nothing” adinat n bànan or aytedim. ⁴ To them, their economic situation undermines their capacity to respond to expectations placed on them as husbands and fathers over the recent years. As a consequence, fathers have lost control over their family members (Diallo, 2018: chapter 4).

Though these Tuareg refugees live currently in Niamey, this place has not been the first destination for all of them. While it is the first destination for few, it is the second for some, and the third for many others. The life trajectories of Mossa ag Attaher, Mohamed ag Irgimit, Mohamed ag Ibrahim, and Alhabib ag Sidia illustrate well these variations. Mossa, a quiet and relatively tall free ellellu (non-noble) Tuareg man, was born in 1961 in Gossi, near Gao town, Mossa arrived in Niamey as a refugee for the first time in 1973 at the age of 12. During that time, he had fled with his parents to Niger because the drought had devastated their entire livestock in Mali. On their arrival in Niger, they were first put into the refugee camp of Lazaré in suburban Niamey, and they were later transferred to Hamdallaye, about 60 km from Niamey. After the closure of Hamdallaye, Mossa ag Attaher returned to Gossi with his parents, who had divorced in the meantime, and Mossa stayed with his father. Like many of his generation, he had been unable to stay in Gossi because his family’s resources had been devastated in the preceding years by the drought. Moreover, before they overcame the consequences of the first drought, a second arrived in 1983–1984, leading to the decimation of what the returnees had managed to build to provide subsistence.

Under such circumstances, Mossa and several of his peers moved back to Niger in search of employment. As he once explained, his lack of education made it difficult to find formal employment. He then began to work as a guard. His wife, Fadimata, is a free tellellit Tuareg woman (the idnan n Egarew near Timbuktu) who was born in the Gossi region. She also relocated to Niamey under the same circumstances at the time she met Mossa ag Attaher. They got married in 1985 and now have four children: Adda (39), Ibrahim (30), Mohamed (26), and Mariam (24). Mossa’s four children all quit their education before finishing elementary school and have since been moving between jobs as either waiters or security guards in restaurants and private domiciles in Niamey, Lomé, Cotonou, and Burkina Faso. Mariam is married and now has one child. Mossa’s family home is as a gathering place where several freeborn Tuareg from northern Mali in Niger regularly meet and socialize around the tea kettle.

The second man, called here Mohamed ag Irgimit is also a freeborn red or white Tuareg who originally comes from the same group as Mossa ag Attaher and also has a non-noble social background. He was born in the midst of the 1960s in Bamba near Bourem in the Gao region. He also came to the Lazaré refugee camp and later transferred to Hamdallaye in the 1970s at the age of 6. There, he was adopted by a French couple who were volunteering as humanitarian workers in the refugee camp at the time. Thus, he went to school under the care of this couple until his graduation with a Degree in Law at the Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey. Since then, he has been working for several transnational structures in Niger. Mohamed is married with two wives and he has five children. The oldest of his children, Anna (now 42 years), was about to complete her Master’s degree in sociology at the Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey in 2012. She is already married and has two kids. Anna’s brother, referred to here as Noni, is now 27 years old. He is the son of Mohamed ag Irgimit’s first wife, Annatou. At the time we met, Noni had been working for 4 years with the French company Areva, in northern Niger. Noni’s three younger brothers, respectively, 9, 7, and 4 years old, go to school in Niamey. Like Mossa, several freeborn Tuareg visited Mohamed at his home after work. They sat on plastic mats around the tea kettle in the yard, which latter had been filled with sand and reminded them of “their past harmonious desert life” in Niamey. ⁵

The pseudonym Alhabib ag Sidi is used for the third man. He is from the Tessalit area, in the Kidal region, where he was born in the 1950s. Originally, he is from the Iradianaten fraction. ⁶ Alhabib left the region for Algeria in the aftermath of the Tuareg’s first rebellion and the drought in 1973. From there, he moved on to Libya and ended up in Niamey where he has lived since 1983. Upon his arrival in Niamey, he began to work as a car driver for Belgian NGOs. There, he currently leads the Malian refugees’ association in Niamey. ⁷ His wife is originally from the Imakalkalen group (near Bourem in the Gao region). Alhabib has four children, although his oldest daughter unfortunately passed away 2 years ago. His second oldest, Rabbi, is studying law at the Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey. Her brother Youssouf (29 years old) has completed his education in Niamey and is currently employed with the customs services in Niger. Like the other men introduced above, Alhabib’s retired status allowed him more free time to talk, and to visit and be visited by peers at home, and people constantly came to his home starting at breakfast time at 7 am and ending only at dinner time, around 8 pm. Moreover, Alhabib played a crucial role in helping newly arrived refugees with their registration and had turned his homestead into an important social space for many free white Tuareg. These visits gave him the opportunity to engage in conversations about Tuareg history.

Ibrahim ag Mohamed, the fourth freeborn Tuareg informant introduced above came directly to Niamey from northern Mali. He was born in 1978 in the area of Gossi. Originally, he also comes from a non-noble Tuareg group social background. He first arrived in Niamey with his parents from the area around Gossi due to the devastating drought of the 1980s. A year after their arrival Ibrahim’s father passed away. In the early 1990s, they went back to Mali and returned again to Niamey in 1994 due to the civil war. Since then, Ibrahim has traveled to Lomé and Cotonou several times in search of seasonal employment. During these years, he learned and mastered the guitar and founded the group Inor, meaning the light. Ibrahim works currently as a security guard and lives with his sister, mother, and a close friend, Alhousseyni, another red Tuareg from around Gossi. Indeed, Alhousseyni and Ibrahim first met in Lomé, where they have both worked as seasonal employees since the 1990s. After a first failed marriage, Ibrahim remarried in 2013. His new wife is also a white or red Tuareg woman originally from a non-noble Tuareg group in the Timbuktu region. Ibrahim’s status as a musician along with his constant good humor was manifested in his use of anecdotes throughout conversations, and this made him relatively famous among his peers in Niamey. This explains partly why no matter the time of the day, there were constantly several young freeborn Tuareg coming to pass the time with him at his shop along Tillabery Road in southern Niamey.

Taken together, while Mossa, Mohamed and Alhabib migrated, respectively, from the camp at Hamdallaye, and Libya to Niamey, Ibrahim ag Mohamed, the fourth freeborn Tuareg informant introduced above came directly to Niamey from northern Mali but has, several times, traveled to Lomé and Cotonou in search of seasonal employment in response to droughts and armed conflicts that induced forced migration from northern Mali to Niger. This raises the question of whether these freeborn Tuareg are labor migrants or refugees. To answer this question, we examine below why labor migration from the initial site of exile did not imply moving out of the refugee social condition for these freeborn Tuareg in Niamey and the students in Senegal.

Staying forced migrants in Niamey and Senegal

What the two case studies have in common is not only the fact that the Tuareg and the students under study here all fled state-orchestrated political persecution in Mali, and consequently that they all become labor migrants in exile. The case studies also present similarities in the ways in which the former students and the Tuareg, despite they have become labor migrants, still understood themselves as people in a “waiting situation” to return to Mali. We argue that becoming labor migrants to alleviate the predicament of exile did not imply here moving out of the refugee social condition. From the perspectives of our informants, they remain in the social conditions of exile and, therefore, refugees until they return to Mali. For instance, although, Mossa ag Attaher, Alhabib ag Sidi, Ibrahim ag Mohamed, and Mohamed ag Irgimit, who had lived in Niamey for decades still consider themselves refugees. At face value, one could think that they seek to draw material benefits from NGOs that target newly arrived refugees only. However, the consistent and systematic nature of their claims and accounts of their shared experiences of suffering, and the persistent references to these experiences in their everyday lives (cf. Diallo, 2018: chapter 7), convinced us that this could not be interpreted merely as a tactic to receive food donations. Rather, as one gradually realized, these narratives reconstructed collective histories that enabled the interlocutors in Niamey, to give a sense and purpose to their actual life situation.

Mossa and his male adult peers depicted themselves as those who did hold their traditional Tuareg culture. They closely connected holding the culture to another notion. That was that of Kel alassal. The term Kel Alassal means the “authentic people.” It refers to a specific mode of living (or social practices) within the framework of their culture or history (atarekh) from Niamey. These social practices range from the regular visits they paid each other in Niamey to listening to guitar songs sung by a freeborn Tuareg musical group called Kel Tinariwen, speaking the Tamasheq dialect spoken in northern Mali, dressing up in Jalabia and turbans, and discussing their desire to return and to live in an independent Tuareg country (akal).

For example, Mossa ag Attaher insistently pointed out that

You see since I am in Niamey I never wore anything else than my jalabia though I worked for France for long time. For example, I remembered long time ago, our patrons at the IRD [a French institute for development research]instructed us [the guards] to wear the uniform they had given us. This was a way to tell me that I should abandon my turban and my jalabia. I clearly told them that I preferred to loose my job than changing the way in which I dress, that is, the Tuareg way. I want to keep my culture and what I am: a Tuareg. I can never abandon the jalabia and the turban.

The jalabia ensemble, called nowadays deux pièces, is composed of short trousers and a boubou. ⁸ Mossa described this as a manifest signal of his allegiance to Tuareg dressing customs. He stressed that over the past centuries, all Tuareg men wore the jalabia ensemble in their everyday lives. He further explained that in the past, youths would meet socially around the musical genre called tendé (see also Ag Doho, 2011). The regular performance of tendé took place, mostly in winter. When it rained, the youths frequently met at the ahal (evening youth gathering) around the tendé, and performed Iswat, the traditional dance steps of youths surrounding the girls singing. On these occasions, the young women appreciated and selected their male partners not only according to their dance and camel racing skills but also their jalabia ensemble. Dressed in the jalabia and the turban, the youths smoothly moved with their camels toward the girls gathered around the tendé. Men targeted the girl singing surrounded by several others applauding. The goal of the men was to profit from the inattention of the others to steal the headscarf of the girl singing, called the tamazagh (or tamawayt). The one who succeeded in stealing this headscarf, called the alacho, was followed by other competitors. Succeeding and not succeeding in collecting back this alacho had equal symbolic value. They all contributed to creating a sense of honor as a true man (ahalis wan tidit) among peers. This distinction could increase one’s social charm in peoples’ eyes. The jalabia and the turban illustrated Mohamed’s and Mossa’s interpretations of what makes up an “authentic Tuareg”: the capacity to embody past dressing habits in the present.

Mohamed ag Irgimit sometimes stressed similar social significance of the veil for female Tuareg. He stated that:

Nothing else than entering my homestead you notice that you are among the Tuareg. You saw my daughter sitting with her veil even though she is born and went to university here. She even graduated recently in Sociology. But you could not know all this information if I did not tell them to you. You are used to Tuareg now, since you saw her sitting you immediately recognized her as a Tuareg. She wears her veil and did not tell anything since you entered this house. ⁹

To understand Mohamed’s argument here, let us describe the context of the conversation. That day, Mohamed was sitting on the left side of his yard, together with his wife, two sons of 9 and 2 years old, and his daughter in her mid-twenties. His daughter wore a white-and-red veil. When she saw a stranger entering their home, she quickly expanded her veil to cover her head and moved closer to her mother. Her mother also slightly adjusted her veil. Mohamed ag Irgimit himself did not have a turban. However, focusing on his daughter’s appearance, Mohamed’s statement reveals how the body postures (way of sitting) and the veil of his daughter came together in the expression of her Tuareg identity. As an ideal Tuareg woman, in Mohamed’s sense, she wore a veil and did not talk in the presence of strangers. Mossa’s and Mohamed’s accounts reveal the relationships between the body, jalabia, turban, female veil, and assertions of authentic Tuareg identity. Ultimately, the accounts invite us to approach these traits as both symbolic and material processes that come together in dress as embodied practice (Hansen, 2004; Schulz, 2007).

For the informants in Niamey, the efforts to maintain their culture through, for example, language, clothing styles, and Tuareg musical culture, which tied them to northern Mali, must ultimately be understood as a desire and hope to return home one day. They repeatedly stressed this guiding principle in their everyday life. Mossa ag Attaher once argued that:

the desert is our country [akal]. It is where we lived, and we will live in the future. We came from there and we will return there. This is why we can’t neglect our culture. Because, if we neglect it now what will we do once we return back home? ¹⁰

This refers not only to past customs but also more importantly to preparation for a future life back home. It indicates a cultural repertoire with specific aspirations, regarding, for example, Mossa’s usage of the notion of akal (country). Etymologically, the notion of akal can mean land, settlement, and country. In the nomadic culture of northern Mali, akal (land) is always placed under the authority of the amenokal (the chief). Hence, Mossa’s use of the term refers to an exclusively “Tuareg imaginary” of a future country in current northern Mali placed under the authority of an amenokal (Tuareg chief) instead of the Malian state.

In a similar way, though the Malian students had taken up jobs as teachers and dockers in response to the predicament of exile in Senegal, they strongly aspired to return home. To this end, they kept close ties to each other in preparation for their return. The Malian students thus exiled had maintained ties with the comrades in Mali to coordinate the struggle. This was the case for Malians enrolled at the University of Dakar, but also for other students in solidarity with the movement, such as the General Union of Students from Black Africa (UGEAN). A.T.D. explained that

Dakar in 1975, there was already a student movement in turmoil which was not only made up of students from the University of Dakar but also from the General Union of West African Students (UGEAO) in Dakar.

This statement illustrates a sentiment of solidarity in the fight against the military regime. In preparation for their return to Mali, the students exiled in Dakar held clandestine meetings to define the actions to be undertaken in support of their comrades who stayed in Mali. According to A.T.D.,

the first meetings were held privately in Dakar in the house of a sister of late Montagna Toure. May 9, 1977, was retained as a historic date of the student movement, particularly the day of the Malian students. The Malian students exiled in Dakar celebrated that date but those who were in Mali did not due to the strong repression.

These meetings and ties to Mali did not imply that the students were not integrated into the host society in Senegal. Rather, they suggest that the integration and job opportunities in the host society did not undermine the refugees’ aspiration to return home. This offers some insights into scholarly debates about the integration and adaptation of migrants. According to Bérubé (2004), many factors influence the process of adaptation, including the gap between the culture of origin and that of the host society, the types of societies, the conditions of leaving the country of origin, and the reception conditions reserved for immigrants. For example, individuals in a traditional society must undergo a major resocialization in relation to the norms and rules that govern group life if they wish to integrate into an industrialized society (Belloncle, 1979; Camilleri, 1989). In the case of the former students in Dakar, the desire to return home shaped the everyday social life in exile. A decade later, these students came back to Mali after the downfall of Moussa Traoré. While the students have been able to return home in the 1990s, the Tuareg are still in Niger, hoping to be able to return in the near future. However, the possibility of their return seems to be further challenged by the rising levels of insecurity and related international efforts of “securitization” in the context of a Global War on Terror in the southern fringe of the Sahara where the Tuareg refugees left (Raineri, 2019).

The ways in which the aspiration and the ethic to return home shape the life of the people under study correspond to what Liisa Malkki has observed among the Hutu refugees in Mishamo in Tanzania. Malkki, for example, draws attention to the productive ways in which the Hutu refugees in the Mishamo refugee camp responded to the spatial isolation by creating “mythico-history” (Malkki, 1995). Malkki uses the notion of mythico-history to refer to Hutu refugees’ narratives recorded in Mishamo, rural Tanzania, and defines the concept of mythico-history in the following way: the “Hutu history” that Mishamo refugees reconstituted did not simply record events but instead “was a subversive recasting and reinterpretations of Hutu history in fundamentally moral terms” (Malkki, 1995: 53.). Malkki argues that the result “cannot be accurately described as either history or myth,” and she therefore labels it mythico-history (1995: 54). Characteristically, the Hutu mythico-history sheds light on how the refugees drew upon their cultural resources, most notably, cultural referents such as proverbs, to substantiate historical accounts that reinterpreted their history in a way that incorporated the experiences of exile into the group identity in preparation for their return to Burundi in the future. This reveals how the Hutu refugees turned the Mishamo camp into a site enabling the elaboration of a self-consciousness of belonging, and is, therefore, productive. Malkki states that:

Likewise, lists appeared very prominently in the narratives. There were lists of traits, lists of “symptoms”, lists of faults, lists of numbered points to be made, lists that were like inventories, lists of many kinds. Proverbs were likewise deployed as rhetorical devices for persuasion and “proof.” (Malkki, 1995: 53)

Malkki’s argument echoes Lubkemann’s point. He sees the aspiration to return home as a key ordering force in the lives of Mozambican migrants in South Africa (Lubkemann, 2008: chapter 10). The desire to become an ancestor through ritual burial practices, argues Lubkemann, informs the migrant’s ethic of sending remittances to Mozambique. Malkki’s and Lubkemann’s claims illustrate that the refugee actors live simultaneously across spaces: their ordinary sites of living before exile, their current social and political contexts in exile, and the places to which they return after exile. Seen in light of Malkki’s and Lubkemann’s contributions, the two case studies show that forced migration and labor migration are not always two distinct patterns or categories of spatial mobility. They should, in many contexts, be considered two facets of the social conditions of forced migration.

Conclusion

This article has reflected on how two sociopolitical processes in postcolonial Mali illustrate the ways in which the refugee crisis contributed to labor migration and, inversely, how labor migration was used as a strategy to respond to the predicament induced by adverse and often deeply humiliating living conditions of exile in West Africa. The discussion afforded an understanding of forced and labor migration as two of the three empirically interrelated sequences which inform the social conditions of forced migration (Lubkemann, 2008; Malkki, 1995; Sommers, 2001). As Lubkemann’s, Malkki’s, and Sommers’s contributions suggest, the social condition of exile implies, first the forceful migration induced by warscape or political persecution; second, the labor migration as a copying mechanism in response to the predicament of exile, and third the aspiration to return home. Our two case studies illustrate these three processes. In the context of Senegal, our discussions have shown that the former students worked temporarily in Dakar but returned to Mali after the downfall of Moussa Traoré in 1991. In Niamey, the freeborn Tuareg are still waiting for the appropriate political conditions to go back to Mali. In this way, the life trajectories examined in this article provide a unique glimpse into some of the most poorly understood dynamics of labor and forced migration and oblige us to recast arguments on these two patterns of migration, as well as to reconsider in new and useful ways political narratives that prioritize the difference between labor and forced migration.