Entangled lives: Land,property and guardianship in a changing Dakar

Abstract

Dakar is replete with incomplete houses that are often viewed pejoratively to denote the supposed ‘failure’ of African cities. However, this perspective occludes analyses of the popular economies and socialities emanating from these same structures. This article explores the everyday lives of property guardians (known locally as gardiens) living in the unfinished diaspora-built homes of Ouakam, Dakar (Senegal). Combining a critical historical analysis of post-colonial and post-socialist land and property arrangements in Ouakam with three ethnographic vignettes, the article unravels everyday articulations of property on the ground and develops the notion of entanglement to explore how property is produced, enacted, negotiated and re-arranged by gardiens. It shows that a propertied landscape characterised by opacity paradoxically enables gardiens to hold their place in the city and argues that entanglement illuminates different registers of agency, prompting us to re-imagine the politics and possibilities of life in the interstices of property.

Pockets

Pointing westwards towards the Atlantic, the bewildering bronze Monument de la Renaissance Africaine towers high above Dakar's skyline. Long before the 160-foot-tall monument – the tallest on the African continent – had been completed, it was the object of impassioned public debate. Shrouded in controversy over rumours of murky speculative land deals by then president Abdoulaye Wade (List, 2017), Imams in the majority Muslim country criticised its imagery as idolatrous, un-Islamic and aesthetically un-African (Quist-Arcton, 2010; Figure 1). However, to former president Wade, the monument symbolised ‘an Africa emerging from the bowels of the earth, leaving obscurantism to go towards the light’ (Wade quoted in Samudzi, 2022). That light, towards which a bronze child's finger aims, lies somewhere on the Atlantic horizon, perhaps towards a Sénégal Émergent, the title of former president Macky Sall's grand development plan (République du Sénégal, 2014). Or maybe, to the lives lived or imagined to be lived elsewhere; to fortunes made, being made, or vowed to be made abroad heard through the muffled WhatsApp voice messages of childhood friends elsewhere. To the people I came to know, however, the monument was a rather ordinary space. It was somewhere away from the noise, dust and traffic of the neighbouring district: Ouakam.

Figure 1.

Visitors and locals intermingling on the steps of the Monument de la Renaissance Africaine (photo by the author, 2022).

Felwine Sarr (2020: 106) describes Dakar as: ‘tumultuous and whirling … a city in movement that is constantly in the midst of creating itself … where international immigrants […] have become the creators of new neighbourhoods, adding their own idiosyncratic aesthetic to the city and populating [it] with new creative styles’. So-called remittance houses, however, reflect the precarious trajectories of migration (Boccagni and Bivand Erdal, 2021: 1075). While riches gained abroad sometimes materialise into opulent villas adorning multiple étages (storeys), Dakar's present face wears the splintered rhythms of remittance flows in a global political economy characterised by normalised crisis (Guermond, 2023). These fragmented temporalities have produced a landscape replete with hollow brick shells, seemingly abandoned concrete foundations, exposed steel bars and sandy streets interspersed by piles of brick and rubble (Figure 2). According to Melly (2010, 2017), the materiality of Dakar's built environment – chiefly, the ubiquitous ‘not-yet’ homes of the diaspora living abroad – refashions urban belonging ‘inside-out’, in a way that constructs migration as the only route through which belonging can be achieved (see also Fouquet, 2008; Figure 3). Despite – or in some cases, because of – this, many Dakarois stay behind, and countless others arrive in the city hoping to assemble lives amidst this landscape. Here, Melly locates the lives of the often-rural migrants who live and work as property guardians (known locally as gardiens), briefly detailing their ambiguous role inhabiting unfinished homes and negotiating ambivalent relationships with – largely absent – owners. As a result of changing agrarian livelihoods and economies in Senegal, rural–urban migration has long been a strategy to diversify household income in the village (Fall, 1998; Guèye et al., 2007). Guardianship, in the African context more broadly, is most prominent in peri-urban areas where rural–urban migration processes converge with an incremental building economy (Gough and Yankson, 2011; Peprah et al., 2015; Van Noorloos et al., 2020). In contrast to the European context, guardianship often emerges through a diversity of informal negotiations and arrangements, making it difficult to generalise their experiences (cf. Gough and Yankson, 2011). The ubiquity of so-called ‘incomplete’ houses means these structures often become lively socio-material configurations deeply ensconced in neighbourhood economies and politics (Diene, 2010; Diongue, 2010). For gardiens, incomplete homes function as material and temporal pockets where ‘a space [opens] up in the ordinary’, enabling a form of inhabitation – however tenuous it may be – to emerge and take hold (Dawson, 2021; Stewart, 2012: 365). Of the gardiens I met, some had lived in the same structure for decades, others had just arrived, while the rest refused to disclose when they came, where they were from, or what exactly they were doing there.

Figure 2.

Plot occupied by gardiens, with brickwork delineating the property's boundaries (photo by the author, 2022).

Figure 3.

Incomplete house with multiple étages foregrounded by a plot serving as a makeshift football ground (photo by the author, 2022).

While spending time in Ouakam, the district's transformation by a distant diaspora was evident. But amidst its seemingly incomplete landscape were forms of social, economic and political life making use of what was already there, constituting something akin to what Lancione and Simone (2021: 971) refer to as ‘dwelling in liminalities’; wherein the liminal, as they write, ‘is the only way of assembling life for those living through the maximum intensifications of current forms of extractive inhabitation’. As Simone (2018b: 30) writes elsewhere, urban life in these contexts commands an ‘incessant provisionality: a continuous working out of attention and indifference, of reciprocity and individuation, of proximity and distance’. I approached my conversations with gardiens expecting to uncover a radical and perhaps even hopeful politics of occupation (Vasudevan, 2017). However, this line of questioning often led me to dead ends. The gardiens I met rarely expressed discontent over the countless luxury apartments lying vacant or half-finished. They harboured little resentment for the wealthy diaspora investing in local property, and although they knew and were close to many other gardiens, they would laugh at my suggestion of collectively organising for better rights and conditions of tenure. Instead, their primary interest was how to participate in Ouakam's dynamic land and property market. Incompleteness, instead of signifying failure, provided the very grounds for inhabitation (Nyamnjoh, 2017).

Entanglement

Although the establishment of certain forms of property, particularly in post-colonial contexts, has been fundamental to both past and present forms of colonial dispossession (Bhandar, 2018), the presumption of planetary private property has neglected the communal, plural and – in Ghertner's (2020) words – ‘lively’ appropriations of space that persist on both privatised and non-privatised lands alike. Indeed, to frame land markets in Africa through such dichotomies can be reductive (Chimhowu and Woodhouse, 2006). To follow The Urban Popular Economy Collective (2022: 350–351), land constitutes ‘a complexity of terrains, open to varied logics around institutional entanglements’ and as a result ‘is often lived as collective space, conjoining different temporalities, crafted within the cracks of regimes of titling and property’. This article follows these provocations by attempting to unravel the everyday workings of property on the ground, illustrating how gardiens inhabit Ouakam's contested propertied landscape, navigating and making use of its accompanying infrastructures as a way of holding their place in the city. Analogous with what Vigh (2006: 14, 2009) has called ‘social navigation,’ gardiens attune their itineraries to the uncertainties of life in Ouakam, adopting practices of improvisation and careful calculation to ‘write themselves into a milieu that otherwise might seem to marginalise them’ (Simone, 2018a: 5). This tactic of ‘writing oneself in’ is what I call entanglement.

Bonilla (2015) charts how the established maroon communities of Jamaica and Suriname often chartered treaties with colonists in which they agreed to restrict settlements to particular boundaries, banned recruiting from nearby plantations, and even return future runaways in exchange for recognition and economic assistance. In plantation societies, these political strategies of ‘interdependence, coexistence and non-interference’ with colonial authorities constituted a form of resistance which she terms ‘strategic entanglement’ (Bonilla, 2015: 45). While these entanglements significantly constrained the growth of maroon communities, they nevertheless expressed efforts to ‘carve out spaces of autonomy within the colonial system, assuring their communities’ persistence into the present day’ (Bonilla, 2015: 45). In this paper I invoke the notion of entanglement to, following Bonilla (2015: 43), illuminate strategies ‘of crafting and enacting autonomy within a system from which one is unable to fully disentangle’. This system, as I show, is Ouakam's land and property market. I demonstrate how a palimpsest of contested claims, legal plurality and institutional ambiguity render Ouakam's landscape opaque: a space where no one quite knows where things are going and anything is up for grabs (Glissant, 1997). And by attending to gardiens’ everyday practices of carving out a living within the socio-legal structures of property, I show how this opacity is – paradoxically – made operable by gardiens. Entanglement, therefore, emerges as a form of urban practice that often reiterates, rather than challenges, urban injustice. Nevertheless, I argue that it constitutes a form of propositional politics – a politics of being and becoming in the world differently – which both evades North Atlantic grammars of resistance and prompts us to reconsider the politics and possibilities of life in the interstices of property (Lancione, 2019). Although entanglement resonates with a politics of refusal (Roane, 2018), it is not refusal tout court and instead emphasises gardiens’ strategies of manipulating and re-working extractive relations as a way of getting by. In this way, entanglement reflects a form of intersubjective agency, where ‘individuals are able to be who they are through relationships with others’ (Nyamnjoh, 2017: 262). If we consider property to be a ‘system from which one is unable to fully disentangle’, then what we find are gardiens ‘crafting and enacting autonomy’ by reconfiguring their position within its relational meshwork (Bonilla, 2015: 43). However, while entanglements can hold the possibility of cohesion and connectivity, enabling someone to transgress their present situation, they also retain the dangers of disconnection, blockage, and ultimately displacement. As Nuttall (2009: 1, 11) writes, ‘entanglement is a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with; it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored or uninvited’; thus, as she continues, a ‘focus on entanglement in part speaks to the need for a utopian horizon, while always being profoundly mindful of what is actually going on’. Entanglement, consequently, is not a grand politics of reclaiming or reimagining the city, but gestures towards a minor, imperfect politics of making things work (Katz, 1996, 2017; Lancione, 2023).

In this register, this article recounts the stories of three gardiens I came to know, presenting a grounded illustration of property relations as they are lived, ‘relations that change … that modify understandings of the self; and that alter as people change’ (Cook, 2015: 297). My intention is not to present three ‘ideal types’ of gardiens nor to romanticise the conditions they inhabit, but to offer an analysis of the ‘everyday counter-political’ enacted by ordinary residents’ inhabiting the city yet-to-come (Lancione and Simone, 2021: 974). Before this, however, I begin by unravelling my own entanglements – as researcher, guest and friend – navigating a complex presence in Dakar. I proceed with a historical account of property's emergence in Ouakam, laying the grounds for the three successive ethnographic vignettes narrated subsequently. The article then concludes with some reflections on the generativity of entanglement for re-imagining a politics of resistance within and beyond Dakar.

The vulnerable ethnographer

As my research unfolded, Sadio became an important interlocutor, gatekeeper, translator and friend. ¹ He and I were first connected through a mutual friend, a Senegalese man who used to work at a food stall in South London, where I live. Born and raised in Ouakam, Sadio ran a local barbershop which enabled him to develop relations with nearby gardiens who would sometimes use the shop's Wi-Fi. My time with Sadio was peppered by chance encounters, salutes from passing car windows, fleeting introductions and hurried phone calls. Indeed, gaining access and developing the trust of those whose lifeworld's are shared here would not have been possible without my association with Sadio. Although researchers are often advised to maintain boundaries with participants, I was often introduced as Sadio's ‘Canadian friend’ before mentioning my research. I was aware of the currency having a toubab (white) friend brought to Sadio, but this did not make our relationship inauthentic. Our friendship helped cultivate dialogical relationships with participants rooted in trust, reciprocity and emotional affiliation (Tillmann-Healy, 2003). For instance, though I encountered 10 gardiens working in Ouakam over the course of my fieldwork – formally interviewing six. I developed a particularly strong relationship with three respondents who graciously agreed to multiple return interviews, each of them a good friend of Sadio's. According to Pettit (2020: 3), ‘being the object of research operationalises a relationship of inequality, placing the researcher in a position of supremacy’. Developing a friendship with participants helped ease these tensions to some extent, but I was concerned that participants felt coerced into participating as a favour to Sadio; certainly, much was said in Wolof that I could not understand. Although I made a point to ensure informed consent was obtained and the conditions of participation were made clear, my association with him required me to straddle a difficult line between being a friend and a researcher.

On two occasions – return interviews where I took notes – respondents detailed the imminence of their displacement and expressed the toll this was taking on their mental health. In these moments, I put my pen and notepad away and concluded the interview, feeling unequipped to ask further questions. These moments triggered an uncomfortable mixture of emotions – sadness, guilt, powerlessness and shame. In those moments, as a friend – feeling empathy and concern – it felt extractive and unethical to continue the interview process. In a separate example, one evening while it was approaching dusk on one of Ouakam's sandy side streets, Sadio and I paused for a moment at a small corner-shop. He lit his cigarette, and I asked if now was a good time to get a taxi back to where I was staying to beat the traffic. He took a small puff and shrugged, ‘I am not sure’. I asked him, confused, if there is a time I should plan to leave. He turned to me with a smirk, ‘you cannot predict life in Dakar … I cannot even tell you if I am going to my house now, maybe someone will call and ask me to do a job’. De Boeck and Baloji's (2016) magisterial portrayal of Kinshasa as a city of the ‘now’ accentuates how residents often have to be prepared to act or move without warning. My interview experiences and this exchange between Sadio and I not only convey something about what it meant to live in Dakar – a similar city of the ‘now’ – but also about doing ethnographic work in such contexts.

Although this carefully crafted paper suggests otherwise, much of my time in ‘the field’ was spent waiting, waiting in traffic, for interlocutors to show up, respond to messages or calls, or for translations to be thought through and expressed. Initially, these moments of suspension evoked feelings of frustration, for running out of time, and guilt, for being an inconvenience. Generally, a methods section summarises the processes through which knowledge is produced. This is, however, often curated to appear much more straightforward than it is. My experience doing ethnography across post-colonial and socio-economic divides was not a simple or linear process; it was messy, confusing and fraught with ethical dilemmas. My emotions were, as Pettit (2020: 6) writes, ‘expressions of collective historical relations of power and inequality’. Usually, social scientists seek comfort in ‘reflexivity’ to transcend these webs of ‘situated positionality’ and free themselves from their entanglements in ‘the field’ (Ilter, 1994: 63). However, ‘reflexivity talk’ also risks absolving privileged researchers from their tensions in the field. One way forward, Pillow (2003) suggests, is the disclosure of discomfort or, in other words, vulnerability. Writing is, after all, a way of framing the world and the world is a confusing and often heart-breaking place. Being vulnerable means turning towards or ‘attuning to’ this messiness (Squire, 2012). According to Kanngieser and Todd (2021), attunement ‘depends on a commitment to waiting … [to] feel an answer, to feel permission, often takes time. Introductions need to be made [and] our intentions need to be named and shared’. At first glance, attunement implies a method of adapting oneself to a particular situation, matching or mimicking to attain harmony. Indeed, it was important for me to attune my rhythms of doing research to the rhythms of my interlocutors. Interviews then took many forms; at times structured and at others more of a conversation between friends, oscillating between English, French and Wolof. This is, however, a method vexed by the tension between my transient and privileged experience of ‘the field’ and my representation of it (Thieme, 2017). Attunement, in this instance, involved a certain method of being in ‘the field’ – simply as I was – and acknowledging, sitting with and navigating what that presence brought. As Kanngieser (2020) writes,

to arrive as a white [researcher] into a country that has been colonised, and is still negotiating and untangling the economies and cultures of white supremacy, is to always be coupled with injustice and harm […] How one feels about this is neither here nor there, it is as it is. The question is whether one turns into it or away.

From the outset of this project, my desire to research an African city as a white, heterosexual, middle-class, male from a European institution was disconcerting. I was aware of the histories and lineages of geography as a tool of imperial power and the extractive way research on Africa has tended to be done; indeed, social scientists have grappled with these tensions for decades (Sidaway, 1992). As Gani and Khan (2024: 1) write, for example, efforts to deconstruct one's whiteness in positionality statements are often simply shallow gestures of guilt used to restore the legitimacy of the researcher which risk reifying ‘material, assumed, [and] imagined hierarchies between people’. Attunement, by contrast, was a way of ‘[immersing] oneself in how these worlds meet’ and recognising the ‘self’ as ‘always in relation to others’ (Kanngieser, 2020). In other words, entangled. My whiteness oriented my body in ‘the field,’ effecting the ways people presented themselves to me and mediating how I read those presentations in turn. This is why I have chosen to structure this paper in the way I have, vignettes are the best way to preserve my own orientation in this story, exposing its limits without also centring myself. Therefore, the representations offered here are merely partial truths and should be read as such.

Un village dans le banlieue

Perched at the western edge of the Cap-Vert peninsula, sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and Léopold Sédar Senghor Airport, Ouakam is one of three indigenous Lébou villages that have been absorbed by the exponential growth of Dakar. Thus, despite Ouakam's density and ‘modern’ vernacular the multiplicity of spatial claims being made are ones not easily subsumed under the auspices of the ‘urban’. Indeed, whatever features distinguish Ouakam as either ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ are practically impossible to discern (Obeng-Odoom, 2012). These characteristics have prompted Myers (2016, 2020) to compare it to the ‘urban village’ concept, to highlight the enduring influence of customary institutions – particularly around land governance – on the production of urban space. As Roy (2016: 817) argues: ‘today's urban question is a land question, [but] this land question very much encompasses regulations, registers and rights that are not urban and that are not simply making way for the urban’. The universalist urban-land nexus model – which posits that urban agglomerations are structured principally by market mechanisms (Scott and Storper, 2015) – and its associated imaginary, quickly unravels in Ouakam, where price is not the sole or even primary arbiter of access to land and property (Diop, 2012; Ghertner, 2020). Therefore, to comprehend the complex dynamics mediating land access and use in Ouakam there is a need to attend to the long durée of urban transformation on the Dakar peninsula.

Urbanisation in Africa has unquestionably been and continues to be shaped by the oppressive and violent forces of imperialism and colonialism. Colonial urban planning significantly ruptured pre-colonial societies, erasing the pre-existing-built environment, and segregating and excluding indigenous populations (Njoh, 2008). However, according to Bigon and Hart (2018: 54), the colonial authority's ‘disciplinary touch has always been relatively light’ in the then-peripheral Lébou villages of Ouakam, Ngor and Yoff. The authors evidence this through the endurance of pre-colonial spatial configurations like the pénc – a modest public space often at the centre of Lébou villages, which generally features one or several large trees and a small makeshift mosque – highlighting it as a particularly salient example of a communal space that serves an important role in Dakar's social life (see also Gallais, 1954). While scholars have tended to foreground the ‘dualist’ geography of post-colonial African cities, citing the legacies of distinct and separable colonial and native towns’, Bigon and Hart (2018) argue the pénc illustrates the complicated history of Lébou resistance to and negotiation with French colonialism. Lébou communities’ capacity to resist top-down colonial authority was, paradoxically, owed in part to their affordance of private property rights under the French cadastral system, which enabled them to continue governing land autonomously. Lébou customary law – which continues to function today – designates that land held in common by the extended family is inalienable and governed collectively by the Diaraf (village chief; Figure 4), the Ndeye Dji Rew (who manage village matters) and the Saltigué (war chief) (Diene, 2010; Johnson, 1971; Kaag et al., 2011). However, the enduring stereotype that customary land tenure exhibits an inherently ‘non-market’ character reflects colonial interpretations which regarded them as obstacles to development. Scholars have, by contrast, long observed the interplay between ‘market’ and ‘non-market’ dynamics in land politics across Africa (Berry, 1993; Chimhowu and Woodhouse, 2006; Mathieu et al., 2002; Obeng-Odoom, 2015). In Dakar, as the colonial port grew in importance to the French empire so too did the pressure on Lébou communities and their lands, altering systems of land governance (Pinard, 2021; Tall, 1998). Although commodified land in a capitalist form would emerge later, Diene (2010) argues that the enforcement of a ‘regularised’ land titling system by French imperialists signified the beginning of speculative land practices. In a slight departure from the repressive and racist urban planning practices adopted in the Médina or Plateau areas, interactions between imperialists and Lébou populations suggested an effort on the part of the French to work with – rather than forcibly suppress – local land governance systems to safeguard imperial interests (Betts, 1971). Members of the Lébou community who had sold their land quickly found themselves priced out of the commodifying peninsula. As such, the relationship between Lébou communities and the French grew more antagonistic. And as land became subjected to a capitalist logic, conflicts within families and communities became increasingly intense, creating local political cleavages with multiple Diaraf's and other community leaders competing for authority (Diop, 2012; Kaag et al., 2011).

Figure 4.

Mural of Diaraf in a pirogue (fishing boat), often repurposed for clandestine journeys to Europe (photo by the author, 2022).

With respect to the land question in nearby Yoff, Diene (2010) writes that an independent Senegalese state was largely indistinguishable from the colonial state in so far as it adopted a European logic of private property. A lifelong resident told me that the 1964 Law of National Domain expressed a much more repressive approach to dealing with customary land systems. In effect, the law stipulated that any plot of land without ‘formal’ title was eligible for expropriation by the state. The rationale was that the colonial system facilitated the exploitation of land's exchange-value by a minority of the population, which allowed the state to frame their consolidation of land as a redistributive policy (Caveriviére and Debene, 1989). However, given that the titling process was prohibitively expensive, and that customary law afforded many – particularly Lébou – residents de facto tenure security, there was little incentive for locals to pursue ‘formal’ land titling (Payne et al., 2009). The original intent of the law was ‘to deny the rights of those who claimed to be owners and who did not exploit effectively the land in question’ (Diene, 2010: 163). However, the outcome was the dispossession of customary ownership. The 1964 Law of National Domain had proven to be an overly crude and simplistic approach to a landscape that had long been characterised by institutional ambiguity and legal plurality, often with multiple and overlapping claims to the same plot of land. As such, residents of Ouakam – and Dakar more broadly – continue to live with the consequences of National Domain, where ‘the fact of being able to impose oneself as an obliged intermediary and to benefit from it, induces rivalries, opacity and rumours’ (Lavigne Delville et al., 2023: 8). For example, public debates resurfaced in 2022 when protests erupted over the state's gifting of contested land around Léopold Sédar Senghor Airport to the African Cup winning national football team (Diouf, 2022). This historical palimpsest is what ultimately constitutes the uncertain grounds of Ouakam, wherein both residents – present and absent – and the state rush to stake claims to, secure and speculate on land.

Tracing the situated history of how land becomes territorialised as property in Ouakam accentuates that private property is – and always has been – ‘a contingent achievement, not a final settlement’ (Ghertner, 2020: 564). Blomley (2020: 39–40) reminds us that property is not an inside/outside condition but a complex ‘relational meshwork’ within which we are all differently entangled. In his words, ‘to occupy, traverse, use and dwell in social space is to confront property’. Property, then, is not an abstracted or disembodied agent of territory but is the product of extant power relations in a particular place and time. Thus, if the territoriality of property is a ‘relational product’, then it can also be a ‘relational resource’, organising ‘the use, occupation, possession and imagining of land’ (Blomley, 2020: 41). This resource is, beyond much doubt, primarily exploited by those in positions of power. However, residents occupying a more marginal relation to property are still capable of reconfiguring its relationality to suit their own needs. And it is ultimately within this framework that I situate gardiens’ strategies of entanglement.

Mamadou

Mamadou's story does not begin in the ‘city’ as such, but on the periphery of the original Lébou village of Ouakam. He had travelled to Dakar from his birthplace in Conakry – spending time in Freetown, Bamako and the Gambia – before eventually settling in the dense forest northwest of the village. Mamadou, Sadio and I sat on three small wooden stools in front of the two-storey concrete structure he called home, which was outfitted with running water but had no electricity. The ground floor, secured with corrugated iron, was reserved for everyday economic activity, including Mamadou's small vegetable stand and coal trading business alongside another man dealing in cement who rented the space from the absent owner. Each time I visited, the activity on the ground floor spilled out onto the street and new faces populated its hollow interior, blurring the boundaries between private and public life and imbuing the structure's apparent vacancy with what Benjamin and Lacis (1986) have called ‘porosity.’ The cotton sheets which covered the two large gaps (intended for windows) on the second storey gestured towards the structure's domestic quarters, with laundry undulating in the breeze serving as the sole indicator of inhabitation.

How Mamadou became a gardien is – effectively – the story of how the land beneath his feet became property. He told me he had settled on the land long before any of the surrounding buildings were erected when one day, the land beneath him was sold by the Lébou to two different owners. The ensuing negotiation over the land title was long and complicated, but eventually an owner was established through a tribunal. Recognising the tenuousness of the buyer's ownership, however, Mamadou saw an opportunity. Understanding that the new owner aspired to build a house, he offered to help construct the foundation in exchange for remaining on the property and securing the owner's plot. Considering the advantage of having someone occupy the space in his absence, the owner agreed. Mamadou's story reveals the first aspect of entanglement that I want to emphasise: njarin.

Whether gardiens occupy land before it is sold or squat a plot unbeknownst to the owner, many will try to negotiate their way into remaining on the site by offering to safeguard the buyer's ownership; in effect, entangling themselves as embodied infrastructures of private property (Figure 5). Fredericks’ (2018, 2022) work on the Mbeubeuss landfill in Pikine has been foundational in centring the infrastructural labour of differentiated bodies in Dakar's vital circulations. People fill gaps, reconfigure themselves and reinvent spaces and objects in myriad ways to keep things moving (Simone, 2004). Likewise, in other African contexts, scholars have highlighted the crucial role gardiens play in improving housing and property value through the safeguarding of land ownership, security of building materials and equipment, and the ‘opening up’ of neighbourhoods for infrastructural and housing development (Adu-Gyamfi, 2021; Gough and Yankson, 2011; Wagner, 2021). Applying an infrastructural grammar to the relational meshwork of property reveals the social, affective and material labour that Mamadou performed in ensuring the continuity of propertied ownership. As discussed, Ouakam's uncertain grounds are subjected to constant negotiation and contestation, producing property claims that are always tenuous. The threat of returning from abroad to find someone with a permis d’occuper (permit of occupation) for a plot you purchased is always present. As such, whether gardiens labour in the incremental construction of the house, lie awake at night guarding materials from potential vandals, or facilitate transactions and negotiations for the owner, gardiens reify claims to private property (Figure 6).

Figure 5.

Plot with hanging laundry occupied by gardiens, sandwiched between an unfinished apartment block to the left and a house with multiple étages on the right (photo by the author, 2022).

Figure 6.

Plot occupied by gardiens featuring makeshift shelters with rerouted electrical wire. Ne pas vendre (tr. not for sale) is spray painted on the brickwork (photo by the author, 2022).

As the years went by, the concrete structure surrounding Mamadou was assembled incrementally until eventually stalling in its current state. He told me the owner's wife had passed away and he had fallen into financial trouble. How long the building had been in its current state was never made clear to me. However, approximately 5 years ago, Mamadou decided, after decades apart, to move his family from Guinea into the house. He always told me, candidly, that this was his home and that, despite its condition and the uncertainty associated with being a gardien, it afforded him and his family a better life. However, the owner – since the passing of his wife – had lost interest in the build and was intent on selling. Mamadou explained, regrettably, that the sale of the property would likely lead to his displacement unless he found a way to negotiate a deal – once more – with a prospective buyer.

Following one interview with Mamadou, Sadio said to me ‘you cannot be a gardien if you do not have njarin’. The Wolof word njarin means to be useful or to serve a particular utility to other people. This could refer to a set of skills – such as masonry – or to a position you occupy within the social world. In Dakar, the practice of housebuilding is inseparable from the construction of the family. Indeed, the house is often thought to ‘bring about the family’ (Melly, 2010: 55, emphasis in original). Although the owner struggled to bring this to fruition, the house's ongoing incompletion allowed Mamadou to create a life for his own family in the city. In Douala, Simone (2008: 28) interprets incremental homes as platforms where residents ‘use what they have and what they are doing as a base to further elaborate and diversify urban social economies’. As such, in areas frequently described as peripheral or makeshift ‘there is often a preference to keep things incomplete’ (Simone, 2014: 330); this was certainly the case for Mamadou. Incompletion, in this respect, signified a world of infinite possibility, where nothing is ever complete (Guma, 2020; Nyamnjoh, 2017; Okoye, 2024).

While Simone (2016: 160) writes that affording opportunities in the city is increasingly ‘a matter of staking claims within overcrowded fields of needs, aspirations and demands’, Mamadou's story complicates this. Gardiens do not necessarily make claims to urban space as such, but their utility – or njarin – lies in facilitating and upholding the incomplete claims of others as embodied infrastructures, binding property's relational meshwork. In this way, Mamadou's entanglement exemplifies the indeterminacy of being infrastructured: that is, subjected to both infrastructure's violence and possibility, simultaneously (Lesutis and Kaika, 2024, emphasis in original). While his survival hinged on his njarin in Ouakam's turbulent property market – which clearly contained the possibility of displacement – incompletion, nevertheless, enabled the reunification of his family and sustained the prospect of a home.

Mousa

If Mamadou's njarin was in solidifying claims made in Ouakam's unstable property market, then Mousa's was in keeping things moving. He had come to Dakar from a small village in the Fatick region, where soil degradation and vulnerability to drought has transformed the largely agricultural economy (Piraux et al., 2023). Although I met him many times, I was never able to be with him for very long; he always had somewhere to be, another phone call to take, another job to finish. In brief, Mousa knew everyone, or at least it appeared that way. The one time that I did visit his home – an unfinished apartment unit in a three-storey block owned by a Senegalese family living in Switzerland – he briefly showed me his room. His mattress was fitted on two metal bed frames with a thin carpet separating it from the cold, harsh concrete. Exposed electrical wire poked out of the walls and rubble filled the adjacent, unfinished kitchen and bathroom. Although Mousa seemed proud of his abode – joking that he would have Sadio and I over for tea – he insisted on showing me the roof terrace. When we climbed the stairs, however, I was surprised to find that aside from some used tarpaulin and a water tank, the rooftop was bare concrete. Mousa explained – in detail – the plans he and the homeowners had drawn up for his future room, exhibiting WhatsApp exchanges with the owners, mapping out the room's dimensions, and gesturing the layout of his furniture to me; this rooftop promised to be Mousa's permanent place in Dakar.

Despite my attempts, Mousa much preferred talking to me about his business as a courtier­ (broker) rather than his role as a gardien. He rarely spent much time at the property and told me that he only slept two to three hours per night. When we would walk around Ouakam, Mousa would regularly point me in the direction of apartment blocks with vacant units, describing their features, listing prices and dates of availability. In one interview with a local urban researcher, they joked that ‘everyone [in Dakar] is a courtier’. Indeed, as a corpus of literature suggests, much of the ‘work’ in African urban contexts is about making-work through an assemblage of assorted income-generating activities (Thieme, 2018). In Dakar, the colloquial use of lejanti refers to a kind of ‘shrewd and opportunistic scheming’ required to make ends meet (Prothmann, 2018: 100). And the Wolof phrase ‘na ka lejanti yi’ – which translates loosely to ‘how is your hustle’ – is a popular way of greeting others. In this sense, how people bring different fragments of work together is much more significant than the work itself. To this end, Mousa, like many gardiens, exhibited an extraordinary talent for réseautage: a kind of resourceful practice of networking. Indeed, as I found, réseautage proved to be Mousa's most valuable asset in transforming property's relationality into a resource for himself.

Cook (2015: 295) refers to brokers in Mengaluru, India as ‘ambiguous, skilled, relation-altering individuals [who] offer a unique angle for understanding property relations’. Elsewhere, Björkman (2021) sees brokerage as ‘morally fraught but socially necessary work of transgression, translation, and trans-border navigation’. Here, I want to draw closer attention to the ‘relation altering’ and ‘translating’ functions that Mousa served. Cook (2015) notes that brokers perform ‘link work’ by moving between social worlds and negotiating the differences between them. Although Dakar is a place where belonging is turned ‘inside-out’ – with absent migrants asserting their presence much more forcefully than non-migrants – this is far from a seamless process. Diaspora house builders rely on a variety of ‘unexpected actors and mediators’ to bring their projects into being (Melly, 2010: 59). Indeed, Mousa was instrumental in the incremental construction of the house: managing the inhabited units below his own, hiring and overseeing the work of contractors, and contributing to the building's design, always in constant communication with the owners abroad. Being a gardien afforded him proximity to an abundance of actors involved in the building process who, in turn, relayed him to other diaspora builders. It is well established that, in Dakar, incidental neighbourhood contacts enable rural migrants to expand their sphere of social interaction (Fall, 1998). In Mousa's case, these connections led to him collaborating with a professional real-estate agent to advertise, host viewings and find tenants for the plethora of vacant apartments on the market. He developed an expansive network of acquaintances around the world who – on short return trips to Dakar – would contact him if they needed a place to stay. Gardiennage, however, remained a stigmatised form of work in Dakar's moral economy, and residents often described gardiens as being dishonest and deceitful. According to Lewis and Mosse (2006: 14), brokers need to ‘assume identities in relation to their strategies of interaction’. As such, Mousa had to present himself as trustworthy and reliable to mediate between social spheres, which explains why he distanced himself from the title of gardien, opting instead to emphasise his role as a courtier. This is the labour of réseautage. Mousa would have to perform and present himself otherwise to move between these socially and culturally distant but materially interdependent worlds. In so doing, Mousa's work did not simply involve latching onto already-existing networks and arrangements but entangling himself in a way that transformed them. Writing on African property brokers in Delhi, Gill (2022: 1966) finds them functioning as ‘situated intermediaries critical to both urban dwelling and mobility’. Indeed, absent owners, both returning and visiting Dakarois, and professional real-estate agents relied on Mousa's réseautage to make things work on the ground, illustrating gardiens’ instrumental role in Ouakam's property market. Nonetheless, while Mousa certainly derived autonomy, economic and social capital, and a sense of self-worth from his position as an actor ‘deeply embedded in ongoing transformations of land and housing markets’, I never got the impression that business was very good (Gill, 2022: 1974). The commission he earned was never enough to support his family in his village and afford his own place in Ouakam. The challenge of sustaining the livelihoods of family navigating agrarian change made his role as a gardien all the more critical. As Prothmann (2018: 101) notes, young men in Dakar speak of their ‘responsibility’ to migrate using the Wolof phrase ‘am taxawaay’, which translates to presence and assistance. Mousa's continued presence in Ouakam, held together by the unremitting work of réseautage, and the prospect of permanence, represented in the rooftop, was not his alone. Although displacement did not seem so immanent in Mousa's case, his relationship with the owners – which he described as familial – was still non-contractual. While these relational entanglements might seem more durable, the following story shows they are often far more fragile than they appear.

Youssouf

Although the Monument de la Renaissance Africaine served as a public space for many, to Youssouf it was an indispensable asset. This was where he ran a small business taking pictures of tourists. If he was not there, he was a short walk away in Ouakam, in a small room on the roof of a four-storey apartment block featuring a single mattress, a small gas cooker, a fan, an old office chair and a couple of luggage cases. How Youssouf came to reside in that room is a long and complicated affair, which begins when the now complete four-storey structure was just one-storey high.

Like Mousa, Youssouf came to Dakar from the Fatick region. He began living in an unfinished home not as a gardien but renting from one. Oftentimes gardiens will outsource their responsibilities – unbeknownst to the owner – by subletting to other migrants at inflated prices. I had come across two such properties during my fieldwork where there appeared to be several occupants in a single unfinished house. On both occasions, they refused to speak to me, as they believed I worked for the owner. These tactics were often cited by residents to justify claims of gardiens as deceitful. One month, when Youssouf had difficulty affording his rent, his friend – who worked as a mason – offered to rent him a room for 60,000 CFA (US$93) a month in an unfinished house without the knowledge of the owner. Youssouf moved into the structure that was already inhabited by several others. Eventually, the owner returned to find evidence of several squatters inhabiting the property. Simply by chance, Youssouf was the only one present at the time. As he told me, this allowed him to negotiate a private arrangement with the owner, assuring them that the others would not return, and that he would act as a gardien. As time went on, Youssouf oversaw the property's construction and developed an intimate relationship with the owner. The owner confided in him about his struggles abroad and trouble financing the house. In these moments, he would tell Youssouf that he had not taken him on as a gardien, but as a brother. The Wolof phrase dëkkale bu yàgg, mbokk la translates to ‘living together for a long time turns neighbours into relatives’. This phrase, Sinatti (2014: 219) writes, suggests that the line separating kin from strangers ‘is largely a matter of self-perception’. Although the two did not physically live together, the house fostered an intimate, entangled relationship of mutual dependence. Youssouf's relationship with the owner, in this sense, was unique and – given how important personal relations are with owners – other gardiens frequently asked him how he managed to develop such a strong bond.

Although this article focuses on how gardiens entangle themselves in the relational meshwork of property in Ouakam, this is not to diminish that owners are themselves vulnerable to a range of uncertainties. The emotional entanglement that developed between the owner and Youssouf resembles something akin to what Simone (2018a: 20) calls ‘strange alliances’, which refers to the diversity of interdependent relationships that form between often disparate and divergent actors in contexts of heightened uncertainty and held together through a practice and politics of ‘rogue care’. While this sort of relation-making would have required a skilful combination of both njarin and réseautage, it differed in that it did not always hinge on a transaction. Although property is almost always abstracted as an instrumental legal entitlement or quantifiable financial asset, it structures and controls access to a whole range of life-giving needs (Blomley, 2020). While the owners’ property might well have been an accumulation strategy, it was still entwined in a variety of cultural meanings, familial obligations and individual conceptions of self-worth. For both Mousa and the owner, the house was concomitantly a place of everyday social reproduction, absence and status maintenance and a leverage for hopes of improvement (Boccagni and Bivand Erdal, 2021: 1072). What made the alliance between Youssouf and the owner strange was that the stability of one's property relied on the instability of the others. On the one hand, for Youssouf to remain in place, the owner's financial troubles needed to persist. On the other, the owner's attainment of whatever ambitions he had inscribed in the project hinged on the assumption that Youssouf would one day leave. Simone (2018a: 37) notes that ‘strange alliances’ persist ‘seemingly impervious to contradiction’. Indeed, the durability of their relationship was expressed materially in the construction of an additional room on the roof, where Youssouf lived rent-free for some time. This made it even more hurtful when – shortly after I had met Youssouf – the owner insisted on his eviction. When the building was completed, the owner transferred it to a property management agency, and it was Youssouf's impression that the agency slowly convinced the owner that the terrace could serve a more lucrative use. In my most recent correspondence, Youssouf had been forced to return to his village, bringing into sharp relief what entanglement ultimately meant for many.

While De Boeck's (2015: 53) similar heuristic of the ‘knot’ denotes ‘world-making’ possibilities, he writes that it also contains within it the possibility of ‘closure, blockage and suffocation’. As I hope all these stories show, entanglement retains a resistant character. It is possible for property's paradox to be made operative – however temporarily – in the service of one's needs or desires. Indeed, both Mousa and Mamadou remain in Ouakam. Yet, no matter how strategically it might be performed or imagined, entanglement can never rid itself of this dangerous paradox. In Dakar, one's njarin, réseautage, or the ‘strange alliances’ formed in the process are always valorised in relation to the needs of much more powerful others and the maintenance of their extractive inhabitation. Nevertheless, for some residents it remains the only conceivable – or indeed possible – way of life in Ouakam.

Dwelling on the land of others

In an interview with a Lébou resident, I remarked on the many ‘empty’ plots I came across in Ouakam where it appeared that financial trouble or a land dispute had stalled construction. Before I could continue, he challenged me, ‘you say there is nothing here … but there is something’. He explained this land was once a dense forest, and that someone would have cleared it to cultivate a small field or build a house, ‘if there is a field, you cannot say that there is nothing there’. Under Lébou customary law, it is the family that clears the land who holds it and what I had let slip was the old colonial fiction of terra nulius (Kaag et al., 2011). De Boeck and Baloji (2016: 296), writing on Kinshasa, claim that in the end there is no terra nulius – ‘no ground zero’ – there is always ‘another history to be taken into account, another claim to be contested, another negotiation to be started up’ in the micro-politics of living together in the city. In practice, Lébou customary law does not have the final say over who owns what in Ouakam, nor does the state. Everyone makes claims to land that, depending on where they are placed within its milieu, are legitimated in some way. Past attempts to settle or ‘rationalise’ this complexity have only added to its opacity. This has created a landscape of countless shady deals and frequent injustices, of which incomplete homes are perhaps the most noticeable expression. As Édouard Glissant (1997: 191) writes, ‘the opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced’. Indeed, any attempt to distil Ouakam's opacity would ultimately obscure what is really going on. Rather, it is opacity itself – where no one quite knows where things are going and anything is up for grabs – that generates the imperative to assert and secure the possession of land. And although this opacity might be full of antagonisms, it provides gardiens with something to work with.

I want to close by suggesting that the stories of Mamadou, Mousa and Youssouf hold implications for how we might think of resistance more broadly, and that the notion of entanglement might help us make sense of all the contradictions we encounter in contemporary urban life. In theorising ‘dwelling as difference’, Lancione (2020: 278, emphasis in original) theorises dwelling as a ‘habitual and creative way of inhabiting the world … of finding and holding our place into the world while actively caring about it’. But what if that world is broken? What if that world has left you behind? Or, what if that world has to be made on the land of others? Here, I am riffing off Jackson's (2014) idea of ‘broken world thinking’ to argue that entanglement represents a kind of broken world politics. Mamadou, Mousa and Youssouf unravelled property's relational meshwork in ingenious ways to write themselves into its distributional matrix. In each case, however, their strategies ultimately held together the exploitative and violent status quo of property. Their tactics were not articulated as radical, they did not aspire to transcend a particular imaginary of property or enact non-commodified, anti-capitalist forms of collective life, they were simply work arounds. ‘If fully freeing ourselves from power is indeed an impossible task’, Martínez (2024: 1394) writes, ‘perhaps there are lessons in communities struggling to increase their autonomy vis-a-vis its functioning’. Entanglement, in this regard, reveals different understandings and registers of agency, in moments when ‘rupture from the dominant system appears implausible, but simply navigating the system's contradictions feels inadequate’ (Bonilla, 2015: 62). It illuminates the everyday ‘rhythms of endurance’ that make use of what is already there (Simone, 2018a) and – like refusal (Roane, 2018) and fugitivity (Best and Hartman, 2005) – ‘complicate categorisation, escape observation, and contest capture’ (Martínez, 2024: 1383). To follow The Re-Arrangements Collective (2023: 11), these are stories about ‘living with and through indeterminacy … always with an eye on a way out, a path to some kind of otherwise’. Agency, in this respect, is ‘something to be discovered, cultivated, nurtured, activated and reactivated to different degrees of potency through relationships with others’; power and weakness, therefore, are fluid, ‘[both] change hands without warning’ (Nyamnjoh, 2017: 256). In this way, Mamadou, Mousa and Youssouf's extraordinary capacity to capture, hold and reconfigure property into something that could move them beyond its repression – however momentarily – expressed a kind of politics.