Mobility as a defining feature of West Africa

In West Africa whilst migration is a driving force of urbanisation, it is also driving change in many other areas, from gender, to agricultural, the arts or education. At times, the vitality and youth of the African continent make it appear that everything is in movement, or could at any point take off. However discussions surrounding African mobility often appear more concerned with European bound migration and quantifying flows than understanding more predominant and everyday forms of internal regional migration taking place within the West African context.

In Benin, the proverbial expression ‘oxo lè wè mon non yi kpè in’ translates to ‘only mountains do not cross paths’ The expression is used both as a warning, to respect one another as your paths will cross again, and as a comfort to soften the blow of painful separation. In West Africa, whilst mountains stay put, everything else can be mobilised, be it people, commodities, or ideas. Mobility is a defining trait of West Africa, “fundamental to any understanding of African social life”.1 Moreover, an important feature of socio-economic life in African cities is a “dedication to turning spaces into those of movement.”2

Mobility in West Africa is rooted in cultures of migration and the region is criss-crossed with pre-colonial trade routes. Today paths cross in markets, in taxis, in airports, and increasingly online, as mobile technologies contribute to mobility practices in West Africa. For Achille Mbembe, mobility is as constitutive of African sociability, an essential vector of transformation and change, of the organisation of space and territories and definitions of belonging.3 Migration is not just an economic imperative, but is also tied up with personhood, for example for the young men who, through mobility become adventurers.4

The migratory adventure was captured perfectly by the famous anthropologist, Jean Rouch, who back in 1967 produced the docu-fiction entitled Jaguar.5 It is the account of three friends who set out from Niger to the Ghanaian cities of Kumasi and Accra. The main protagonists experience the city in contrasting ways: as a poverty trap or a land of opportunity, but come together to open a successful market-stall, becoming “jaguars” (slang for cool kids) before heading back to Niger their pockets full of hard-earned cash.

However, rather than focus on narratives of migration within Africa, research on African migration is often preoccupied with the arrival of Africans in Europe. Research and policy has been preoccupied with West African migration to Europe or North America.6 This is in line with the false but predominant assumption that all sub-Saharan migrants are heading to Europe. Whilst in fact approximately 70% of sub-Saharan African international migration remains within the African Union.7 Indeed, most of the migration in West Africa is inter-regional,8 regional flows account for 84% of movements within West Africa, seven times more than migration flows from West Africa to other parts of the world.9 In Africa, the West African region has the highest number of inter-regional and international migrants; a figure of 8.4 million, representing 2.8% of the population.10

Attempts to quantify migration flows are conducted by the approximations of the informal flows of people and goods, which are hard to capture through the administrative and statistical apparatus of states. Migration paths in West Africa are multipolar and shift depending on economic fluctuation crisis or growth. Indeed, migrants move in relation to the political economy of the region, responding to the boom and bust of various locations. In West Africa mobility remains a strategy in the face of high poverty levels, the absence of a welfare state and economic vulnerabilities that create high levels of volatility. This in turn, has shaped the emergence of cities in West Africa where mobility is very much built into urban livelihoods.