Cultivating Hustlers: The Agrarian Ethos of Soninke Migration

Sedentariness has been disregarded in migration studies. Although recent scholarship pays greater heed to immobility, the latter is often narrowly conceptualised as the exact opposite of mobility. This article attempts to overcome such dichotomies by focusing on agrarian life and activities in one of the most migratory rural contexts in West Africa, namely the Soninke villages of the Upper Gambia River valley. It shows how young men—normally the most mobile group in Soninke society—are trained to embody an agrarian ethos in order for them to be able to pursue not only agricultural livelihoods but also migratory ones. Physical, social and moral virtues cultivated in farm fields are thought to make the young man fit and adaptable to life and work abroad. The article further suggests that this agrarian ethos is reproduced through migratory dynamics, such as the integration of West African migrants as unqualified labourers in the stratified labour market of Europe and North America. As a synthesis or symbiosis between mobile and immobile cultural practices, the Soninke agrarian ethos provides us with ways of rethinking the relation between migration and sedentariness, thus bridging the dichotomy between the two.