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Individualization Strategies Among City Dwellers in Contemporary Africa: Balancing the Shortcomings of Community Solidarity and the Individualism of the Struggle for Survival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

Alain Marie
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In urban Africa today, like elsewhere, the purported survival strategies of individuals are determined constantly by severe material constraints. The poor and the new poor are overwhelmingly new city dwellers dependent on precarious, intermittent odd jobs (petits boulots; single women with small children; young school dropouts (déscolarisés, condemned to the expediencies of the streets, illicit actions and, in many cases, delinquency; unemployed graduates (diplomés-chômeurs), without opportunities for paid employment; as well as those designated successively in the vernacular as conjoncturés, déflatés and compressés (i.e. affected by wage reductions, permanent employees downgraded to temporary contracts or casual labour, and workers who have lost their jobs through massive redundancies). These individuals can meet only the most basic needs (eating, feeding their children, paying the rent). When survival becomes an issue, long-term strategies tend to be constrained by the need to fulfil the most basic needs and daily necessities. At any rate, pursuit of this objective does not involve selective mobilization of optimized means, when those who admittedly are looking out for themselves (se cherchent), rummage about (grouillent à droite [et] à gauche), pursue small jobs in unskilled manual labour or portering, or as night watchmen (racolage pour trouver des petits contrats de manoeuvrage, de manutention ou de veilleur de nuit), search constantly for opportunities to sell items that they bought for a little bit less, inland or across the border. They may also try to establish a business or small craft shop and, during the interim, get by with difficulty thanks to sporadic aid from relatives who are also unemployed.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 45 , supplement S8: Household strategies for survival 1600–2000: fission, factions and cooperation , December 2000 , pp. 137 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 2000

References

1. The expressions in italics are from the French African vernacular in the major cities of West Africa.

2. These activities are occasional, irregular, temporary, isolated and very poorly paid jobs. The trick is to discover them by expanding one's network and increasing the interactions, offers and applications.

3. A detailed description of the implicit and explicit socialization procedures that give rise to individual habits driven by a natural inclination toward solidarity appears in the study by Rabain, Jacqueline, L'enfant du lignage. Du sewage à la classe d'âge (Paris, 1979), on informal education among the Ouolof in DakarGoogle Scholar.

4. This tradition remains significant in Dumont, Louis, Essais sur I'individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l'idéologie moderne (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar.

5. Greater mobilization of the workforce for tasks exceeding the capacities of domestic units; gifts of food, various services and prized commodities that sustain support networks and offer entitlement to various gifts in return to cope with daily needs, such as social obligations or production hazards; recurring gestures of hospitality and commensality; reciprocal participation n i wedding or funeral expenses; sets of services to the eldest and the chiefs in return for guaranteed return disbursements on their part, etc.

6. Cf. Meilkssoux, Claude, Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris, 1975).Google Scholar

7. Mauss, Marcel, “Essai sur le don”, in Mauss, Marcel (ed.), Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris, 1960).Google Scholar

8. For a critique of the culturalist orientation of Maussian theory, from a materialistic point of view, cf. Marie, Alain, “L'échange: sous le don, la dette”, Sciences humaines, 23 (1998), pp. 28–31Google Scholar.

9. This is why among the Dan from Ivory Coast, for example, regardless of the amount of matrimonial compensation initially paid for the wife, the husband's debt toward his in-laws is infinite: it is said that “the dowry never ends”, in that the husband has a never ending obligation to give gifts, to accommodate, and to help his in-laws (personal observation).

10. E.g. land clearing and work in the fields of others, joining collective hunts, mutual aid in house building, reciprocal guarding of part of the herds. n. The relation between parents and children, between older and younger generations, between chiefs and subjects.

12. The relation between givers of a wife and recipients, between patron and client, between protector and protege, between benefactor and beneficiary.

13. Durkheim, Emile, Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse (Paris, 1912).Google Scholar

14. A more detailed analysis appears in Marie, Alain, “Du sujet communautaire au sujet individuel. ne lecture anthropologique de la realite africaine contemporaine”, in Marie, Alain (ed.) L'Afrique des individus. Itinéraires citadins dans la société contemporaine (Abidjan, Bamako, Dakar, Nyamey) (Paris, 1997), pp. 53–110Google Scholar.

15. Business failures, poor harvests, accidents, deaths of young children, infertility, impotence, stillborn babies, successive illnesses, decline, madness, epidemics, death in the family, death of the victim etc.; in today's world, also traffic accidents, losing one's job, dropping out of school, bankruptcy, etc.

16. Ideas about witchcraft help exonerate society from any semblance of a cause for criticism or subversion (in addition to sanctifying the social order in the stories of th e world's creation by die gods and the divine heroes and society's establishment by our forebears). The community order is thus sanctified according to Durkheim's definition of the term: the profane shall not affect it; individuals have no alternative but to submit. For an analysis related to this perspective, cf. Gluckman, Max, “Crises morales et solutions magiques”, Economies et sociétés, Cahiers de l'I.S.E.A., 2 02 1967, pp. 5–48Google Scholar.

17. Elias, Norbert, La société des individus (Paris, 1991, fourth French edition).Google Scholar

18. Chiefs, distinguished individuals, exorcists, religious officials, great warriors, political entre-1 preneurs, rich merchants; in today's world, political officials, successful businessmen, outstanding pupils or students etc.

19. For example by making their “invisible” doubles work as slaves on their “invisible” plantations. 20. This account presumes a view of the social world as a “closed society” devoted to simple reproduction, excluding expanded reproduction that indefinitely increases the resources and diversifies the positions to be conquered. In a closed society, individualism therefore automatically has a detrimental effect on others. Generally, a “materialist” explanation prevails for this symbolic representation. Following a case study on witchcraft in France today, Jeanne Favret-Saada noted that faith presumed a closed conception of the social universe and its economic resources: each individual is in charge of a domain; once all domains have been appropriated, sorcerers need to remove resources magically from other domains to expand their own. See Favret-Saada, Jeanne, Les mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorceUerie dans le Bocage (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar.

11. On political aspects of witchcraft in societies based on lineage, see Augé, Marc, Théorie des pouvoirs et idéologic (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar , and idem, Pouvoirs de vie, pouvoirs de mort (Paris, 1977). Regarding the phenomenon's context with respect to “modern” political stakes in contemporary Africa, see Geschiere, Peter, Sorcellerie etpolitique en Afrique. La viande des autres (Paris, 1995)Google Scholar.

22. For an especially demonstrative case study, see Bonnafé, Pierre, Nzo Lipfu, le lignage de la mort. La sorceUerie, idéologie de la lutte sociale sur le plateau Kukuya (Nanterre, 1979)Google Scholar.

23. Rumour itself is fraught with danger: it activates the magic forces of powerful men and exorcists.

24. Representations depict persons as consisting of several psychological components: a vital force, defensive and aggressive powers, shadow, mirror images. Thus, the idea of the individual's essential duplicity appears rational (“I am another” and even several others). We understand why an individual accused of witchcraft accepts this accusation: he knows that his double may have acted maliciously and beyond any conscious control of his, and that it is very believable if his double has been captured or manipulated withou t his knowledge by a sorcerer's double. See La notion de personne en Afrique noire, Colloques du CNRS (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar.

25. Bayart, Jean-François, L'Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre (Paris, 1989).Google Scholar

26. Reciprocity is intrinsically an extremely rigorous and effective constraint: if an individual abstains from attending large funeral gatherings, he risks being left alone to bury his loved ones n i shame and, worse still, being buried all alone himself “like a dog”. He will be doomed to wander eternally and to oblivion, which is tantamount to hell.

27. This explains the sudden changes of fortune, the accidents, the diseases, death of a loved one, loss of a job, disaffection of one's patronage, professional failure, and persistent failures on examinations or recruitment tests. The suddenness, accumulation, or repetition of all such events reveals that they are far from fortuitous.

28. Though analytically distinct, they are in reality united in “a wealth of imaginary social meanings” that stick together and form a bond between the social actors, who think in their world and act strategically within it without needing to disassociate the one from the other. See Castoriadis, Cornelius, L'institution imaginaire de la société (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar.

29. These are ad hoc gatherings based on free individual accessions and released from the community framework: mutual aid and mutual savings groups - tontines - between neighbours and colleagues; sports associations, recreational groups, committees of parents of schoolchildren, neigh-bourhood associations, self-defence groups against crime, syndicates, political parties, churches, prayer groups, fundamentalist Islamic communities etc.

30. See Marie, Alain, “‘Y a pas l'argent’: l'endetté insolvable et le créancier floué, deux figures complémentaires de la pauvreté abidjanaise”, Revue Tiers-Monde, 36 (1995), no. 142, pp. 303–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Statements recorded in Abidjan between 1992 and 1997 in several working-class neighbour-hoods. See Leimdorfer, François and Marie, Alain (eds), Individualisations citadines et développement d'une société civile: Abidjan et Dakar, Research report commissioned by the ministry's representative for cooperation and French language, I.E.D.E.S. (Université de Paris I), 06 1998Google Scholar ; Alain Marie (ed.), Paradoxes de I'individualisation dans la societe abidjaaise. Etudes de cos en milieu social préarisé, final report, GIDIS-CI, ORSTOM, Centre ORSTOM de Petit Bassam, Abidjan, December 1994; Marie, “Y a pas l'argent”, idem, l'Afrique des individus; idem, “La ruse de l'histoire. Comment, au nom du libéralisme, l'ajustement structurel accouche l'Afrique de ses classes sociales”, in M. Haubert et al. (eds), Les sociétés civiles face au marché. Le chargement social dans le monde post-colonial (Paris, 2000, forthcoming).

32. The clientele becomes poorer, the deadbeats increase, as competition rises as laid-off workers and jobless graduates join the ranks of the self-employed.

33. Dismissals after rehiring workers formerly paid monthly with part-time contracts or as day labourers, thus alternating periods of uncertain and poorly paid employment with periods of forced inactivity.

34. See Marie, L'Afrique des individus.

35. Vuarin, R., “Les entreprises de l'individu au Mali. Des chefs d'entreprise innovateurs dans le procès d'individualisation”, in , Marie, L'Afrique des individus, pp. 171–200.Google Scholar

36. Leimdorfer, F., “Individus entre familles et entreprises: patrons et patronnes de restaurants populaires á Abidjan”, in , Marie, L'Afrique des individus, pp. 113–169.Google Scholar

37. Gérard, E., “La lettre et l'individu: marginalisation et recherche d'intégration des ‘jeunes Diplômés’ bamakois au chômage”, in , Marie, L'Afrique des individus, pp. 203–248.Google Scholar

38. Kponhassia, G., “Reconversions professionelles, reconversions mentales. L'irruption des salariés ivoiriens au chômage dans le secteur des activités informelles autrefois abandonnées aux étrangers”, in , Leimdorfer and , Marie, Individualisations citadines, pp. 149–158.Google Scholar

39. Ori, B., “Initiatives d'insertion socio-économique et démarches d'individualisation chez les jeunes citains d'Abidjan”, in , Leimdorfer and , Marie, Individualisations citadines, pp. 159–178.Google Scholar

40. Such help may have included support during their studies, help with finding a job, funds to get them started, gifts of money, accommodation etc.

41. Marie, Alain, “L'insécurité urbaine: l'engrenage des violences”, in Herault, G. (ed.), Jeunes, culture de la rue et violence urbaine en Ajrique, Proceedings from the international symposium in Abidjan, 5-7 May 1997 (Ibadan, 1997).Google Scholar

42. Ouattara, S., “Freshnies et quinzanies: la prostitution juvénile au secours des families”, in , Marie, Paradoxes de I'individualisation, pp. 269–309.Google Scholar

43. They have no word for the conjugal family.

44. On the evolution of views regarding conjugality and the procreative family, see Marie, Alain, “Les structures familiales à l'épreuve de l'individualisation citadine”, in Pilon, M.et al. (eds), Ménages et families en Afrique. Approches des dynamiques contempomines, Les études du Ceped, 15 (Paris, 1997), pp. 279–299Google Scholar.

45. See Marie, Alain, “Avatars de la dette communautaires. Crise des solidarités, sorcellerie et procés d'individualisation (itinéraires abidjanais)”, in , Marie, L'Afrique des individus, pp. 249–328.Google Scholar

46. On this subject, see Piault, Colette (ed.), Prophétisme et thérapeutique (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar ; Dozon, Jean-Pierre, La cause des prophètes. Politique et religion en Afrique contemporaine (Paris, 1995)Google Scholar , for studies of Ivory Coast.

47. For a case study of the role of these Pentecostal religions in Ghana, see Meyer, Birgit, “Les églises pentecôtistes africaines, Satan et la dissociation de la ‘tradition’”, Anthropologie et sociétés, 22 (1998), pp. 63–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. See Alain Marie, “Pas de société civile sans démocratic Contre l'État e t sa société, l'exigence démocratique des jeunes chômeurs abidjanais engagés dans l'opposition”, in Leimdorfer and , Marie, Individualisations citadines, pp. 63–111, “La ruse de l'histoire”Google Scholar.

49. This crisis of the sociopolitical debt is highlighted, for example, in the following statement: “Among our ministers, there are many to whom we have given money [often the entire extended family, including all the heads of a village family, contributed toward their study costs]. And they do not help. There has been a break in contact.”