MOBILIMA · Mobility in situ: Debating emigration and return in Western Mali

Mobility in situ: Debating emigration and return in Western Mali

Today in Europe, debates on migration saturate the public space. But too little is known of how these issues are understood in emigration societies. MOBILIMA has tackled this issue by investigating the local debates around emigration and return in the Western region of Kayes (Mali), which has a long history of sustained involvement in transnational migration. Though this migration and its social effects have been the topic of a wide range of studies, a systematic approach of the local understandings and discussions of these dynamics in a historical perspective is still much needed. The project demonstrates that societies marked by mobility (Kayes is not only an emigrant society but a place to which people migrate too) are highly reflective on these dynamics that profoundly affect social structures and individual and collective self-representation. In this respect, my work contributes to a discussion of the notion of a “culture of migration”: this idea surfaces in many scholarly works on Soninke migration, and is also widespread in ordinary discourses, circulating among migrants and non-migrants. I wish to unpack such a notion: rather than a homogeneous culture of migration, I explore cultural and discursive productions around migration as fields of tensions with historical ruptures. How do family members of former and present migrants, former migrants themselves, non-migrants (some of whom are would migrants) debate and conceptualize international mobility? What are their own terms, their cultural references, their understandings of the historical dynamics at stake? This project has been developed with the following objectives: 1) To contribute to the social history of migrants who returned in the 1970s-1980s thus engaging with the scholarly discussions on return migration. This project thoroughly documents two often quoted but under-researched experiments: the “Coopérative of Somankidi”, a project named after the adjacent village Somankidi-Coura (literally “New Somankidi”), which was founded in 1977 by returnees from France of various West African origins; and the Radio Rurale de Kayes (RRK), initiated in 1988 by Italian NGOs, then funded and supported by returnees. 2) To contribute to theoretical discussions on social reproduction in contemporary Africa. How social reproduction is envisioned now that the migratory system that has dominated for decades is in crisis is a key question I investigate, asking in what respect migration fits in longer patterns of dependence. This stems from the analysis of the ways migration is both narrated and memorialized, and notably for the analysis of songs and broadcasts kept at the RRK and covering the late 1980s-early 1990s. 3) To provide a multilayered account of the key arguments around migration and return in Mali, past and present, and contribute to current academic and public discussions about the visions of Europe emerging from an emigrating area. Migration is but one of the socially sanctioned avenues for social success, and I analyze the gendered and generational dimensions of these paths as they are locally discussed.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union