Customer Reviews

Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848-1960 (Western African Studies)

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Manchuelle's history of Soninke migration up to 1960 is based upon extensive research on colonial documents of French West Africa, specifically the places known today as Senegal and Mali. He makes use of everything from crew manifests of river steamers to harvest reports by French administrators to argue his central point: that the Soninke people began migrating in such great numbers not because they were forced by harsh colonial policies and taxes, but because they were attracted to high-wage jobs that allowed them to accumulate wealth on their own terms.

The author describes Soninke communities, farming systems, and authority structures as they were in the 19th century, and analyzes the important role played by those communities in "desert side" trade: Soninke merchants acted as commercial middle-men between desert-dwelling nomads to the north and sedentary farmers to the south. He goes on to explain how young Soninke were drawn by this intermediary role into itinerant trade and seasonal agricultural labor even before the advent of French colonialism in the region. Modern migration, the author says, is more or less an extension of this earlier form.

Manchuelle reinforces his argument effectively by showing that the Soninke's neighbors, while subjected to the same conditions as the Soninke (e.g. drought, forced labor and colonial head taxes), migrated with nowhere near the same frequency. His contention that Soninke migration stems more from cultural factors than from issues of survival seems hard to argue with, given the weight of documentary evidence cited (the endnotes and bibliography are about as long as Manchuelle's text itself).

I would have greatly liked to see a follow-up study on migration since 1960, but alas the author's career was cut short by the crash of TWA 800 in 1996. "Willing Migrants" is clearly written and impressively researched, and is useful to anyone wishing to understand modern migration in Africa.