Migrations and Mobilities in Sahelian West Africa
Authors: Rain David Rickter 
Published: March 2024

Human population movements have throughout history balanced social obligations with vocational or entrepreneurial activities, with all practices heavily influenced by patterns of human and physical geography. West Africa’s particular shape and location on the Earth’s surface create special conditions for human mobility. West Africafeatures a complex system of human population movements ranging from temporary labor migration to herder mobility, apprenticeships, and other mostly urban-based work opportunities. Demographers, historians, geographers, and others have studied these movements and have worked to correlate them with underlying patterns of precipitation, food sufficiency, economic opportunity, and household dynamics. Understanding the complexities of human population movements in the region provides a window into not only diverse cultures but also the ways these communities have remained resilient in the face of periodic food-security crises. Often the ways outsiders view population movements in West Africa is biased toward the Western-style permanent move, where a job seeker cuts ties with her former home and sets up housekeeping someplace entirely new—a pattern only rarely encountered on the continent of Africa. The region known as the Sahel features a temperature and precipitation regime characterized by an extremely seasonal and unimodal distribution of rainfall that creates starkly delimited wet and dry seasons. Climate is a well-known feature of the Sahelian West African region, with influence on all aspects of life. In the Sahel, there is only one rainfed cropping season, leaving a “dead season” of six months or more when rainfed cropping is impracticable. Rainfed agricultural production is prey to the vicissitudes of the weather, and on-farm investments often reflect drought risk. Precipitation corresponds to the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), an area of contact between air masses north and south of the equator that follows the high-sun season throughout the year. The northernmost extent of the ITCZ brings needed precipitation to the Sahelian zone but is unreliable. Agricultural conditions are satisfactory in approximately four out of every five years, but there is a propensity toward drought (or in the other extreme case, flooding) on a regular though indeterminate basis. In response to this climate and environmental context, humans in the West African region have adapted in multiple ways to use rainfed agriculture when practicable and spread assets among livestock, cropping, and social network investments that often span considerable distances. In order to understand the complex interplay of place characteristics and human practices, typologies of movements are helpful. In anthropological fieldwork on mobility among the Hausa people of southern Niger and northern Nigeria, Harold Olofson identified twenty-five emic (or locally defined) categories of spatial movement, all but one of which were circular in nature. In a cosmological view of mobility, destinations are frequently indeterminate, and little qualitative distinction exists between yawon ganin gari (walk of seeing the town) and yawon ganin duniya (walk of seeing the world). In other words, there is not much difference between stepping a few yards from one’s door and traveling hundreds of miles away. Perhaps the differences between short- and long-term mobility are governed by cultural norms and economic logic, but particular decisions to move are difficult to quantify due to the flexibility of the practice. Of all the intriguingly interlocking explanations for West Africa’s complex patterns of human migration—environmental, sociopolitical, economic—perhaps the most compelling ones see a kind of pocketbook rationality in their sometimes erratic-appearing moves, from one rural farming setting to another, or living half the year in a nearby city, or traveling from market town to market town in a serpentine pattern reflecting the varied landscapes of the region, so heavily flavored by precipitation. Destinations for movements can be markets, through-points, or friends in a social grouping who could be a key link in a time of emergency, when any contact however indirect could come in handy during a drought. Westerners who view migration as a permanent move with cut ties to the home region, or who are blinded by their survey instruments, will miss the complexities of entire cultural systems organized across sometimes-great distances, with some of the movements over a millennium old. Some balanced place and network investments in transcontinental trade routes to the Maghreb or to the Guinea (gold, ivory, or slave) Coast. In the city of Maradi, a city of approximately three hundred thousand in southern Niger along the border with Nigeria, mobilities practiced by itinerant sellers became more attuned to market opportunities during the colonial period. Having a detailed understanding of all mobilities practiced by women, men, or children helps shed light on the social cohesion and resilience, expressed geographically through asset-spreading, complex social networks based on gifts and reciprocal sharing (such as would take place at a wedding or naming ceremony), and reliance on information—particularly meteorological and market information—to allow people to make informed household decisions.