After trafficking: Togolese girls’ orientations to life in a West African city

Introduction

This article presents an alternative explanation for why parents send their children to work outside the home. In particular, I am looking at the practice of adolescent Togolese girls migrating into Nigeria to work as domestic servants, a practice falling under the legal category of trafficking per the 2000 UN Trafficking Protocol and the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). Instead of the human rights explanation rooted in a discourse around “modern day slavery” ¹ wherein desperate, impoverished families are effectively coerced into giving up their children to duplicitous profiteers, ² or my informants’ understanding of the practice as a rite of passage into marriage, I take it as a post–Cold War strategy on behalf of families to secure better possibilities in an era in which the collective imagining of a prosperous future within Togo has been increasingly foreclosed. This concept of Togo as a site of “non-futures” derives from Charles Piot’s (2010) Nostalgia for the Future, which recounts the development climate in the 1990s, as anti-Soviet interests, particularly of France and the United States, began pulling their financial backing from then President Gnassingbe Eyadema, whose loyalty they had previously sought as one of the few pro-Western figures in the region. At the same time, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank austerity measures and a mandate to privatize social services constituted a challenge to state sovereignty (Piot, 2010: 2–3). The economic crisis and the toll of living under a long and intractable dictatorship created a national culture of exile, where citizens increasingly understood that horizons for a better future lay beyond their borders.

The Togolese practice of sending children out of the country to work is a manifestation of a contemporary understanding of the future, and this shifting temporal and spatial sensibility impacts the way in which adolescents conduct themselves. This contrasts with a more universal human rights claim that poverty, vulnerability, and “inadequate information about trafficking and its risks” are the driving forces behind what is deemed trafficking (Cohen, 2003: 13), and with the folk understanding that the ritualized practice of girls traveling to the city to work is a rite of passage into adulthood, enabling them to secure the necessary clothes and dishes to marry. Here, I explain their desire to constantly leave as bound by material constraints, but one framed by a different understanding of the future than their independence era parents or colonial era grandparents, who came of age during a time when nationalism was a collective project, even among the non-elite cadres of Togolese society, albeit in “subtle and concealed forms” (Lawrence, 2007: 149).

For this article, I present stories demonstrating three exemplary figures: the cosmopolitanist, the localist, and an intermediate who lies somewhere in between. The figures who inhabit these categories were girls who originated from a case study village in central Togo that I have named Yonda. They had finished their tours of duty as domestic servants and were living in a market neighborhood in northern Lagos called Mile 12. (I refer to them as girls instead of women, not because of their age, but rather because their lives are largely in flux and they have yet to lay down roots or commit to a long-term trajectory with respect to marriage, work, geography, etc.) I would like to qualify that the cosmopolitan, the localist, and the one who lies somewhere in between are not essentialized ideal types. Instead, they are exemplary cases of the way in which these girls used a wide variety of strategies to establish themselves as wage earners and family members—be it with their kin back in the village or their constructed communities in the city. And they circulated within these spaces under a set of constraints that limited their freedoms, regardless of location.

Methodologically, I am looking at these girls at a particular moment in their lives that I identify as a “vital conjuncture” following a cultural demographer Jennifer Johnson-Hanks (2002: 871). Johnson-Hanks concept of the “vital conjuncture” speaks to a transformative moment in a person’s life when the social structures shaping her behavior come into view. “Vital” because it focuses on events related to birth, death, or change in civil status (such as marriage or migration), and “conjuncture” in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of “relatively short-term conditions that manifest social structure and serve as the matrix for social action” (Johnson-Hanks, 2005: 24). With respect to my research, I take the completion of bopi bateh onati as a vital conjuncture, when the girls had finished their (average) 3-year contract as domestic servants and then had to answer the question, “What next?”

Per the legal definition of trafficking, these girls do not qualify as victims because they had aged out of childhood (i.e. they are over 18 years old) and, thus, were able to consent to their working conditions. And the decisions they were making regarding migration, work, and marriage occurred within this conjuncture of structured expectations and uncertain futures. I suggest that this moment provides a window into the girls’ (and their families’) earlier motivations when they would have been qualified as trafficked. I argue that the post-migration conjuncture reveals two prevailing expectations that the girls were grappling with: the pressure to maintain ties to custom and kin, which includes marrying a Yondan man, and the pressure to continue on the path laid out by bopi bateh onati, which is to capitalize on greater financial security and opportunity outside of Togo by investing in urban Nigerian sociality. Thus, by attending to the conduct of Yondan girls’ “post-trafficking,” we get a sense of the socially structured horizons of Yondan society influencing their behavior (Johnson-Hanks, 2005: 23).

While the TVPA and UN Trafficking Protocol no longer dominate many of the anti-trafficking protocols in practice, and more nuanced understandings of coercion have come to the fore (see Kempadoo, 2012: vii -xiii), these documents continue to influence the campaigns in Nigeria and Togo. Moreover, the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report and the consequences with respect to development dollars of an unfavorable TIP ranking play a critical role in the way in which the Togolese and Nigerian anti-trafficking campaigns identify trafficked children. As a result, those who are unable to prove that they are above the age of 18 years (like many I describe in this article) are susceptible to capture, detention, and repatriation by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and Other Related Matters (NAPTIP), Nigeria’s main anti-trafficking task force. And regardless of the level of coercion or consent of their individual experiences, their cases contribute to Togo and Nigeria’s anti-trafficking statistics for inclusion in the State Department’s considerations for TIP rankings (for more on the TIP report’s influence in Togo and Nigeria, see Buchbinder, 2012: 221–240).

By presenting these girls’ stories, I am questioning the efficacy of using trafficking as a mode of naming violence against Togolese adolescent laborers; while this approach may help some children in need, too often it forecloses possibilities by funneling development dollars into anti-trafficking interventions. In so doing, the emphasis on child trafficking deflects attention and aid dollars from more insidious forces harming children, such as a dysfunctional educational system and poor job prospects for Togolese youth. As much of the child labor scholarship in post-colonial Africa has been written by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (see Grier, 2004), on an epistemological level, this also has ramifications for academic scholars who rely on development frameworks to study children’s work—frameworks that are shaped by the constraints of running a non-profit organization, such as the need for funding, statistical results, publicity, and so on. For historian Beverly Grier, the consequences of development agencies setting the conceptual agenda are that children are not taken seriously and their contribution to modern West African economies is overlooked.

The contributions of child laborers have become even more substantive in light of economic recessions in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1970s caused by structural adjustment programs, civil wars, drought, and the impact of HIV/AIDS (Grier, 2004: 3). Through the framework of bopi bateh onati, I hope to touch upon the more nuanced cultural antecedents of this practice, as well as highlight the centrality of Yondan adolescent work to the larger labor migration practices of the Yondan community as a whole.

Another consequence of embracing the rhetoric around trafficking is that depictions of child laborers are based on an uninterrogated set of assumptions about children and childhood, wherein children are passive subjects in need of protection and childhood is a fixed and universal construct. Instead, a better approach would recognize childhood as a construction structured by such limiting forms as gender, class, modes of production, and so on, and children as social actors shaping the conditions that shape them. The assertion that all children are passive is inaccurate and masks the ways in which some creatively strategize to improve their present conditions and future prospects. As Beverly Grier (2004) writes, “[i]f for some children and adolescents, working was not the problem but the solution to a problem” (p. 13).

Not only have the adolescent girls I profile “after trafficking” recently completed bopi bateh onati, but they are also on the cusp of entering into Yondan parenthood, where they will be making decisions for the next generation of child laborers. By tracing their experiences, I show how bopi bateh onati works for the Yondans and the ways in which they arbitrate conflicts, albeit imperfectly, when the system does not. There are stories of Yondan children experiencing terrible violence and neglect under bopi bateh onati. And yet, in my understanding, these cases are the exception and are adjudicated by an existing customary apparatus, wherein approbation becomes a public force policing egregious acts within the system. Hence, the assertion by neo-abolitionist groups that all forms of children’s travel for work are violent not only discredits Yondans who embrace this practice as something they desire, but it also dismisses the grassroots protective infrastructure already in place to help these children. This infrastructure includes the Yondan expatriate associations in the satellite communities where children are working, as well as the governmental agencies and NGOs that may have previously worked on issues of child exploitation and abuse but were forced to retool their priorities to align with mandates emerging from the anti-trafficking discourse.

Togo as a site of non-futurity

Jean-Francois Bayart’s (1993) “politics of the belly” well characterizes Togo’s modern political structure, where Eyadema maintained power by developing a cult of personality and paying off his underlings by giving them civil service posts to pad their pockets with state funds. This system trickles down to the village level, where state civil servants exploit their positions of power to siphon off public funds—if accessible—for their own consumption, largely to the knowledge of the local population. These village figures act as a referent for the girls, representing the best it can get if you follow the development line and anti-trafficking rhetoric that encourages children to stay in school, stay in village, gain an apprenticeship, and eventually earn a living. Here, success includes becoming a teacher, a profession whose capacity to inspire is hampered by the underhanded tactics public teachers use to get by. Ambitious Yondan school children see their teachers routinely compensate for the state’s failure to pay their salaries by having children tend their fields instead of attending class and forcing them to pay for private tutoring in order to get access to the school curriculum to pass their exams. Two important authority figures at the health clinic, le pharmacien (the Pharmacist) and l’infirmier (the Nurse), also proved to be disappointing role models when they funneled the clinic monies into their own pockets, leaving the dispensary grossly under-stocked and rendering the people vulnerable to dying of preventable conditions like snake-bites and postpartum hemorrhage.

In contrast to the development paradigm of progress through patience and the idea that advancement is an inevitable outcome of the linear unfolding of time, many post–Cold War Togolese have a different conception of what the future entails. Instead of developing the nation as was promoted in the era of post-independence jubilance, the best a citizen can do for their future is get out of Togo and “fend for themselves.” ³ In Nostalgia for the Future, Charles Piot (2010) further elaborates on the contemporary Togolese understanding of progress as any movement out of the country, exemplified by the US visa lottery in Lomé. Unlike other West African countries, Togo has the highest rate of lottery applicants. For example, in the 2007 lottery, 1592 Togolese were awarded US diversity visas in contrast to only 218 and 95 from neighboring Benin and Cote d’Ivoire, respectively (Piot, 2010: 77). Since the visas were selected based on the size of the applicant pool, Togo’s high numbers reflect the cultural cachet the lottery holds for many Togolese nationals (Piot, 2010: 178). In a study closer to the subject of Togolese traveling for work in Nigeria, Nwajiuba et al. (2009, 2011) found that Togolese were the most represented non-Nigerian entrepreneur in the markets of Lagos state (58%) and were also likely to stay for an extended period of time, averaging 17 years in one survey (Nwajiuba et al., 2009).

Piot’s work on Togo’s post–Cold War exit culture contributes to a growing body of literature in Africa studies on the question of “non-futures.” Perhaps the most notable of these works is James Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity (1999), that tracks the Zambian economic crisis of the 1980s, where a rapid decline in the country’s copper industry and IMF sponsored Structural Adjustment Program’s austerity measures led to an evacuation of state entitlement programs, a dramatic rise in the cost of living and a drop in wage earning opportunities. As Ferguson (1999) follows the workers’ next steps in coping with job loss and heightened levels of financial uncertainty, he broadens his focus to ask what happens when the myth of modernization is “turned upside down, shaken and shattered,” and people in crisis are unable to make sense of their experiences and imbue them with dignity (pp. 13–14).

The concept of progress so valiantly asserted by development policies in the post–World War II era for Third World nations to “wait, have patience, your turn will come” begins to unravel as the Copperbelt workers’ waiting only leads to further decline. Not only does Ferguson reconsider the temporal dimensions of modernity in his ethnography, but he also incorporates a spatial dimension into his definition with his use of the terms cosmopolitanism and localism. Looking to development rhetoric as his referent, Ferguson upsets the conventional understanding of Africa as progressively marching toward increasing urbanization by tracking how recently laid off mine workers ostensibly integrate “back” to their villages, yet many such workers had never lived in rural areas or were not returning to their natal villages. While cosmopolitanism and localism are conventionally associated with location, in terms of city versus rural areas, Ferguson (1999) takes it to be a practice of style and performativity that reflects people’s relationship to an imaginary of modernity, where location becomes secondary to a cultivation of cosmopolitan or local ways, as a form of “cultural style” (p. 231).

In developing his concept of “cultural style,” Ferguson (1999: 95) draws from Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to show how difference, in this case between cosmopolitan and local styles, is not an a priori given, but rather produced within fields of uneven power relations. Rather than consider the urban and rural as spatial locations, Ferguson takes them to be “practices that signify difference between social categories.” And these mannerisms become important with respect to success in one context or another, as exemplified by Ferguson’s research assistant who took to drinking with old men living in pockets of Lusaka to retain his local ways and better position himself for integration back to village. In contrast, city-slickers-cum-villagers who are unable to shake their cosmopolitan ways will find themselves disadvantaged when they return to so-called traditional and local surroundings.

Ferguson’s cultural style also speaks to a performative competence that is critical for reintegration, particularly as return becomes the ultimate end point since dependent and unproductive retirees cannot afford city living. Ferguson (1999) goes on to say that cosmopolitanism and localism are not expressive of an a priori identity, but rather speak to a process of becoming in the act of cultivating a particular style: “the performance of difference is one of the ways that distinctive subjects and social types are themselves constructed and made to seem natural” (p. 96). Thus, donning certain types of clothing is not about adhering to a norm as much as possessing a social sense and capacity to successfully perform certain embodied practices. And this process “involves both deliberate self-making and structural determinations, as well as such things as unconscious motivations and desires, aesthetic preferences, and the accidents of personal history” (Ferguson, 1999: 101). Thus, we find that the motivations at play in Yondan migration practices are more complex than either the Yondan or development explanations and involve material, as well as ideological factors.

For Ferguson, the localist is one who has a greater allegiance to his rural “home,” visiting frequently, conforming to local custom and carrying himself in a way that indexes a strong ethnic identity. He drinks home brewed beer and adheres to a village style of dress. In contrast, the cosmopolitan’s ways communicate how much he has separated from custom, eschewing localist traits and ties to home for an embrace of an international (largely Western dominated) mass culture (Ferguson, 1999: 92). Ferguson is careful not to essentialize these different categories by conceptualizing them as lying in a stylistic space that ranges from having an extremely cosmopolitan capacity to having an extremely localist capacity, with many falling somewhere in between. As a capacity, there is the possibility of acquiring other traits along the spectrum, although such flexibility is rare since cultivating stylistic competence is costly and difficult (Ferguson, 1999: 107). This caveat is important, as the term “cosmopolitanism” understood as an ideology of world citizenship has garnered criticism for being elitist with undertones of cultural imperialism (Featherstone, 2002; Gidwani, 2006; Miller, 2002). My use of the term, however, is far more modest and serves as a heuristic device to track the stylistic competencies of these circulating figures as they oscillate through rural, urban, and peri-urban settings in West Africa.

Thus, throughout my presentation of the Yondan women and girls living in Mile 12 market, I have associated them with various competences along this spectrum of cosmopolitanism and localism because the differences in their behavior were striking and spoke not only to their ways of living but also to their investment in the Yondan rite of return as scripted under bopi bateh onati. Their diverse cultural styles also spoke to different imaginings of where the future lay and which road secured better options.

In the case of Yondan “cosmopolitanism” and Yondan “localism,” the differences indexed behaviors that were deemed pious by the larger Yondan community versus those that were seen as inappropriate for women and girls. Dress and substance use, for example, were two of the more glaring differences between the two groups. In the village, all women and girls are to wear a skirt. This even applied to me. As a newly arrived Peace Corps volunteer, I was called off my bicycle by the village chief, who told me that I should not be wearing bike shorts without a skirt to cover my legs. In the city, I frequently saw adolescent girls wearing spandex shorts or mini-skirts. Cigarettes and marijuana use were also unheard of behaviors among those who would consider themselves “villagers,” although this was relatively prevalent in the city. There are numerous other styles of living that I touch upon in this paper, which speak to the options available to these adolescents and what they do with these limited opportunities.

Bopi bateh onati: a means toward marriage or a pathway out of Togo?

In the past, the boys’ families were always in charge of the wedding, not the girls themselves. Before, girls would travel to get the clothes and dishes that they would need when they began their married life in the home of their in-laws… Now, the kids have to do everything for their weddings, which is why they travel out of the village so much. As far as I’m concerned, girls travel out to find money for their weddings. ⁴

This quote is from a Yondan woman in her early 30s. It is a sentiment that was repeated by the bulk of my informants and an explanation that I have been continually troubled by. While marriage is the ostensible reason for bopi bateh onati, families rarely see the money that their daughters earn and even without the ogá’s (or “the trafficker’s”) token gift of clothes and dishes, parents typically could afford their daughter’s wedding expenses. Instead, the context of Togo perceived as a place without a future explains why parents would engage in this seemingly unnecessary sacrifice. Rather than the immediate gains of a daughter’s salary or the financial burden it discharges (as the human rights organizations and parents assert), bopi bateh onati exists because it is a systematic method for getting young Yondans out of Togo. And while Yondans have engaged in regional migrations for generations, the all-encompassing nature of the practice in its present form— in which every able-bodied Yondan must take the trip— is a product of this post–Cold War culture of exile.

Mile 12 market

Even for the megacity of Lagos, Mile 12 market was immense, with five different neighborhoods and a population of nearly 700,000 people. Dubbed “the gateway to Lagos State,” the market was a major destination for trucks traveling from the northern farm belt along Ikorodu Road with food crops for sale in the city. ⁵ Ikorodu also served as a boundary splitting up the two sides of Mile 12 for the Yondans. On the southern side were the older, more maternal Yondans, who worked in the more established food stands situated in officially recognized concrete structures. For these women, such as Fati, Awa, and Fulandi, the people of Mile 12 were part of a landscape they had to navigate as they cut quietly and quickly through the mayhem to perform their daily duties. Despite the legitimacy of their worksites, their concrete stalls served as a dam to hold back an expanse of makeshift shacks in torturous small alleys guided by lines of open sewage tracked with splintered planks where people engaged in more illicit enterprises—including brothels and fight clubs. These back alleys were so small that pedestrians walked single file, waiting patiently as oncoming traffic vied for the same planks to cross the slick mud that courses through the Mile 12’s labyrinthine southeastern side. Awa worked on this side, preparing sauce for patrons of a local brothel.

Across Ikorodu Road was the northern boundary of Mile 12—a 20-foot tall concrete wall that served as a membrane containing the billowing biomass and frenetic energy of the market’s main produce section, where hundreds of makeshift stands were filled with baskets of onions, dried cassava, dried chilies, tomatoes, grains, legumes, and so on. It was like any other market I had visited in West Africa—only 10 times the size. The access point to the northern side was a gate that was wide enough to allow 18-wheeler trucks to deliver their crops for distribution to Lagos’ 10 million consumers. ⁶ And as one’s gaze turned the corner through the gate, the full scale of the market came into view as it expanded along the horizon. The vista was of rolling hills of garbage, corroded tin roofs, splintered lean-tos, and concrete stairs that led to nowhere as half-finished, abandoned residences were a reminder of the futility of quests for permanence. It was here that the cosmopolitan Yondans who rested on more tenuous moral ground resided. They were younger, unmarried, and more influenced by their peers—and the northern side was a welcome hideaway from the knowing eyes of their aunties across the road.

Despite its dilapidation and crime, Mile 12 served as a reliable place of refuge for Yondan girls living in Lagos. Unlike the more established neighborhoods where Yondans settle, like Ikeja or Agégé, the dynamic chaos of Mile 12 allowed new arrivals unlimited access to lodging, work opportunities, and privacy from potential Yondan visitors. Yet, on 10 March 2010, Mile 12 was subject to a major demolition. ⁷ On that day, in compliance with Governor Babatunde Fashola’s “megacities” revitalization plan, municipal workers bulldozed much of the market to the ground. Newspapers and comments on the Internet called the destruction “long overdue” for a market that was “host to prostitutes, hired assassins, and other criminal-minded characters” (Awoyinfa, 2010). Unfortunately, while ostensibly in the interest of Lagosians, the demolition spelled disaster for the thousands of people who earned a livelihood in Mile 12. And subsequent to the dispersal, my research assistant and I could no longer track the Yondans we had been profiling since 2007 (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Image of demolished neighborhood near Ketu, just north of Mile 12.

Yondan perceptions of Nigeria

Yondans living in Togo tend to associate Mile 12 with the other city sites, from Cotonou to Libreville, as places of debauchery and moral abandon where innocent girls are corrupted. In order to protect their reputations, many Yondans who stay in the market will report having worked in other neighborhoods. While most parents fear the Mile 12 lifestyle, the drive to send daughters to Nigeria overrides the costs of lost innocence. This is particularly the case when a girl drops out of school and the dangers of an unwanted pregnancy or too much free time mitigates the relative risks associated with the city, as expressed by this teenager in Yonda:

My grandmother told me to go … And when she said it, I was so happy because I was not doing anything [in Yonda]. I would see my friends leave and they would return to find me still at home. When they came back, they would bring things that I did not have. So, when she talked about Nigeria, I was happy and did not hesitate to leave. ⁸

Village judgment of representations from the diaspora

Like all these spaces of symbolic depravity for the Yondan community, there is a spectrum of players, from those who engage in many of the behaviors deemed depraved to the virtuous representatives of traditional morality. Yet, upon returning to the village fold, the freedom Mile 12 avails to do what you want and be who you want falls away, and the forces of social control, including sorcery, quiet the playful defiance Yondans celebrated in Lagos. Back “home,” reputation matters with respect to norms of piety.

When I returned to Yonda the following year, I was overjoyed to reunite with Awa and Fati who had subsequently rejoined their husbands. I assumed we would talk freely and reminisce about our time together in Mile 12, but I encountered markedly different women. Instead of the free-flowing openness of their Mile 12 personas, they were reserved and guarded. At first eager to talk about our time in Lagos, I quickly came to understand that they kept these experiences to themselves upon crossing into Togo. During my visits with Fati, for example, her co-spouse and mother-in-law’s constant presence in the courtyard was visibly stifling to Fati. In one respect, the variability of these spaces of control explained why there was a constant need for Yondan women to move from one zone to another. Money matters were unquestionably a huge driver of Yondan movement, but the respite from social constrictions also played a role. While there was a constant drive to return to the Yondan homeland, the restrictive nature of village life made it unsustainable for long periods of time—particularly for young women struggling with competing obligations to family, financial security, and self-determination (Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Image of Ikodoru Road from overpass that bridges the northern and southern sides of Mile 12 market.

Mile 12 is also a generative site to think through questions of shifting conceptions of the future and uncertainty because it housed a spectrum of Yondan woman with various interests in the market as a place to live and work. While Mile 12 was infamous, it also carried a mystique of possibilities for younger Yondans anticipating their first trip out. And for those committed to their friends and lovers in the city, the sanctuary of the market allowed them to postpone marriage, because, despite its poor reputation, the market offered financial security with abundant work opportunities for uneducated rural migrants. In stark contrast, residents in Yonda frequently teetered on starvation when unexpected crop failures, brush fires, or increased seed prices overwhelmed their delicately balanced food stores. This vulnerability was exacerbated by the fact that some of the most able-bodied workers (i.e. the community’s sons and daughters) were working in Nigeria (see Watts and Bohle, 1993: 43–67). ⁹

Circulation as a cosmopolitan or localist

The first person I met from Yonda was Fati, a localist who was working on the southern side in an established bar on Ikorodu Road. Her job was to prepare rice twice daily in a Hausa boxing arena behind the bar. Her friend Awa (also a localist) worked close to Fati’s bar in front of a brothel on the southeastern side of the market. While both these women worked in highly disreputable locations, they were calculated in their movements and quickly returned to less compromised spaces when their shifts were finished, typically resting in Fati’s bar or a courtyard nearby. Even though Awa was renting space from Mina (a prominent cosmopolitan), she never socialized with Mina or her friends; presumably for fear that another Yondan would think she had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Instead, Awa and Fati spent their nonworking hours exclusively together.

Fati’s small stature and disarming smile lent her an air of “goodness” and moral uprightness in the otherwise promiscuous world of Mile 12. During her short tenure in the city, Fati has discovered lost Yondans and acted as a go-between for many wishing to relay money and information back to the village. Most of the time we were together, she would recount the various transgressions of the cosmopolitans, building up a repertoire of stories to feed the rumors in Yonda, which naturally encouraged the cosmopolitans’ to keep their distance from Fati and Awa’s meddling gazes.

Many other localists I came across in Cotonou or Lagos would turn a blind eye to the debauchery of the teenage girls who had come to faire la jeunesse in the city, adopting a stance that “They got theirs and I got mine.” Fati did not take this position and frequently cast an unfavorable glance at the girls who openly flaunted their transgressions of Yondan moral codes, by wearing sexually-suggestive clothing, smoking cannabis, and socializing with men cultivating a reputation for selling drugs and contraband. Such performed behaviors created an effective line between the different Yondan clusters. Fati would stay at the bar and spend time with Awa and their friend Fulandi over breaks, and the others would keep to their side of the road (Figure 3).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Example of Cosmopolitanist style.

In contrast, cosmopolitans had more comfort and range of motion in the market. They would spend their days lounging in front of Mina’s room, or watching videos at friends’ places or in the movie houses scattered throughout the market. Sarena was the youngest cosmopolitan, and while she technically lived with Mina, she spent most of her time with her Kotokoli boyfriend deep in the northwestern side of the market. Embedded among them was a localist named Wife of Seven Seven who was also living on the northern side of the market (Figure 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Wife of Seven Seven at her stand.

Wife of Seven Seven was the wife of an elderly chauffeur in Yondan and she was immune to the disrepute of her surroundings because of her age—she was somewhere in her early 50s—and the fact that she always wore a double-layered wrap skirt, worn-out T-shirt and tattered hair wrap, which marked her as an innocuous outsider. Her job was to prepare sauce for a food stand that was located in front of a massive field of garbage. Wife of Seven Seven slept in a nearby room of her employer and was paid to prepare two pots of sauce—one in the morning and another in the late afternoon. Occasionally, late night revelers hungry after hours of dancing would wake her up in the middle of the night to prepare an additional pot of sauce with rice. Although her employer did not compensate her for these extra meals, Wife of Seven Seven was generally content with her pay and workload. In this respect, her compensation offset the physical and moral dilapidation of her surroundings. While she inhabited the space of the northern side, she— like many other localists— was less sentimentally attached to Mile 12 than her cosmopolitan counterparts. Her relationship to Mile 12 as a symbolic terrain of depravity and opportunity guided her spatial practice and limited her circulation to the bar and her sleeping quarters.

The “cultural style” of the cosmopolitan

“Cosmopolitans” distinguished themselves by making others aware of the fact that they were proud of their longevity and relative comfort in Mile 12. They behaved as if they were able to afford a type of leisure that was cultivated by years of living in Mile 12, and this leisure suggested true comfort in their surroundings. Many of the days, Mazou, my research assistant, and I spent at Mina or Sarena’s houses were watching the girls engaged in half-planned and half-executed intentions with an arbitrary yet regular rhythm. Mina would start a thought or think to go on an errand and then forget. Or she would just watch something drop on the floor and then note its location but make no motion to pick it up, or start to make the motion to pick it up and then think better of it. Frequently, the girls were napping when we arrived or slowly engaged with half an interest in their late afternoon meals.

Unlike new, disoriented arrivals to the city, these “cosmopolitans” conveyed absolute comfort in the midst of the mega-city’s most notorious market. In fact, their relaxed states of being were almost defiant affronts to the frenetic energy surrounding them. Without children to care for or fields to tend, these women had considerably more leisure time than their Yondan counterparts and would frequently linger in everyday tasks. On more than one occasion, I watched them say that they needed to do something like get change for N500 or buy some sugar in the market, but rarely would they return. Or just move a few feet away, before sitting back down to talk among themselves. While it is clear that their tactics were intended to carve out some privacy, it also seemed that they occasionally forgot what they were doing, almost in mid-motion. Mazou and I were initially convinced that they did not want us around, but the more time we spent at Mile 12, the more it seemed to be part of the daily mannerisms of living. I sensed that their efforts to control the physical space were intimately tied to their sense of cultivating a lifestyle of leisure, and this was carved out both spatially and temporally in the way they inhabited Mile 12.

Fati—the localist

While Fati was physically in Mile 12, her mind was on her newly wedded husband back in Yonda and her children working in Nigeria’s southwestern farm belt. While she spent the bulk of her time in the village, it was not the years logged that marked her as a localist as much as her intentions for being in the city—to make quick money to resolve a marital issue back in Yonda—and her resolution to maintain her local ways while working in Lagos (Figure 5).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

An example of localist style.

Fati’s problems began when her perpetual positive attitude and bright smile—which made her popular in Yonda—garnered the jealousy of her sister-in-law Warama. She was particularly well-liked by the men in her husband’s family, including Warama’s own son who said he preferred Fati over his mother. Not only was she talkative and friendly, but Fati often gave men free rice when they came by to visit her stand. Fati maintained her own field and often would get help from her friends and the Yondan drivers were happy to transport her wares for free. According to Fati, all this affection angered Warama.

While Warama was the first to marry into the family, she did not enjoy Fati’s seniority or popularity. Rather than attribute it to her charisma, Warama was convinced that Fati was providing extra-marital sexual favors to curry such sympathies. Soon rumors started spreading. Fati responded to Warama’s accusations by notifying the village chief and her parents. At the time, she was pregnant and Warama said that the child was conceived out of wedlock. To verify the accusation, Warama’s husband (Fati’s brother-in-law) declared that Fati would suffer a difficult birth if the child was not her husband’s.

Saturday was market day in Kaboli, a village 15 kilometers from Yonda, and Fati was waiting for the market car when she started having labor contractions. As frequently occurs, the other vendors were slow to load their wares and the car did not return to Yonda until late into the night. When she got back home, everyone was already asleep. She also wanted to sleep, but was having “so much pain in my belly, I could not sleep.” She lay in bed and started to have the urge to go to the bathroom. On her way to the latrine, she gave birth to her youngest daughter. Everyone gathered around when Salamia was born and an elder declared that the accusation of Fati’s infidelity was untrue because of her easy labor. As news spread about Fati’s problems with her sister-in-law and the false rumor, she garnered even more attention—further upsetting Warama.

That same year, Warama’s husband died. In keeping with Yondan tradition, Fati’s husband Aboubakar decided to marry Warama. While he told his senior wife, Azia, of his plans, he did not tell Fati. When news finally reached Fati, she was incensed. “I was shocked. I said to the boy, this must be a joke. That it was impossible. But he told me that it was true.” The rumors of the impending marriage continued to spread, but Aboubakar still kept it from her. “I said to Azia that I will leave if he marries this woman. I would only stay if he does not go ahead with the marriage.” Aboubakar then went to the Boba of the family (patriarch) and told him of Fati’s concerns. Boba then warned Fati’s parents that they should encourage their daughter to calm down and accept the arrangement or else leave the family.

Aboubakar finally decided to tell Fati. Beginning with a prayer to Allah, it took him 10 minutes before he told her of his intentions. The ever-outspoken Fati responded that this was obvious and she, like the entire village, has known for a long time. She was visibly upset, but Boba told her to forgive them and welcome Warama back into the family. “I refused to change my mind,” she said.

A few weeks later Fati heard “Ami, Ami, Ami” coming out of her husband’s rooms as scores of well-wishers came to congratulate him on the marriage. She went to her room, packed her things, and headed towards her parents’ house. The next morning, he knocked on her door to wake her for morning prayers, but Fati had already moved in with her parents. She stayed with them for 7 months. Every day during those 7 months, Azia would come to ask Fati to return to Aboubakar and resolve her differences with Warama, but Fati refused. Finally, her parents convinced her to go back. “I felt uneasy and humiliated in the house. I was humiliated that my husband was stronger than me and one morning, I was praying and I saw everything that was happening in front of my eyes. I started crying and decided that I had to leave and travel.” Despite his objections, Aboubakar drove Fati to the bus station because he was afraid she might never return if refused her wishes to work in the city.

Since she arrived in Mile 12, Fati learned that Azia is ill. While reluctant to return, she decided to travel back to Yonda for Ramadan. Before her return, however, she planned to visit her children working in the farms in Oyo (five hours north of Lagos). Since her split with Aboubakar, she wanted to see if they still love her:

It is up to them to give all the earnings from the youngest child to me. This year, when I went to visit them, they said that he [Aboubakar] told them not to give me any money. And they always give money to their father. For the past three years, the eldest has given everything to him. If they don’t give me some money then I’m going back to Lagos. It’s not that I need the money—I can make it on my own—it’s just to test them.

Mina—the grand dame of the Mile 12 lifers

If Fati was a localist par excellence, then Mina represented the other extreme. Of all the cosmopolitans living in Mile 12, Mina was the grand dame of the group, having lived in the market the longest. In a sense, she was the most permanently urbanized in that she had invested heavily in her rented room, had spent much of her money on clothes and friends, and had stronger obligations to her friends in the city than to her family back in the village. She had also openly defied Yondan norms in front of gossiping visitors, effectively forgoing her relations in Yonda for a deeper engagement with her fellow Lagosians.

Mina had previously worked as a domestic servant in Ghana and was a core figure of the Yondans living in Mile 12. She was also the closest to aging out of her fertile years and thereby committing a grave taboo by failing to bear children. She had no plans to leave the market, in contrast to Fati who eagerly awaited her departure date. When asked what she will do if the government tears down her room, Mina said she would consider her next move once the demolition trucks arrived at her doorstep.

In her late thirties, Mina had for long maintained a food stand in the alleyway diagonally across from her room, supplementing her rice sales by trading textiles from Benin. Her naturally pale skin had become thin and reddened from applying lightening creams, and these creams lent a mottled, bruised look to her legs. Between her eyebrows was a small tattoo of a blue hook. With round cheeks, soft shoulders, and arched eyebrows Mina conveyed congeniality, but she was hardened by years in the market. And her aloof, guarded manner that she had cultivated was an advantage, protecting her far more than the flimsy padlock that sealed her splintered front door. Aside from a late afternoon session selling rice, Mina had spent most of her days sitting on the well-positioned concrete ledge in front of her house—where she spoke in Kotokoli, Hausa, Yoruba, or Yondan depending on her conversation companion.

It was assumed by the girls that Mina had no children, no husband, and no plans of getting married. Unlike the others who feared self-incrimination, Mina’s disregard of Mazou and me had more to do with genuine indifference than any concerns about our ability to cause harm. She had no reason to hide from us nor any reason to engage us. As the oldest of her friends, Mina did not answer to anyone. While we were welcome to visit, her nonverbal cues suggested we keep things superficial. My request for a formal interview was naturally declined with a chuckle. Instead, we learned about Mina from snippets she shared during our visits and second-hand stories from her friends.

Roukaiyah was Mina’s closest companion and the two reserved Kotokoli for their exclusive conversations. Unlike Mina, Roukaiyah was small in stature and dark skinned. She wore a wrapped skirt every day, but her gruff mannerisms indexed an unusual masculinity. When she sat, she sat with her legs wide apart and her feet firmly on the ground. It was generally assumed by the localists that Roukaiyah and Mina’s deep, raspy voices came from their daily marijuana cigarettes. With few chances of winning the favors of suitors, Mina and Roukaiyah enjoyed their own company more than the attention of men, and seemed less concerned than the others about finding a suitable husband.

Hibou in the middle

Hibou was positioned differently among the Mile 12 Yondans because she lay somewhere in between the lifers and the temporary workers who sought to dissociate themselves with the market scene. Like Fati and Awa, the two Yondan “localists,” Hibou had planned to leave Mile 12, although this sentiment was regularly tabled the more embroiled she became in Lagos life. Unlike Mina, Hibou had spent considerable time in the village as a primary school student before “abandoning the bench” to work as a bonne (domestic servant) in Cotonou. For Fati, Hibou’s latent innocence was redeemable if they could only get her back to village—a noble plot that never succeeded.

Hibou was like Sarena, the youngest of the group, in that they were both financially dependent on their boyfriends. Over our months of visiting the market, we never once saw Hibou working—although she had claimed to sell koko (corn porridge) during the day and cigarettes, candies, and biscuits at night. Hibou said that she started smoking because she wanted to faire la jeunesse in Lagos like the rest of the girls. Fati found out about Hibou smoking when she stopped by Mina’s house unannounced. Fati said she would tell Hibou’s mother if she did not stop smoking. After the incident, Hibou continued to smoke but made a point of hiding it from Fati.

Despite Fati’s threats and motherly chastising of Hibou, there was a mutual appreciation between them, which is why Fati chose Hibou to rehabilitate over other Mile 12 cosmopolitans. Unfortunately, her intentions were in vain. Two years later, Hibou was still living at Mina’s house and was 6 months pregnant with the child of her new Hausa boyfriend. Her gruff manners had softened since pregnancy, and while her changing figure made it difficult to keep up with the latest fashion trends, she kept her nails well-manicured and her hair stylishly coiffed.

While pregnant, Hibou did not attempt to work and spent most of her days eating and resting or hanging out with Mina and Sarena. One day when Mazou and I came to visit, Hibou was complaining that her wardrobe was full of shirts that were too tight for her growing belly. She wanted her boyfriend to buy her new clothes. Sarena said that Hibou should pay for them herself. In response, Hibou looked at Sarena as if she were crazy and said that an expectant mother should not pay for anything. Her boyfriend got her pregnant, so he should pay. Sarena then asked Hibou if she plans to marry him and Hibou retorted, “Do you plan to marry your boyfriend?”—to which they both started laughing at the ludicrous thought. Hibou then said it did not matter because she was only with “this guy” for the pregnancy. Once the baby was born, she would go back to village and marry her boyfriend back in Yonda. The Hausa guy was not her true love, he just got her pregnant.

Adjara and the goiter

Hibou’s second roommate—the first being Mina—was Adjara, who represented a “good” lifer. While she also engaged in Mile 12’s debauchery, at 28 years, Adjara was an ambitious and conscientious self-made yogurt hawker. She lived a few rooms down from Mina’s crew in the same row of converted concrete storage units. And like Mina, Adjara held a 1-year advance on the room that she shared with two Kotokoli girls and Hibou (Figure 6).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Adjara cleaning bottles after day of selling yogurt drinks.

Adjara traveled outside of Yonda through the bopi bateh onati route at a young age to work for a Fon family in Cotonou. There, the family treated her as a servant and socialized her to be obsequious—she ate meals alone, was punished if she did not work fast enough, and was banned from visiting friends or relatives. She returned to Yonda after fulfilling her 3-year unwritten contract with two pagne complets (fabric sets) and a stack of cooking pots. ¹⁰ She also started dating a Yondan boy working in Nigeria’s southwestern farm belt and committed to marry him in an engagement ceremony. Her mother then sent her back to Cotonou to work for another family. No longer a young teenager, Adjara eventually graduated out of in-house unpaid work by developing contacts with other freelance Yondans, perfecting a fluency in Fon and cultivating a savvy for the city. ¹¹ Thus began Adjara’s voluntary oscillations between Yonda and the city.

Somewhere during the journey from here to there, she came across a photograph that shifted her life trajectory. On the bus back to Cotonou, while looking at pictures from her last visit to Yonda, Adjara noticed a slight bulge at the base of her neck; she was developing a goiter. This moment of revelation prompted a mission to stem its growth, and this mission has kept her from marrying:

I would like it to disappear completely so that my neck retains its form. This is my only preoccupation right now. I’m ashamed to go out with my friends. Even to a party. It’s as if everyone is looking at my neck. Just last week I was supposed to go to Ikeja—no it was Ikotun—for a baptism. I was all dressed and ready to go. But in the end, I refused to leave the house. ¹²

Adjara’s earnings from hawking yogurt had allowed her to rent a room where she had reluctantly boarded four girls for free, in addition to paying for her regular goiter treatments (Figure 7). ¹³ She then fell in love with a Hausa man and got pregnant after 2 months of dating. He was excited for the child and planned to marry Adjara after the birth. “Even his father called me on the telephone and told me to take good care of the baby.” But Adjara lost the child and the man would not forgive her: “I don’t know what came over me … I was tired and couldn’t eat like before. And since then, the guy never stops talking about me in public.” I asked if the problems with her Hausa boyfriend were not related to her goiter treatments:

Yes, that was part of it too, because he will probably marry another after me. And with time, my goiter will grow even bigger. And once we start fighting, the other wife will insult me. And my husband will stop loving me as the goiter develops … But now I’ve ruined everything.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Adjara receiving goiter treatments from neighborhood healer.

Yet, if all else fails, she could always marry a Yondan. Even the fiancé she left behind in the village would take her back if she traveled to Abuja and begged his older sister for forgiveness for leaving him to work in Lagos. There is a level of assurance when it comes to Yondan men who practice polygamy. Quite simply, Adjara said, “There just aren’t enough of us.” Although she wanted to stay and marry in Lagos, she assumed—once she’s cured her goiter—that she would return to Yonda.

Caught in an entanglement of “an emergent world of expressive desire,” Adjara was exemplary of a new kind of Yondan youth, where her capacity to live in the city and earn independently gave her license to eschew the prevailing norms of marriage (Rofel, 2007: 1). Like all the Yondan girls who came to the city, Adjara’s point of entry was as an adolescent domestic servant—or trafficked child per human rights law. Yet, as we track the driving forces of romance and fear, we find her tacking among the Yondan “boy” she should marry, the Hausa “man” she wants to marry and her fears of disfigurement that preclude her from marrying anyone.

What intermediate figures tell us about futures, desire, and bopi bateh onati

Like Hibou, Adjara repeatedly made plans to return to Yonda, but had yet to follow through after 8 years. Unlike the cosmopolitan who was satisfied to visit Yonda briefly, or the localist, who viewed the city as a short-term means to an end back in village, these girls fell in between. They are in the city, but perpetually long for home. And yet, they largely stayed put because their ties in the city were greater than their obligations to Yonda. Perhaps an unexpected happening, such as a death in the family or the birth of a dependent child, would draw them back. Based on the Imo State University surveys of Lagos’ immigrant entrepreneurs, it is likely that the girls who chose to stay will establish themselves in the market as food vendors, regardless of whether they are married or have children. And if they do establish themselves in the market, it is also likely that they will stay for over a decade. ¹⁴

Returning to vital conjunctures, we could say that this is a juxtaposition of Adjara and Hibou’s long-term plans and the power of a punctuated time, that anthropologist Jane Guyer (2007) writes about is the way in which many people have come to experience the “near future.” In this new temporal sensibility, time is punctuated, rather than gradually unfolding. It consists “of fateful moments and turning points,” where events resonate more with people’s experience of time than sequences or cycles (Guyer, 2007: 416).

In the case of Togo, Charles Piot (2010) sees this switch from the “linear time of the dictatorship (with its modernist teleology and steady sources of income) and the continuous time of the ancestors” to a more event-driven sensibility, exemplified in the way in which NGOs operate in the country, unexpectedly opening up 1 month and then closing down the next, with capital following their mercurial footsteps (p. 164).

This is particularly evident in the way in which unexpected mishaps occur within the Yondan “spaces of vulnerability” that make up their everyday (Watts and Bohle, 1993). There is also a hopping that occurs with respect to migration practices, where Yondan youth are inclined to pick up and move to the next hub, be it Mile 12, the village, or another node along the route of circulations. Guyer’s piece, like Ferguson’s Expectations for Modernity, asserts that the dominant paradigm of Cold War development policy gave way to a new temporal framing, where planning is taken over by a tolerance for the vagaries of the immediate and a faith that the future will provide. ¹⁵ Present-day time, in this sense, speaks to the difference between anticipated and contingent futures, where the horizons of hope that shape an individual’s behavior are limited by material constraints and the vagaries of unexpected events.

Thus, while Hibou may ostensibly desire to return to the village, she finds the lack of opportunities and slower pace of life stifling. Yet, a sick parent may force her to return long enough for a village wedding, thereby converging her actions with her stated desire to marry Yondan. Alternatively, she could further develop her relationship with the father of her unborn child, and further entrench herself in a life far from Yonda. The conjuncture reveals the central contradiction for ambitious young women: bopi bateh onati’s promise of marriage and its attendant security is broken when the girl returns and realizes the difficulties of making money as a weitao, or young village wife. This vision of the future is exemplified by Adjara’s constant forestalling of her trip back to Yonda for fear that she will forever be trapped in a miserable marriage with a shameful goiter if it is not cured while her life is still on her terms.

Disappointment comes to the fore as expectations of completion and security in marriage do not materialize, and the Yondan weitao begins the next stage as an oscillator between potentials— the village and the city. Like the localists in this story, the cosmopolitans had also initially returned after their tours as domestic servants, but they refused marriage and evaded disappointment by returning to the city. Subsequent to their flight, many cosmopolitans, like Hibou and Adjara, have come to desire the principles of normalcy and inclusion that come with a Yondan marriage.

These intermediate figures represent an emergent form of the future, one that is constantly deferred as their sentimental attachment to home conflicts with the unsustainable nature of village life for ambitious young women. Due to the precariousness of their present circumstances, it is the events unfolding in a structure of expectations that will ultimately determine where the girls will live out their later years. And the outcomes of these various responses to vital conjunctures have consequences for the reproduction of bopi bateh onati. For the cosmopolitans, their urban settlements function as a node for Yondans circulating through the migration network, where they provide temporary housing to visitors and information on work opportunities. More importantly, they perpetuate the mystique and allure of the city for Yondans back home, and the promise of a better life in Nigeria. For those who ultimately return, they reproduce the expectations around bopi bateh onati by fulfilling their obligations to marry and by bringing up the next generation of working girls.

Unlike the narratives presented through the framework of trafficking, the stories presented in this paper highlight the complexity of emotions and personal relations adolescent girls grapple with in contemporary African cities. It also speaks to the terrain of limited possibilities for ambitious youth attempting to take hold of their futures in this post–Cold War era by migrating to the city. In fact, the options available to these migrating women and girls, in contrast to the immobilized utopic village life promoted by human rights discourse, speak back to those who would use the anti-trafficking agenda to forcibly liberate them. ¹⁶