Negotiating Love and Marriage in Contemporary Senegal: A Good Man is Hard to Find

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Negotiating Love and Marriage in ContemporarySenegal: A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Dinah Hannaford and Ellen E. Foley

African Studies Review / Volume 58 / Issue 02 / September 2015, pp 205 - 225DOI: 10.1017/asr.2015.44, Published online: 01 September 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S000202061500044X

How to cite this article:Dinah Hannaford and Ellen E. Foley (2015). Negotiating Love and Marriage inContemporary Senegal: A Good Man Is Hard to Find. African Studies Review, 58,pp 205-225 doi:10.1017/asr.2015.44

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Negotiating Love and Marriage in Contemporary Senegal: A Good Man Is Hard to Find Dinah Hannaford and Ellen E. Foley

Abstract: In Senegal, love, respect, and compatibility have historically figured into marital calculations, yet prospective husbands must also provide material support. After decades of stagnant economic growth, good providers are hard to find. In this article we examine two strategies that women employ in an attempt to achieve eco-nomic security: nonmarital sex and transnational marriage. Though recent anthro-pological literature proposes a global transition toward companionate marriage, evidence from Dakar suggests that Senegalese women are prioritizing short-term material gain over longer-term projects of social reproduction. Transnational marriage and nonmarital sexual relationships illuminate women’s new strategies to stabilize their social positions in increasingly precarious times.

Résumé: Au Sénégal, les maris potentiels doivent certes fournir un soutien matériel à leur épouse cependant amour, respect et compatibilité ont historiquement égale-ment figuré dans les calculs matrimoniaux. Après des décennies de stagnation de la croissance économique, les bons chefs de famille sont difficiles à trouver. Dans cet article, nous examinons deux stratégies que les femmes emploient pour tenter de parvenir à la sécurité économique : sexe hors mariage et mariage transnational. Bien que la récente littérature anthropologique propose une transition mondiale

African Studies Review , Volume 58, Number 2 (September 2015), pp. 205– 225 Dinah Hannaford is an assistant professor of international studies at Texas A&M

University. She is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on transnational migration and its intersection with kinship, gender, and class, both in West Africa and Western Europe. Her most recent article appeared in the journal Global Networks . E-mail: [email protected]

Ellen Foley is an associate professor of international development and social change at Clark University. Her research addresses the social production of health and disease with a focus on how social and economic changes articulate with hierarchies of gender, class, and generation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. She is the author of Your Pocket Is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal (Rutgers University Press, 2010). E-mail: [email protected]

© African Studies Association, 2015 doi:10.1017/asr.2015.44

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vers le mariage de compagnie, des témoignages provenant de Dakar indique que les femmes sénégalaises privilégient les gains matériels à court terme par rapport aux projets de reproduction sociale à plus long terme. Le mariage transnational et les relations sexuelles hors mariage éclairent les nouvelles stratégies des femmes pour stabiliser leur position sociale à une époque de plus en plus précaire.

Keywords: Senegal ; marriage ; transnational migration ; nonmarital relations

In a small bedroom in Dakar, Senegal, in 2011, Khady Sene, age thirty-four and twice divorced, is making her cousin howl with laughter. Quite the comedian, she is describing how she will seduce and marry a famous Senegalese wrestler. She knows his manager, she says, and she’ll make him introduce them. With a great deal of playacting, she details all the white lies she’ll tell him: how she always dreamed of marrying him, how she was a fan of his from the beginning, how he’s so much better than the other wrestlers. She’ll say she once fainted during one of his combats and had to be taken to the hospital. “These are the kinds of stories I’ll tell,” she promises her cousin. Her cousin laughs and says, “Do you love Yekini? Or do you love his money?” Sene suddenly becomes serious. “There is no longer such a thing as bëggel [romantic love]” she says. “You don’t have real love between hus-bands and wives anymore. It’s all about întéret [self-interest].”

Whereas scholars from an earlier era questioned how colonization, labor migration, and urbanization would affect kinship, marriage, and social structure in African societies (e.g., Goode 1963 ; Oppong 1971 ), the context of globalization and its associated socioeconomic dimensions frame such inquiry today. Social scientists who focus on love, sex, marriage, and repro-duction question whether global economic trends will produce similarities in marital, sexual, and reproductive processes in diverse social settings. The rise of a global gay culture, international sex tourism, and transnational online dating sites are just a few examples of convergence around global-ized sexual identities, ideals, and opportunities (Cole 2010 ; Constable 2003 ; Johnson-Hanks 2007 ). Several studies have also looked at global shifts in the articulation of love and romance (Hirsch & Wardlow 2006; Padilla et al. 2007 ). 1

This article offers ethnographic evidence of emerging romantic and marital strategies in one African setting, the cosmopolitan capital city of Dakar, Senegal. Dakar (and Senegal more broadly) can be considered a “global” or “globalizing” locale from many vantage points. Neoliberal eco-nomic restructuring, the increasing mobility of both men and women over-seas, and changing notions of social obligations have had dramatic effects on urban households. Economic distress has closed off some avenues of social stability, while others emerge in the post‒structural adjustment era (Aduayi-Diop 2010 ; Antoine et al. 1995 ; Diouf 2003 ; Melly 2011 ). How do individuals navigate marriage and social standing against a back-drop of prolonged social and economic uncertainty? By highlighting the

Love and Marriage in Contemporary Senegal 207

contemporary logics that inform women’s selection of marital and sexual partners, we chart recent shifts in Dakar of what Cole and Thomas have deemed “the dense persistent intersection of sex and material resources” (2009:8).

In what follows, we draw from our ethnographic research on marital and nonmarital relationships in Senegal to explore the varied and contra-dictory effects of late modernity and the neoliberal moment on marriage and social reproduction. While ethnographic evidence from many parts of the world demonstrates a growing preference for “love marriage” (also known as “companionate marriage”), we suggest that the Senegalese case offers some interesting contradictions to this trend. First, spousal compati-bility, intimacy, and love have long been part of the Senegalese concep-tualization of marriage, and therefore could not be called “modern” phenomena. Second, our evidence from urban Senegal suggests that desire for marriage grounded in intimacy and love is receding in the face of persistent economic challenges. While anthropologists working in settings as diverse as Mexico, Pakistan, and Nigeria have examined a perceived rise in the contemporary pursuit of love marriages (see Hirsch & Wardlow 2006b ), we are observing a departure from marital expectations of a partnership between spouses based on sexual and emotional intimacy and shared projects. While marriage remains compulsory for Senegalese women, new socioeconomic challenges are motivating them to innovate and improvise within it (Dial 2008 ; Foley & Drame 2013 ). Many Dakaroises are pursuing relationships with the hopes of securing immediate financial benefit, with waning regard for formerly central concerns with kinship ties, caste endogamy, emotional closeness, and social reproduction (Bass & Sow 2006 ; Diop 1985 ).

Below we draw from our research on sexual partnerships and sexual health (Foley) and on transnational migration (Hannaford) to examine contemporary marital ideals and understandings of romantic relationships in urban Senegal among Wolof speakers. 2 First we review older cultural notions of marital success, which hold that marriage is a long-term project of forming kinship ties and assuring social reproduction, based on a gen-dered division of labor designed to meet the physical, spiritual, and sexual needs of both husbands and wives. Next we explore two phenomena that pose a direct challenge to those normative expectations of marriage: women’s practice of having multiple sexual partners ( mbaraan ) and transnational marriage. In both cases, companionate ideals such as physical intimacy and the primacy of the conjugal bond are waning in favor of individual material security.

Sang , Dëkkal , Dëkkoo : Love and Marriage in Senegal

Studies of marriage in Dakar and in Wolof society in general have long emphasized marriage as a long-term project that balances reciprocal fulfill-ment for the partners with communal objectives of strengthening kinship


ties and meeting religious expectations (see Diop 1985 ; Antoine et al. 1995 ). Even early studies of modernization in Dakar that identified a move toward mutual partner choice (e.g., Thoré 1964 ; Mercier 1960 ) empha-sized the importance of kin networks, caste and ethnic endogamy, and com-munal objectives. The affective, reproductive, and material dimensions of marriage have thus long been intertwined in Wolof culture. In spite of the numerous cultural, economic, and social transformations affecting Senegalese society, marriage remains an obligatory rite of passage and a much desired life event for men and women. Both a religious and cultural duty, marriage has long served as a means for women to gain adult social status, partial autonomy, and social and economic security; it is the way that they may “achieve desired social status, reach a state of respectability, liberate themselves from parental authority, and obtain emotional and material security” (Bop et al. 2008 :51).

If “emotions are embedded in historically situated words, cultural prac-tices, and material conditions that constitute certain kinds of subjects and enable particular kinds of relationships” (Cole & Thomas 2009 :3), the focal point of women’s marital aspirations in Senegal is the goor jaarin : a man who is worth something (Diop 1985 ; Antoine & Dial 2003). This dense cultural concept involves a masculine form of honor that rests in large part on financial success and the ability to care for dependents. Physical desire and emotional compatibility figure into marital calculations, but ideal husbands must fulfill their marital duties to their wives by providing them with mate-rial support. At the same time, a man’s comfortable financial standing, though necessary for him to quality as a goor jaarin , is not sufficient. Just as in other African settings, in Senegal “material provision and emotional attachment are mutually constitutive” (Cole &Thomas 2009 :20‒21). In order to embody the status of a goor jaarin a man must enact the role of good pro-vider through acts of care and generosity toward his wife, her family, his own parents, and other dependents. These acts of care and generosity become the context within which a long-term marital bond develops, thereby assuring social reproduction and the reinforcement of kinship ties.

Marital success also implies that both husband and wife find emotional and sexual satisfaction. The key marital obligations of a good husband are widely understood as comprising sang , dëkkal , and dëkkoo : a man must “clothe,” “house,” and sexually satisfy” his wife, as codified in Senegal’s “Code de la Famille,” the civil document that governs familial rights and responsibilities (Dial 2008 ; see also Babou 2008 ). 3 If material support is one pillar of marriage, a satisfying intimate relationship is also considered essential to its success. Lack of sexual satisfaction is in fact grounds for the initiation of divorce proceedings by either a man or a woman, and co-wives in polygynous marriages are lawfully entitled to an equal number of nights with their husband. 4 Dëkkoo also encompasses emotional connection and partnership. In the spatial organization of households, the marital bed-room is recognized as an emotionally and sexually charged space reserved for the couple: the place where they can escape from crowded communal


households, enjoy sex and intimacy, and also negotiate thorny domestic issues, from the household budget to relations with in-laws (Buggenhagen 2012 ).

In addition, the expectation of love often features in women’s descrip-tions of successful marriages. As women who participated in our research spoke of love, they often articulated many aspects of what has come to be referred to as “modern love”: that is, the companionate model of marriage that emphasizes reciprocity, mutual respect, and complementarity between husbands and wives as the characteristics of a stable union (see Hirsch & Wardlow 2006). Indeed, as the case studies below make clear, gifts, financial support, and physical attention are themselves considered important demonstrations of romantic love. A husband’s failure to provide material support for his wife is often interpreted as a failure to respect, care for, and love her. Though Hirsch and Wardlow (2006) and contributors to their volume identify a global shift to an ideal of emotional and sexual attach-ment, this has long been the norm in Senegal. For example, numerous Wolof proverbs convey the challenges of marriage (e.g., “Lal u sey dafa xat” [the marital bed is narrow]; “Sey du benn fann, du naari fann” [marriage is not for one day or two days]), implying that love and compatibility are necessary to overcome marriage’s inevitable frustrations.

In their commentaries, Senegalese women emphasized that romantic love is not an end in itself or the goal of marriage, but rather a quality that allows women to tolerate inevitable challenges and disappointments. The key attribute of a good wife is the ability to muñ : to remain patient, stoic, self-composed, and uncomplaining in the face of challenges. As Fama Fall, a thirty-one-year-old second wife, explained, “Love is important in a couple, because if you don’t love your husband, you won’t be able to muñ .” While muñ implies maintaining appearances for an external audience, it also suggests the ability to overlook the faults of a spouse and maintain one’s composure even in the face of indignities such as infidelity, financial inad-equacy, or antagonistic in-laws. The fundamental understanding of mar-riage is that it is difficult; financial security and protection represent a man’s expression of love, love makes muñ possible, and muñ is essential to making marriage last. Thus a woman enters a marriage with a certain expectations, and a good marriage is understood as serving a number of functions; it increases the woman’s social status and offers her financial and emotional security while simultaneously ensuring social reproduction and often the strengthening of ties between large extended families.

In the early twenty-first century, however, economic challenges and a growing gap between expectations and opportunities—particularly for young people—are destabilizing this balance of motives. On a global level, neoliberal capitalism has paved the way for rising inequality within and across countries (Harvey 2005 ). In developing nations it has produced expectations and the desire for consumption while simultaneously cutting off paths to earning and economic stability (Comaroff & Comaroff 2001 , 2005 ; Ferguson 2006 ). Failed structural adjustment policies in Senegal and


the devaluation of the West African franc (CFA) in 1994 led to a doubling of the federal debt and extreme inflation. Housing prices in Dakar have risen sharply, pushing families into the periphery and discouraging young adults from leaving their parents’ homes and establishing their own house-holds. Inflation has pushed the cost of everyday staples out of reach for families, leading to rising food insecurity and the “pauperization” of the middle class. The urban financial downturn has left many families strug-gling to fulfill the basic needs of their members, leading some scholars to argue that the urban Senegalese family is “in crisis” (Aduayi-Diop 2010 ). Equally significantly, the fallout from privatization and structural adjust-ment reforms in the 1980s has meant the disappearance of jobs in the public sector and the formal economy, including the role of the Senegalese civil servant—once the archetypical goor jaarin . As elsewhere in the region, the decline of the public sector and the seeming “end of salary” have pro-duced disruptions in social life (Mbembe & Roitman 1995 ).

While young men are experiencing alarming rates of un- and underem-ployment and privatization has placed public wealth in private hands, the extreme wealth of the elite is increasingly visible in Dakar. New shopping malls with escalators and European clothing stores, chic ocean-view hotels, and omnipresent luxury SUVs exist alongside multiple daily power and water cuts, poor public sanitation, and malnutrition. These hypervisible global and local leisure practices and luxury commodities have influenced Dakaroises’ understandings of adequate material support, so that while economic security has decreased, expectations have increased. Women find achieving social respectability through dress and displays of generosity and giving at family celebrations and rituals an increasingly expensive endeavor (Buggenhagen 2011 ). Whereas clothing and housing their dependents may once have been straightforward duties on the part of men, male infor-mants complained that their wives make outsized demands; the definition of sanse (being well dressed) seems to expand every year to include more and more imported items, such as leather handbags and matching shoes. Though women are increasingly contributing to their personal and house-hold expenditures, the ideal remains that the husband covers all such costs.

Recent scholarship on prolonged economic distress in Africa empha-sizes that economic hardship transforms the context in which people con-struct new ways of “being in the world” to fulfill old and new aspirations (Makhulu et al. 2010:19). As elsewhere on the continent, alarming rates of un- and underemployment in Senegal have left young men unable to become “successful and respected adults in their community” (Melly 2011 :368; see also Cole 2004; Honwana & De Boeck 2005; Mains 2007; Masquelier 2005 ), and neoliberal reforms have disrupted a clear linear narrative leading to social adulthood. This gap between expectations and possibilities of finan-cial support, and the absence of readily available goor jaarin , plays an indis-putable role not only in a delay of marriage and family formation (Dial 2008 ), but also in the rise of divorce, which has been estimated as affecting a third of all marriages in Dakar (Antoine 2001 ). This gap also plays a role


in the decision of some women in Dakar to pursue life strategies that divert emphasis from marriage as a joint project over an extended time horizon that balances motives of financial and emotional security for both them-selves and their families.

Even in the face of contemporary challenges, marriage remains the primary social and economic strategy available to women. Despite the fre-quently heard laments among unmarried young women in Dakar that “there are no husbands left,” much less husbands who can provide adequately for their dependents, marriage remains a important goal; as the Senegalese sociologist Fatou Binetou Dial points out, while “the ideal model of a good husband no longer corresponds to the realities of marriage, . . . women continue to believe in it” (2008:181). Sang , dëkkal , dëkkoo , and muñ (stoi-cism) also remain central to Senegalese understandings of marriage, including the cultural constructions of muñ that refer to the goal of marriage as a long-term project. However, following Dial, we find that women in Dakar continue to seek the increasingly elusive goor jaarin in a setting that no longer produces them . But as good providers become increasingly rare, women’s processes of evaluating potential marital partners are deemphasizing his-torically important concerns with strengthening kin networks, formulating a long-term partnership, respecting class, caste, and ethnic endogamy, and establishing emotional intimacy in favor of a narrower calculus of imme-diate and individual material gain. For many women, contemporary chal-lenges and the increasingly inability of men to fulfill their traditional role as breadwinner have prompted innovations within and outside of the insti-tution of marriage. In these cases, the goal of marriage as a long-term pro-ject has given way to strategies in which heterosexual unions are seen as a means to extract immediate financial benefit from male partners.

Thus whereas marital ideals still stress the importance of intimacy, fidelity, and material support, and while hegemonic marital norms remain dominant in the popular media and everyday discourses, for some young women the elements of intimacy and fidelity are being deemphasized in favor of the requirement for material support. As suggested from the com-ments quoted above from our informant Khady Sene, an overriding con-cern for intérêt , for one’s own interests, has entered into the marital calculus. As Deggan Diof, a thirty-eight year old divorcée, said,

A man who wants to court me has to be able to meet my needs. If he can’t meet my needs I am not going to waste my time with him. My girlfriends tell me that they are only looking [out] for their intérêt [interests]. What will they do with a man who can’t give them money?

This point of view is even evident among older Senegalese. Though parents have traditionally sought a “good” match for their children, the qualities of what makes for a desirable suitor seem to have shifted for many. According to Diof, parents who are suffering from the economic downturn push their daughters toward men (such as overseas migrants) who can offer them money.


Mame Fatou Ly, a sixty-seven-year-old mother of six, said about both unmar-ried women and their parents, “Now it’s money. They don’t look for Allah, they don’t look for anything that isn’t money. Even if he is a griot, if he has money, they’ll marry him.” 5 Thus as Dakaroises are confronted with the increasingly tenuous economic prospects of marriage, women are impro-vising within marriage to satisfy essential needs and to accommodate ever-expanding social standards for conspicuous generosity and consumption. Some are diversifying their strategies by seeking multiple male partners, while others compromise on the romantic and intimate aspects of marriage for the possibility of economic security from absentee husbands. Mbaraan and long-distance marriage are new kinds of social insurance, new modes of wresting social and economic security from relationships with men. In the following sections we explore each of these social practices and assess how they are pushing the boundaries of known romantic and sexual strategies.

Strategies for Hard Times: Nonmarital Sex and Transnational Marriage

How Many Mbaraan Does It Take to Make a Goor Jaarin?

Mbaraan is a flexible Wolof word that can be used as a plural or singular noun, or as a verb. A woman can mbaraan by having multiple male partners, and the men that she is using for material gain (and likely deceiving in the process) are also referred to as her mbaraan . Given its transgressive nature, mbaraan has generated sensational media coverage, volatile moral com-mentary, and critical debate among Senegalese social scientists (Foley & Drame 2013 ).

In most accounts, mbaraan is depicted as the practice of young women in their late teens and early twenties who extract money and other goods from a string of male suitors (Biaya 2001 ; Fouquet 2007 ; Nyamnjoh 2005 ). These young women have usurped their parents’ role as the recipients of the gifts that are an expected feature of traditional courtship. Senegalese scholars point to historical and cultural antecedents to mbaraan ; prospec-tive brides traditionally encouraged their suitors to compete with one another by bestowing lavish gifts, and divorced women often relied on the economic support of several male patrons with whom they had no sexual relationship (Aduayi-Diop 2010 ; Thioub 2003 ). As Aduayi-Diop (1990) points out, the word mbaraan is closely related to the word mbaxal , which refers to a savory Senegalese rice dish with a mixture of condiments. Just as a woman who cooks mbaxal must mix together many spices, a woman who practices mbaraan juggles many sexual relationships.

Women can engage in mbaraan as a prelude to marriage, as a way to augment their access to love, sex, or financial resources during marriage, or as a strategy in the typically brief period between divorce and remarriage. Rather than focusing on the longer-term marital project with a single male


partner, they rely on the resources of multiple men, be they affective or material. In contrast to muñ —a strategy of patient resignation—women who mbaraan actively pursue the financial security, love, or sexual satisfaction missing in their marriages.

Kumba Diallo’s story illustrates how professional aspirations and mate-rial desires may influence a woman’s appraisal of prospective spouses. In this case, she converted an mbaraan into a husband, hoping that this strategy would guarantee her financial security. Thirty-two years old at the time of the interview and married with two children, she is a Dakar native who was renting an apartment with her husband in the upper-class neighborhood of Fann Residence. An aspiring singer, she had met her husband in Dakar’s bustling music scene. She acknowledged that she did not love him when they married; instead she hoped that he would help her launch her musical career. He appeared to satisfy the criterion of being an adequate male pro-vider, and he was also willing to invest in her musical future. When they were newly married she was happy: “In the beginning he did everything for me. He gave me a lot of resources. I’m a singer and he helped me get out my first album. But at the same time I’m not happy because I didn’t love him then and I have never loved him.”

Eight years later, Kumba Diallo was receiving less money from her husband, and she said this was the source of their problems. At the time of her marriage she was willing to forgo love for immediate financial support and the prospect of a successful musical career, but as this material support waned her dissatisfaction grew. She began to seek affection and material support outside of her marriage. At the time of this interview she had a rotation of seven mbaraan boyfriends, including one favorite. “He’s older,” she explained, “and from the interior of the country. . . . I love him and he’s a rich man. He gives me everything that I want.” She explained that once she had a “good situation” she would be able to stop mbaraan . When pressed about what this might include, she responded that she needed “a lot of money, a house, and a car.” While she spoke fondly of this lover, her roster of six other men revealed the potentially ephemeral nature of these rela-tionships and her desire to provide safeguards against overreliance on a single partner. She recognized the fragility of her mbaraan relationships and her need to diversify her prospects.

By agreeing to marry her current husband, Kumba Diallo had embarked upon what many Dakar residents would label a marriage of intérêt , specifi-cally economic self-interest. Though he did help with her immediate pro-fessional goal, financing the production of an album, in the absence of steady economic support she had little motivation to remain a patient or faithful wife (i.e., to muñ ). Given her desire for maintaining a starlet’s stan-dard of dress and grooming and for acquiring global consumer goods, it is not surprising that her favorite lover was both rich and willing to accommo-date her expensive tastes. Yet it would be overly mechanistic to conclude that she appreciated him only for his affluence. Instead, it appeared that his wealth and generosity, and his capacity to enact the role of the steady


provider, were what allowed her to feel love for him. As in other African settings, Kumba Diallo’s case demonstrates how “material provision and emotional attachment are mutually constitutive” (Cole & Thomas 2009 :20‒21).

Like Kumba Diallo, Fama Fall found herself disappointed in her mar-riage after her assumptions about her future husband’s means and gener-osity proved incorrect. She was thirty-one at the time of the interview and had been married for about a year to a forty-five-year-old man, for whom she was the second wife. She lived with her infant in the home of her older sister in Sacré Coeur, a long-established middle-class neighborhood. Her husband had courted her for about eighteen months before she agreed to marry him, partly at the urging of her girlfriends. 6 But she was beginning to regret the decision, and complained that her husband only fulfilled his responsibilities to her “halfway.” He refused to provide financial support for a small business she had established, and “when I have a family gathering and ask him for permission to go he refuses. It really upsets me and I am starting to have a lot of regrets.” Her unhappiness stemmed not only from her miscalculation about her husband’s generosity, but also from a longing for her former boyfriend.

I had a lot of hope in this man [her husband], but I’ve seen nothing. My girlfriends all told me that he was a man who would be able to meet all of my needs, but I am disappointed. I have gotten very angry with my friends who pushed me into this marriage. I actually loved another man, but he was taking a long time to decide [to marry], so I was influenced by my friends. But I still love the other man.

Although the boyfriend had not made any overtures toward marriage, she wistfully recalled how much financial support he had given her: “He used to help me financially. When I would travel he would take me to the station and come pick me up. He was never jealous. My husband is jealous and doesn’t help me with anything.”

At the time of the interview Fall had a few mbaraan and continued to see her old boyfriend, sneaking off to his apartment twice a week and making sure that she was back at her sister’s home before her husband might pass by after work. Though most of the problems in the marriage had to do with her unfulfilled material aspirations, the desire to be cared for also entered her explanation of why some women have mbaraan : “A woman just wants to feel loved. When she goes to bed at night, she is reassured that she is loved, pampered and protected. If she doesn’t have that with her husband, she will seek it elsewhere.” She admitted feeling guilty about her behavior, especially when her husband was acting affectionate: “Every time I visit my mbaraan I go home and cry. Some days my husband is very atten-tive, and it stuns me because it was his neglect that pushed me into mbaraan. When he is nice I feel a lot of remorse and I cry a lot. I get sad and think to myself that he doesn’t deserve to be tricked.” It is probably relevant that


because the first wife lived in the family home and the husband could not afford to rent or build a home in which they could all live together, Fall and her husband also lacked the regular bedroom time that might foster inti-macy and solidarity. Therefore, his lack of means also prevented them from living together and sharing a domestic space where their marital bond could be strengthened.

While Kumba Diallo and Fama Fall both found themselves on the losing end of a strategic gamble to marry for money (i.e., to turn mbaraan into husbands), Lyka Faye was using mbaraan to cope with an arranged marriage. She was twenty-eight and married to a man twelve years her senior who is also a maternal relative. They had two children and lived in the middle-class neighborhood of Ouest Foire. When recalling how they came to be mar-ried, Faye said she had no idea at the time why a distant relative of her mother’s was visiting the family. It turned out that he had come to ask for a wife, and her parents decided she was the most suitable daughter for him. Faye did not love him but said that she had to “respect my parents and sub-mit to their decision.” Yet in her description of her current situation, it was not the absence of love but rather her financial dissatisfaction and her hus-band’s failure to fulfill his financial obligations to her and her children that was paramount.

My husband is a construction worker. Perhaps he isn’t well paid and has to send money to his family in the Casamance, . . . that’s why he doesn’t have enough money. . . . If my children get sick, I have to figure out a way to pay for their medical care. If I have a family ceremony to attend I also have to figure out a way to pay my dues.

She said that she had turned to mbaraan for the same reason that most women do, “because their husbands aren’t taking good enough care of them.” Although Faye emphasized her quest for material assistance rather than her emotional needs, it is likely that caretaking here implied both emotional attention and financial support, and that her husband’s inability to satisfy her material needs also inhibited her ability to feel love for him.

The stories of women who mbaraan illustrate that their expectations of men’s obligations toward their wives ( sang , dekkal , and dekoo) remain reso-nant. Women who find their marriages lacking in love and affection, sexual intimacy, or material support seek these social goods outside of marriage, often by maintaining a rotation of male partners. Whereas in the past these features were sought from a single male provider, a husband, women who mbaraan find them in multiple relationships. It may be that women who initially selected their spouses for their financial potential (a strategy that we suggest is on the rise), only to be disappointed, are particularly likely to seek affection and additional material support outside of marriage. A sec-ond vantage point from which to assess how and why women are employing new logics as they embark on marital projects with tangible financial objec-tives is the phenomenon of transnational marriages.


The Ultimate Goor Jaarin ? Marriage to Overseas Migrants

While mbaraan represents a dramatic departure from the traditional formula in which women marry out of religious, cultural, and familial duty and muñ in the face of hardship, the search for the goor jaarin has also led many Senegalese women to look outside of Senegal for potential spouses. Marriage to overseas migrants has become an increasingly desirable strategy for women seeking a materially stable union and reflects a new calculus about the desirability of potential husbands. While this phenomenon in some ways represents a natural permutation of historical marital patterns—women and their kin have always sought to better their social and economic position through an advantageous match—it also reveals how financial cal-culations have come to eclipse most other aspects of traditional approaches to marriage and how a “culture of migration” (Massey et al. 1993 ) is reshaping older notions of class and caste.

As Antoine et al. ( 1995 ) note, for generations, Dakar-based women rarely married men from outside of Dakar; in fact, sociologists of marriage even noticed a trend of neighborhood endogamy (Dial 2008 ). Over the past forty years, however, the same forces of neoliberal reform that have challenged men’s earning power and changed some women’s view of mar-riage have also changed this geographical focus. Though provenance from urban, middle-class neighborhoods (along with other markers of upward mobility such as university degrees) may once have signaled financial prowess and the promise of goor jaarin status, this is no longer a certainty (see Babou 2008 ). In recent years, in fact, it seems to have become increasingly common for middle-class Dakaroise women to marry rural men of lower-class origins (see Tall 2002 ; Riccio 2005 ). In addition, once stringent divisions of caste in Wolof society are eroding in marriages where migrants are concerned.

The collapsed formal sector in Senegal has driven many Senegalese men to look outside of Senegal’s borders for the means to provide for kin and reach social maturity. The Human Development Report 2009 puts the emigration rate from Senegal at 4.4 percent—likely an underestimate (UNDP 2009 ). The World Bank estimates, for example, that remittances by overseas migrants from 2010 to 2012 equaled 13 percent of Senegal’s GDP (World Bank 2013 ). Many men journey to the global North, where they engage in low-wage labor or work in the informal sector to send money home. Such remittances have not only transformed the physical landscape through construction of new homes, schools, mosques, and health centers, but have profoundly shaped the political and social landscapes of Senegal as well, upsetting older strictures of social order such as socioeconomic status and caste. One indication of these social transformations is that women are increasingly opting to marry overseas migrants, even those working in these relatively low-paying jobs. Unmarried women and their families appear to believe that by residing overseas, a suitor is inherently in a better position to provide for his wife than a nonmigrant, regardless of his educa-tion or upbringing. The migrants, for their part—almost regardless of their


rural/urban origin, caste, premigratory class status, or actual job/migration status overseas—find themselves in a position to marry Senegalese women who may not have looked in their direction before they became migrants. Even middle-class men find themselves struggling to compete with migrants on the marriage market, and thus many of them, too, are turning to menial labor overseas (Melley 2011 ). What exactly the migrant does overseas and his legal immigration status are usually of little importance in the negotia-tions for marriage—in contrast to traditional marriage negotiations in which the particulars of a husband’s situation and extended family would be extensively considered. In fact, many wives of migrants have no sense of their husbands’ occupations, beyond “ immigré ” (migrant) or “ mingi exterieur” (“he’s abroad”). Being overseas is in itself a profession as far as many Senegalese are concerned, and it affords membership into a certain kind of class category because of its associations with potential to earn and be a goor jaarin .

Thus the increasing economic crunch and the rising social status of migrants in Senegalese society has led many women to eschew the bene-fits of cohabitation, daily companionship, and sexual satisfaction in mar-riage ( dëkkoo ) for the promise of access to (foreign) material resources ( sang and dëkkal ) (Hannaford 2011 ). The life of a migrant’s wife can mean years of separation from her husband. Even for those who marry men with steady work and legal immigrant status in the destination country, financial constraints often keep husbands from visiting more than once every year or two. For those whose partners are undocumented immigrants, the absences are even longer. The Senegalese media have produced countless stories of abandoned jabaaru immigré (migrants’ wives), and nearly every Dakar resi-dent can point to a neighbor or a relative who has been left in the lurch by an absent migrant partner. In choosing transnational marriage in spite of the recognized loneliness and struggles of migrants’ wives, Senegalese women are putting the need for material resources over emotional needs . Many of the women’s tales of courtship with their migrant husbands were punctuated by detailed accounts of gifts and markers of status and wealth connected with l’exterieur —overseas migration and an international com-munity of consumption.

Mariama Gueye’s story is typical of that of many migrants’ wives. Thirty-one years old at the time of the interview and pregnant with her first child, Mariama met her husband through her relatives while he was on a two-month vacation from his factory work outside of Milan. He proposed on the first day of their acquaintance, but she asked for some time to consider. At the time she was in a long-distance relationship with another migrant who was living in Paris, but was beginning to doubt that he would ever propose. Though she had dated migrants before, Gueye claimed that her reasons for marrying her husband had little to do with his migrant status. She and her parents believed him to be a pious man of good character from a good family despite his rural origins and lack of formal education, factors that would have made him an unlikely match for an urban sophisticate like Gueye


if he had not been a migrant. “And then there was me, too,” she explained, citing the social pressure in Senegal for women to marry. “I was no longer a gamine . I was thirty years old.” She accepted his proposal a week later and two weeks after that they were married.

Though she did not put herself directly in the category of women who were eager to marry migrants out of interêt , Gueye acknowledged that the desire was widespread.

The majority of girls think that if you have a husband who is abroad it’s an opportunity to go there. And everyone wants to go there. Even the girls who marry toubabs [Europeans, whites], it’s like that, to travel. It’s only to travel. They can marry without love just to be able to travel. A woman, she will do anything to change countries. There are a lot like that.

Indeed, nearly all the migrants’ wives interviewed reported a hope to one day go abroad themselves. Gueye herself aspired to work abroad and earn money to support her parents, a key source of social standing in Senegal. Before marrying, she had worked as a cashier in a gas station. As a working woman she felt a responsibility to contribute to household expenses, help her siblings who were still in school, and make her own displays of gener-osity and giving at family celebrations and rituals, and she held the position with some amount of pride. Nevertheless, she described the difficulties of accumulating wealth and savings from a meager salary in a country of such low employment:

When I worked, it was difficult, everyone counted on you, everyone. They don’t know how much you are paid, but they know that, “Mariama, dey, she works!” At the end of the month, everyone calls you, “I have this or that problem.” It’s just you with your 100,000 CFA [around U.S.$200] a month—it’s not enough!

As a migrant’s wife, with the promise of remittances and the possibility of becoming a migrant herself one day, Gueye hoped to be in a better position to help her parents: “I want to work and help them, that’s what I want.”

But despite such hopes, the majority of migrants’ wives do not join their husbands (Baizan et al. 2011 ). In addition, many wives of migrants, like most Senegalese, have unrealistic expectations about the earning potential that comes with migration. Nafy Diouf, a thirty-three-year old migrant’s wife, said, “If you ask anyone, they’ll tell you that migrants’ wives lack nothing. That’s what they say! Your husband lacks nothing.” But most find the remittances they receive from their absent husbands to be much less than expected, and the disappointment is all the more painful because of the general societal belief that a migrant’s wife is well provided for. Twenty-nine-year-old Nene Diatta, who eventually joined her husband in Italy, confessed that before she arrived there, “I thought there was a never-ending flow of money. He was in Europe; he was abroad.” Though he dutifully sent her


150,000 FCFA (about U.S.$300) each month, she assumed that her husband was being ungenerous: “I thought it was nothing.” Another dissatisfied wife, twenty-six-year-old Rama Diakhate, summed it up thus: “A migrant hus-band? There is zero benefit. They are cheap, stingy.” The financial disap-pointment experienced by these women was undoubtedly compounded by loneliness and the logistical complexities that are involved in maintaining a long-distance marriage. Although they may have anticipated such sacrifices, the double loss of physical and emotional closeness and adequate finan-cial support made the situation all the more painful.

Even when the resources are adequate, many migrants’ wives still find that the trade-off of living apart is not what they had bargained for. Fatim Drame, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, had been married for eight years to a Senegalese man resident in Marseilles who visited every two to three years for two months at a time. When asked if she looked forward to her husband’s visits, Drame sighed and explained how her transnational marriage differed from more traditional, companionate ideals of Senegalese marriage.

Marriage before it is neex [enjoyable, fun, nice], you have to live with your husband. He has to get to know your jukkoo [character, manner], and you get to know his. That’s what marriage is. I cannot tell you that I know my husband’s jukkoo . I don’t know his jukkoo and he doesn’t know mine.

After eight years of marriage, Drame still felt that she barely knew her husband; by the time she began to get used to his presence during one of his visits, it would be time for him to leave. “I can’t say I’m happy, I can’t say I’m unhappy,” she said, but she felt that something was missing in her life without a husband. Recently, she counseled a sister-in-law who was about to marry another migrant in France.

I told her, if I were in your place I wouldn’t marry a migrant. I wouldn’t accept. One day I was listening to a radio program that was talking about migrants’ wives. They said migrants’ wives basically have no husbands, they were saying all sorts of things. I called, because the whole thing touched me, and I said, “It’s true, we don’t live.” Because all the women who see you wearing gold jewelry, wearing nice clothes, say that your husband sent them to you. But you don’t even care.

Aminata Seck, age forty-two and divorced, was also profoundly disillu-sioned by the realities of her marriage to a migrant in Germany.

Marriage to a migrant is painful. Because your husband is there, you’re here. That’s painful. You’re lonely. You’re the one covering your daily expenses. You don’t have anyone to help you. You’re the only one in the house with the kids, it’s difficult. You get stressed because the in-laws come and say things—they think you have all the money. They think he gives it all to you. But he doesn’t give you anything.


The remittances from Seck’s husband were never enough to meet her two children’s basic needs and school fees, so she had taken up work buying and reselling merchandise to make ends meet. Her frequent absences from home to pursue her work led to conflict with her husband, who suspected her of cheating.

When he calls on the phone and doesn’t reach you, he creates problems. You know? It becomes a problem. He wants you to be sitting in the house, so when he calls you pick up. And he doesn’t give you enough [money]! If you go out, when you get back he says, “you’ve got a boyfriend!”

Although this was not true in her case, infidelity on the part of migrants’ wives was not an unheard of occurrence, with some wives themselves turning to mbarran to compensate for their lack of spousal support—either finan-cial, or emotional, or both. If gifts and remittances represent not just support but also affection, wives often experience financial disappointment as emotional withholding, as a sign of lack of love on the part of their hus-bands. After ten years of marriage, Seck made the difficult choice to seek a divorce. Though she and her husband had courted long-distance for two years before the marriage, she claimed, like Fatim Drame, that she had never really known him and that the marriage itself was not real. “It was a telephone marriage. . . . You have to live with someone to know their real character, their real face, that’s when you know someone.” She blamed this lack of cohabitation and emotional sharing for his jealousy: “There was just no trust.”

Divorce is not uncommon among the women involved in such transnational partnerships. Like the women who turn to mbaraan when their material needs are not met in marriage, many women who marry migrants for economic reasons also lack the motivation to muñ . The long-distance relationships simply lack the qualities of partnership and affection that support such commitment and goodwill over the long term. Seck said she would never consider marrying another migrant (“Migrants aren’t worth the trouble”), and many migrants’ wives echoed these sentiments. They said that they would counsel a friend, daughter, or sister not to make the same mistake. Nevertheless, unmarried women continue to opt for marriage to migrants, putting their hopes for finan-cial advantage and social status above any desire for physical and emo-tional closeness. Faced with the discouraging lack of goor jaarin among their local counterparts, these women place their bets on migrant men, believing that undefined overseas riches are the most promising path to a happy life.

Conclusion

Material exchange and men’s ongoing support of women is an intrinsic part of intimate relationships in Senegal; women have always aspired to


marry a good provider who can improve their social standing and economic well-being. Love, affection, and intimacy are included in women’s aspira-tions, and many women see them as indispensable in a lasting marriage. Yet contemporary practices reveal a pronounced emphasis on material expec-tations, with many women forgoing love, intimacy, and marital fidelity for a chance at upward economic mobility or at least financial stability. The rise of mbaraan and transnational marriages may be an indication of the decreasing viability of traditional marriage as an adequate guarantee of social and material stability for women.

Previous research has explored the new phenomenon of mbaraan as a form of female sexual exploitation of men and as a means for divorced women to avoid the stigma of becoming prostitutes (see Foley & Drame 2013 ; Fouquet 2007 ). Yet this phenomenon, when paired with the simulta-neous rise of transnational marriages, suggests a broader departure from the former marital strategies in which conjugal bonds anchored long-term projects of social reproduction. The social forces that produce both mbaraan and transnational marriages suggest an increasing economic instrumentali-zation of romantic and sexual partnerships—and we argue that these trends run counter to the assumptions present in much of the socio-anthropological literature. This instrumentalization of heterosexual liaisons pushes some women toward marriages of “interest” and toward securing additional financial support outside of marriage.

Unfortunately, these conjugal and sexual strategies by no means ensure marital satisfaction or material security. For many of our research participants, marriages of intérêt , unions with absentee husbands, or the exhausting subterfuge required to maintain several sexual partners failed to deliver the desired ends. Some women who are experimenting with these new social possibilities find themselves lonely, disappointed, and remorseful.

In their introduction to Modern Loves , which offers ethnographic evi-dence of love marriages around the world, Hirsch and Wardlow argue that globalization and modernity are facilitating this rise in the companionate marriage ideal (2006a:14). In contrast, the longstanding concern about affective ties between husband and wife in Senegal is becoming less eco-nomically viable. As Senegalese men find it harder to provide for their wives and children, and individuals can stake few claims on extended family and social networks in moments of economic hardship, women in Dakar are turning to nonmarital sex and transnational marriage in exchange for material support. Both of these alternatives to traditional married life represent a move away from—and not toward—the values of companionate marriage that cohere with traditional Senegalese understandings of mar-riage. Mbaraan contradicts companionate marriage’s “prioritization of and greater personal investment in the marital bond over other relationships” (Hirsch & Wardlow 2006a :24), while transnational marriage involves a sacrifice of both emotional closeness and sexual intimacy in favor of anticipated economic and social advancement.


Cole and Thomas ( 2009 ) rightly criticize the tendency in recent Africanist scholarship on gender and sexuality to foreground the instrumentalist aspect of relationships at the expense of analyzing the complexity of con-temporary and historical ideas about love, affection, and intimacy. They note the harm involved in downplaying the affective dimension of African relationships, and their volume’s historical accounts of love and romance on the continent disrupt the notion that such concerns are “new” or a result of the “modern” era. We are sensitive to Cole and Thomas’s critique of the abundant literature that exaggerates the differences between African and Western notions of intimacy, which in so doing portrays the latter as normative and the former as deviant and ignores how emotions and mate-riality are entangled everywhere. Though our findings reflect an economistic trend in Senegalese relationships, we have also emphasized that intimacy, romance, and material support have always been intertwined in Senegal, as elsewhere in Africa. Women’s willingness to forgo these aspirations for their relationships, or to diversify their pursuit both within and outside of marriage, appears to be the more recent innovation. Our evidence suggests that these emerging patterns may reflect a particular moment in advanced neoliberal capitalism in which economic dimensions of relationships surpass the desire for love and intimacy.

As we observed women embarking on new trajectories of strategic marriage and nonmarital sexual exchanges, we were impressed with the significant social and economic risks inherent in their efforts to secure a stable source of income or support. While more conventional marriage is not without risk or inevitable disappointment, few of the women in our studies had found stability or satisfaction in their less traditional marital circum-stances. Indeed, the majority of migrants’ wives experienced the double frustration of insufficient remittances and the loneliness and isolation of long-distance marriage. Many women who practiced mbaraan expressed guilt and shame about transgressing hegemonic social norms and longed for a single male partner who could offer social and financial security. They are vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and they feared that their infidelities would be discovered by their husbands or their children. If transnational marriage and mbaraan represent recent gendered innovations for coping with insecure times, they are far from providing women with durable solutions to their intimate and material dilemmas.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Joanna Davidson and the anonymous reviewers of ASR for their notes on earlier versions of this article, and Bruce White-house for organizing the panel at the American Anthropological Association that sparked this collaboration. The research for this paper was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (Hannaford) and the Fulbright Scholars Program (Foley).


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Notes

1. Perhaps nowhere are fresh perspectives on love and marriage more necessary than in research on African societies, where for too long research seeking to unravel “African” patterns of sexual activity were apt to “reduce African intimacy to sex” at the expense of more nuanced accounts of love, desire, and longing (Cole & Thomas 2009 :3).

2. Foley’s fieldwork involved life history and relationship interviews in 2009‒10 with registered and clandestine sex workers; never married, divorced, and widowed women; and unmarried, married, and divorced men in Dakar. Hanna-ford’s data come from long-form ethnographic interviews with migrants’ wives in Dakar and its surroundings, as well as in Italy, in 2010‒11, which form part of her larger multi site project on Senegalese migration and marriage. Our research participants were predominately Wolof or sufficiently acculturated to urban settings to speak Wolof, Senegal’s urban lingua franca. Many of our com-ments about Senegalese expectations in marriage are based on Wolof cultural notions of marital obligation and responsibility, but these concepts have cultural equivalents among other ethnic groups in Senegal.

3. While the “Code de la Famille” is a much disputed document, and civil or legal marriage is not the norm even for most city dwellers, who instead celebrate only religious and traditional marriage rites, the tenets of sang , dekkal and dekkoo are so hegemonic that they were easily incorporated into the state’s legal construction of marriage.

4. Polygyny is sanctioned by the Senegalese interpretation of Islam as well as by Senegalese law, and the practice cuts across social classes in Senegal (Antoine et al. 1995 ). Having multiple wives is a sign of wealth and status, and this is true for people from all social strata: university professors, ministers of parlia-ment, farmers, and even tailors. Unlike in other Muslim contexts, in Senegal there is no clear sign that the practice is on the decline.

5. A griot is a Wolof caste that non-casted Wolof would traditionally be prohibited from marrying.

6. While Fall’s friends did suggest that her husband was a man of means, their urgings to accept the marriage proposal also followed the predominant cultural logic that a definitive proposal outweighs a probable one, irrespective of the desirability of the men in question. This logic is conveyed in the Wolof saying “A bad husband is better than a good boyfriend.”

Negotiating Love and Marriage in Contemporary Senegal: A Good Man is Hard to Find

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