Abstract:
This article explores a key trope of economic stagnation and chronic joblessness in postcolonial Senegal: the image of "lazy" young men in the public sphere. This civic and moral discourse is critical of young men who allegedly drink tea "all day." But this attitude elides the long history of youth protest against injustice, and excuses a state that has displaced the most strident critics of Senegalese neoliberalism by bribing them with overseas scholarships and government positions. This suggests that what some see as political and economic inactivity is manufactured through state-sponsored encadrement: techniques of trapping, quartering, and containing youth.
Unemployment? Oh. Like the young men who sit and drink tea all day?
I was confused but dismissed my growing sense of discomfort, convinced this nagging feeling was an occupational hazard of the ethnographic enterprise. Whenever I mentioned my interest in studying the economic stagnation that had plagued Senegal for decades, someone mentioned unemployment (
chômage, in French) and tea (in Wolof,
attaya). Code switching, as we know, often involves miscommunication. To speak with friends and colleagues, I was obliged to maneuver between French, Wolof, English, and Fulani. Apparently not without some bizarre consequences.
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