By Chelsie Yount-André
In Dakar, migrants’ children who grow up abroad are sometimes called “little tubabs” (white people) by their Senegal-based relatives, a racial metaphor that suggests that they are foreign and spoiled. In an effort demonstrate to Dakarois how the behaviors they view as problematic among migrants’ children may be rooted in confusion and misunderstanding, I organized a children’s theater workshop in Dakar. This exercise opened a space for discussion about the ways moral judgements are rooted in assumptions about what other (ought to) know, revealing how children’s behavior shapes their relatives’ perceptions of the transnational circulation of resources.
Among Senegalese, migrants’ children have a reputation for being spoiled. Adults roll their eyes at stories of youth who visit from Europe, only to sit on the couch absorbed in their phones. Dismissing these youth as “little tubabs” (white people), Senegalese suggest that migrants’ children’s (mis)behavior is the natural result of growing up in Europe. Scholarship on youth migration reveals the diverse processes of racialization migrants’ children encounter in their (parents’) country of immigration, highlighting the subtle ways stigmatization is encoded in host countries’ language, law, and educational systems (Fernando 2014, Rosa 2019, Statz 2018). But we know little about the sorts of stereotypes these children might encounter when they return to their parents’ country of birth.
At the theater workshop in Dakar, a boy plays a “French cousin” by wearing glasses and a button-down shirt and sitting immersed in his phone, at a distance from the rest of the family. Photo credits: Author
When I began fieldwork in Senegal in 2014, I perceived these assertions that migrants’ children act like “little tubabs” to be unrelated to the transnational socioeconomic relations I was studying. Although accusing an adult migrant of acting like a tubab can be a serious insult—a claim that one has "forgotten" one's family and failed to send adequate material support—when it is aimed at children, the term is usually an affectionate tease. But as I examined the role of “second generation” children in transnational class and kinship-making (Yount-André 2018, 2020), my attention returned to the term “little tubab” and its racialized meanings, which are bound up with assumptions about wealth and morality. I began to see the term as encapsulating the frustration and resentment that brews beneath the surface in transnational families’ negotiations of resource redistribution.
In Senegalese households in Paris and Dakar alike, value-laden expectations regarding material obligations, what I call “economic moralities,” often emerged in critical terms. Transnational relatives regularly voiced frustration with stingy migrants and their spoiled children, on the one hand, or with greedy relatives whose demands for gifts surpass migrants’ salaries, on the other. Traveling between France and Senegal, I saw these frustrations as rooted, in part, in transnational kin’s difficulties imagining their relatives’ lives abroad.
Enacting Economic Moralities
These tensions motivated me to return to Dakar to share my research with the Senegal-based relatives of migrants, like those with whom I worked in Paris. Supported by a Wenner Gren Foundation and the Chaire UNESCO World Food Systems, I organized a children’s theater workshop in Dakar with the aim of highlighting how migrants’ children’s behaviors, which in Senegal appear to be marks of selfishness, often result from unfamiliarity with the social expectations of children in Dakar. Members of the Kàddu Yaraax theater troupe led 12 youth (aged 8-16) in acting out scenes that depicted the confusion and frustration that Senegalese children in Paris experience when they visit their families in Senegal, encountering new expectations regarding how they “ought” to give and share. Transcriptions of stories that Senegalese children in Paris had recounted during my dissertation research provided the script for the scenes that the youth developed at the workshop. By embodying the perspectives of migrants’ children, I hoped that youth in Dakar would gain new insight into European children’s struggles.
Youth playing the role of Senegal-based family members explain to their “French cousins” that there are no individual portions when eating around the communal platter, but rather, "We share it all!" Photo credits: Author
The youth at the workshop immediately grasped the sorts of misunderstandings I highlighted and quickly contributed stories of their own. One child described a cousin from France who was troubled by the fact that there was only one large fish in the middle of the communal dish and asked how they would evenly distribute it if it was not divided up beforehand. This story was incorporated into the play, in a scene where the boy playing the “French cousin” repeatedly asked how much of each ingredient he was allowed and the other children emphatically replied, “We share it all!”
In this scene, workshop participants enacted a dance circle, dancing and discreetly handing cash to their "griot" accompanists, while those playing migrants' children avoided paying the griots for their songs. Photo credits: Author
There were other moments, however, when the stories I shared as evidence of migrants’ children’s confusion took on different meaning for the workshop participants. In one narrative, a girl in Paris described a trip to Senegal when she was approached by a woman in the street who began to sing her praises, complementing her family’s generosity in strident tones the way a griot might (members of the bardic caste, remunerated for praise songs). Embarrassed, the girl awkwardly waited for the woman to stop, until finally her aunt handed the woman some money. Realizing that it was cash that the woman was after, the girl concluded saying that this event taught her that sometimes, you must play dumb, or pretend to not understand Wolof, to escape the overwhelming demands for money in Senegal.
On trips to Dakar, migrants encounter so many requests for money and gifts that one could go bankrupt. The migrants I spoke with all listed tactics they used to selectively avoid requests and mitigate expectations. But at the workshop, watching the children’s somber expressions upon hearing this story, I had the sinking feeling that I had broken an unspoken rule that (in Senegal at least) one shouldn’t name these strategies aloud.
A girl playing a Senegal-based relative reprimands her "French cousin" for refusing to offer money to the griots in the previous scene. Photo credits: Author.
The next morning, I asked some of the children what they had understood from the griot example. They summarized: the girl didn’t want to give, so she waited for her aunt to pay in her place or lied, claiming to not speak Wolof. They did not recall that, at first, the girl had no clue the woman expected money. In Paris, I reminded them, there are no griots singing praises. “There are so!” a 10-year-old protested, confident in her knowledge of France through relatives and television. I specified that the griots in Paris do not usually approach people in the street expecting money. The children’s surprise gave me a chance to emphasize the girl’s honest confusion, having never observed such an exchange. If the girl’s bewilderment had escaped them, how much more difficult was it to imagine her sense of betrayal upon realizing that the griot’s words of praise were a veiled attempt to ask for money? To the children in Dakar, the griot’s right to request support – particularly from someone from Europe – seemed so evident that they would need greater context before they could grasp their cousins’ frustration with these frequent demands.
To call migrants and their children tubabs is to liken them to white Europeans, a racial metaphor that not only suggests that all Europeans are wealthy, but also makes a moral evaluation about their (lack of) generosity and commitment to values like solidarity among kin. My goal of revealing the confusion migrants’ children experience in Senegal was hindered by my difficulties imagining which parts of life in France might escape youth in Dakar, who have an otherwise impressive understanding of life in Europe despite having never left Africa. The workshop gave me an opportunity to discuss with the youth these assumptions about what others do and do not understand, but moral judgements of others’ behavior rely on assumptions about what they (ought to) know that are made in a fraction of a second. At the workshop, I saw how quickly migrants’ children’s innocence could be overlooked, taken as evidence of their (failed) upbringing and (lack of) moral character, as “little tubabs.” The vast global inequalities that drive adult migrants’ remittances and prompt them to redistribute substantial sums on return trips simultaneously shape their children’s interactions with transnational relatives. By attending to the stereotypes that transnational youth encounter when “returning” to their parents’ country of origin, we gain insights that not only can help these youth to make sense of their experiences of movement between countries, but also can reveal how unspoken assumptions about children mediate their relatives’ perceptions of the transnational circulation of resources.
About the author
Chelsie Yount-André is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna, Italy on the ERC “Hau of Finance” project. Her work, situated at the intersection of economic and linguistic anthropology, examines how global reconfigurations of class and belonging become relevant in families’ everyday lives, analyzing children’s role in reproducing socioeconomic relationships among transnational kin. Her work has been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Africa Today, Signs and Society, and Food and Foodways. You can find her at academia.edu and follow her on Twitter @cyountandre.