Victims of their Fantasies or Heroes for a Day?

From 2005 the waves of the Atlantic Ocean that shatter on the Senegalese coasts, are ploughed by about ten thousand migrants in pirogues (most of them Senegalese) who set off for the Canary Islands, risking their lives to “gagner l’Europe”. In Senegal the phenomenon of boat migrations has triggered a remarkable production of images and discourses. In assuming movements as an exception, in the mass-media and official discourses the pirogue migrant is portrayed as a “kamikaze”, a victim or a “naive adventurer” who is driven to leave by the imagination of an idyllic European “elsewhere”, or by the desire to achieve the same economical wealth displayed by returning migrants. Conversely, numerous ethnographic studies suggest that for millions of Africans being mobile appears rather a “way of life”, a part of their daily experience, implying more than just movement of people in geographical space alone (De Bruijn et al. 2001). Drawing from the analysis of the ethnographic data collected in Dakar and in the urban areas of M’bour-Saly, in this paper we suggest that boat migrations could be better understood by examining both the manifold forms of social representations of the migrant within Senegalese society, and the meanings conveyed by Senegalese media and narratives of migrants and non-migrants. The adoption of an historical perspective on the study of M’bour’s migratory context will allow us to retrace a locally specific “culture of migration” and underling its importance in order to deconstruct macro-analytical interpretations, and question the official rhetoric on “clandestine migrations” from Senegal.