Lecture | Research Seminar
The Beginning of an Errant Path: Dakar as Hub for African Roamings
- Date
- Monday 10 February 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Pieter de la Court
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 1A01
This presentation draws from a multi-sited ethnographic project that analyzes the contemporary ‘roamings’ of African border transgressors moving from and within West Africa, and across the Atlantic, in South America. The project develops the concept of ‘errance’, a quest for dignity, peace, and wealth that circumvents both border controls and institutional promises of rights’ recognition. The presentation describes Dakar, Senegal, as crossroads where the trajectories of Africans from different corners of Africa have intersected throughout history. It focuses on border transgressors who wait there to leave the African continent during the last two decades: who they are, where they come from and why do they leave their places of origin. Reflecting on the motivations for embarking on an errant path makes it possible to compare it with other concepts related to movement: migration, refuge, and adventure.
About Jonathan Echeverri
Jonathan Echeverri is Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Antioquia, in Medellin, Colombia. He received a PhD in Anthropology of the University of California, Davis. His main topic of interest is human movement. In his research trajectory, he develops the concept of errance as an alternative to understand the travel stories of Africans who look for better horizons beyond the African continent. His most recent project, located in the Northwest tip of Colombia, is entitled “Following the thread of errance: itineraries of South-South travelers through Uraba.” The main ethnographic site for this project is Necoclí, a port in the Gulf of Urabá where the journeys of people from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America periodically get suspended. Other research interests are, on the one hand, economic anthropology and, on the other, audiovisual and its potential for triggering ethnographic reflections.