Bush Bound is a timely and important, but in ways counterintuitive, contribution to the scholarship on African migration to Europe and elsewhere. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Gambia over a total of 17 months between 2006 and 2012, the book examines permanence, or ‘how young men stay put in a Gambian village’ (p. 3). The book is divided into six chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion, with each chapter offering a detailed and at times poignant view into the lives of young men (and a few women) from the village of Sabi as they work to earn a living, with Europe being the wished for, but seldom reached, destination.

The chapters’ sequence loosely mirrors the aspirations of the would-be migrant. The first chapter reviews the history of Sabi agriculture, trade and migration, contextualising these within the broader stretch of Senegambian and West African history. The second chapter describes farming life in Sabi, including the cultivation of an agrarian ethos and the social importance attached to being seen as hard working. The third chapter describes how Gambian young men look for money and other (liquid or illiquid) resources. A central part of this chapter is the detailed histories of two Sabi men who both seek to travel, but are never able to go further afield than the city of Serrekunda, the Gambia's economic centre, save for one man's travel to Benin in an unsuccessful bid to obtain a visa to Europe.

Throughout these chapters, Gaibazzi makes several arguments. Firstly, he convincingly shows how mobility and immobility are just two sides of the same coin. Referring to the imperative to work hard and make a life for oneself and the family, or hustling in Gambian parlance, Gaibazzi notes that mobility is ‘one possible outcome of … hustling [emphasis in original] as a general livelihood practice that largely cuts across moving and staying’ (p. 91). Mobility here is not a line of continuous action, but action in fits and spurts, shaped by unexpected opportunities and cul-de-sacs. Similarly, farming and travelling are presented not as dichotomous but as two facets of the same skill set: ‘men explicitly construct their subjectivity as hustlers on the basis of the dispositions and skills cultivated in the village bush’ (p. 82).

Secondly, Gaibazzi shows how ‘immobility’ is not a residual category, signifying absence of agency and choice. Here, Gaibazzi makes an important contribution to the recent interest in mobility in anthropology and sociology (Gaibazzi himself is an anthropologist). This theme is picked up in the second half of the book when Gaibazzi describes how these would-be and thwarted migrants cope with their relative immobility. A key theoretical element of this discussion is the notion of ‘sitting', which Gaibazzi links to the notion of ‘bare life’ as developed by Giorgio Agamben. As an activity that does not have any value, ‘sitting’ suggests the need for men to find value in immobility, despite the valorisation of the successful migrant and the frequent invocations of the USA and Europe in youth culture. Gaibazzi describes several strategies employed by the men to offset the tedium and stigma and just sitting, ranging from repositioning oneself as a family patriarch (giving one's immobility an aura of self-sacrificing nobility) to piety and Islamic reformism. Furthermore, these attempts to overcome ‘sitting’ have political resonances. The Gambian government has, for some time, conducted a ‘back to the land’ campaign to encourage youth to remain as farmers, which, Gaibazzi argues, is a way to ‘recapture the meaning of rural permanence’ (p. 160). The extent to which the youth of Sabi accept such claims is a bit unclear, however – as is the larger political discussion in the Gambia about the viability of ‘back to the land’ as a development strategy.

This quibble aside, Bush Bound is a compelling book that should be read by multiple audiences and not just those with an interest in Senegambia. Indeed, its greatest contribution is arguably the way it shifts the focus of the migration debate away from humanitarian platitudes to elucidating the complex, socially embedded (and historically deep) practices and ideas that fuel migration.