In this very readable and accessible ethnography, Bruce Whitehouse sets out ‘to study [the] generalized condition of mobility on individuals, families, and social groups’ (p. 5). He first introduces us to Togotala, a rural Malian village, whose residents, like West Africans for hundreds of years, have moved elsewhere in Africa and created stranger communities. Togotala has had considerable economic development – a solar-powered health clinic, telephone system, good water, and schools. All of this has been made possible by the pooling and remittance of resources accumulated by community members through migration and trade. Remittances, keeping families and even countries afloat in sub-Saharan Africa, are highly significant in the contemporary period. Both elite and non-elite individuals have travelled abroad to find their fortune and send some of it home. Most have gone to Europe and the United States, considered the fonts of opportunity. West African Muslims have also made their way to the Arab Middle East. In both cases, the potential migrant must contend with visa issues. By contrast, Whitehouse's study population, Muslim West Africans who are primarily Malians, took what might have been an easier route, migrating within sub-Saharan Africa to settle in Brazzaville, Congo, where they have created a trade diaspora. In the 1950s, many came as part of the diamond rush, as buyers and intermediaries. Some became traffickers, but they were a fraction of the West African immigrants in Brazzaville. Over the years, while Congolese chose to be bureaucrats, West Africans became suppliers of various goods and unskilled laborers. Despite political violence there, West Africans continued to come and they revitalized the urban commercial sector.

Many West Africans never return to their home areas, in part because they can earn more in Congo, and can do jobs that would be disparaged at home. They can also keep acquisitive kin at a distance. They have often been resented, especially those who have had economic success enabled by social capital and networks. And they have been subjected to a variety of indignities: forced to follow the rule of communal rather than individual prayer, attending the immigrants' mosque, dealing with hostility and verbal abuse due to their ‘strangerhood’, and suffering shakedowns and round ups. Perhaps this explains their continuing attachment to the hometown as a place, reinforced by what Whitehouse calls ‘the stranger's code’, that is ‘an unwritten set of rules governing the behavior of immigrants in Congo’ (p. 117). In the course of the tale, we are introduced to West African men and women whose stories enliven different facets of the Sahelian immigrant story in Brazzaville, Congo.

In his analysis and representation of transnationalism, Whitehouse broadens the concept and endows it with greater flexibility. He illustrates contexts beyond migration alone by mapping out connections between Sahelians in Brazzaville and their home areas and by showing how these ties are activated. One common way is through the fostering of children, a time-honored tradition throughout West Africa about which Esther Goody wrote more than four decades ago. Another is through the jatigi, who is an established West African host who can accommodate a new immigrant with housing, connections, and so on, very much along the lines of the patron role (mai gida, Hausa) so integral to immigration in much of Muslim West Africa. In neither case does Whitehouse link the practices to familiar West African institutions. To what extent do these practices in Congo hail from West Africa?

Early research on urban and mining societies in Central Africa explored the question of situational identity – seeing how identity in town as opposed to in the village played out. Identity then could be seen as a function of a situation and how the actor performed particular roles. In his discussion of strangerhood and hostility towards West Africans, Whitehouse includes individuals who choose to assimilate, to be more Congolese than the Congolese. One craves more understanding of the ‘situation’. Does it matter for those who are children of mixed parentage – Congolese and Sahelian – which parent is which? If the father is Congolese and the mother Sahelian, do the offspring have an easier time assimilating? And what happens when they return to West Africa?

As much as I enjoyed reading this ethnography, I missed an anchoring to ethnographic writing of the past. There is a larger context that is missing. And as a multi-sited study that began in Togotala, I was hoping the author would follow several of the Sahelians back to Togotala, or at least to West Africa, to experience their re-entry. We know that place attachment matters. How does it play out?