For more than thirty-five years I have lived with and thought about the social lives of West African peoples—both in West Africa and in New York City. Although I have learned much about the texture of life from my West African teachers, and I have come to admire many of the men and women who have patiently taught me about being in the world, my greatest respect is reserved for their existential dignity. Confronted with unimaginable poverty and deep social and cultural alienation, the West African men and women I’ve known in Niger and in New York City have consistently demonstrated grit, fortitude, and an admirable capacity for social resilience.
The steadfast capacity for dignified social resilience is the central theme of Scott Youngstedt’s insightful new book, Surviving with Dignity: Hausa Communities of Niamey, Niger. This work is a deeply humanistic and moving portrait of the trials and tribulations of Hausa men in Niamey, the capital city of the world’s poorest country. The nuanced description that fills Youngstedt’s book bears witness to the virtues of conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork, which in Youngstedt’s case constitutes a twenty-year period in Niger. Given this depth of ethnographic experience, it is no surprise that the author describes without sentimentality the challenges of daily life in a space of deep and intractable poverty. To his considerable credit, Youngstedt does not reduce poverty—or dignity—to a statistical profile or a discourse of disembodied analysis. Instead, he skillfully tells a wide range of stories that evoke the myriad existential challenges that his Niamey friends have confronted and struggled to overcome.
Youngstedt tells the story of these people through the prism of the hira, an informal conversation group in the Hausa communities of Niamey which, like similar groups (or fakarey) among the neighboring Songhay, is the cornerstone of social life. As Youngstedt writes:
Hira groups are of supreme importance in the lives of male Hausa migrants in Niamey. In the context of globalization, they serve as a public space to comment interactively on contemporary life, consider the outside world, and share ideas about how to make sense of and respond to the forces of modernity. Hira provides men with a sense of dignity and self-respect, valuable connections for navigating the economic and social logistics of living in a diaspora, and crucial resources for mediating changing and competing worlds of meaning. (122)
In this way the reader learns about the Hausa capacity for dignified social resilience not from an applied social theory, but from the vantage of a long-standing and centrally important cultural institution. This ground-level perspective not only gives the book a healthy authenticity, but also presents the reader with a palpable portrait of the daily struggles that Hausa men in Niamey face with a dignity. They have much to teach us all.
Youngstedt’s clear and compelling narratives demonstrate how the everyday confrontation with urban poverty can result in an admirable social resilience. Youngstedt also illustrates how the power of ethnography can be used to represent a complex social reality that defies systematic reduction. This book is a model of and for contemporary ethnography, African studies, and urban anthropology. As in all good books, when you reach the final pages of Surviving with Dignity, you will be sad that your reading experience has come to an end.
