THE ART OF WAITING

The economic downturn of the past two decades has undermined young people's ability to attain social adulthood throughout the world, but particularly in the global South. Like Boube, Hamissou and Moussa, who bemoaned their dependence on their parents for their livelihood, youth are denied opportunities and advancement in a world where jobs are scarce. Many are forced to delay marriage and family formation. Thwarted in their quest for growth and unable to found households, they are, to borrow an expression used by Hansen's (Reference Hansen2005) Zambian informants, ‘stuck in the compound’.

Educated samari feel particularly victimized by joblessness, given the prevalence of male breadwinner norms and the extent to which adult masculinity is defined in terms of financial independence. Additionally, their schooling was often prioritized over that of their sisters. Therefore much hinges on their ability to achieve social betterment. Samari's failure to assume the role of provider and fulfil social expectations of masculine success is a stark reminder of their exclusion from Euro-American modernity – a predicament Ferguson (Reference Ferguson1999: 236) has characterized as ‘abjection’, a term he uses to translate the debasement and humiliation experienced by mine workers impacted by the disastrous implementation of structural adjustment programmes and the dramatic rise of poverty on the Zambian Copperbelt. Niger's status as one of, if not the, poorest country on the planet further exacerbates unemployed samari's sense of degradation. The country regularly ranks lowest on the UN scale of human development. When they didn't voice their suspicion that the UN rankings were based on falsified data, young men often confessed to me the shame and embarrassment they felt for being perpetual derniers (last).

In their attempts to confront their abjection young men throughout the world seek refuge in configurations of male sociality that offer solace and solidarity against the world ‘out there’ from which they feel excluded. In Ouagadougou and Bamako the grins, informal tea circles created by unemployed youth, have become a nexus of political engagement through which members negotiate access to various resources as they fashion rigid forms of street masculinity (Kieffer Reference Kieffer2006; Mazzocchetti Reference Mazzocchetti2009). In Meerut College, north India, unemployed young men have founded a club called ‘Generation Nowhere’. They meet once a month to commiserate about the worthlessness of their degrees (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2008). In Arusha, barber shops act as hubs for the dissemination of information as well as centres of male bonding in which young Tanzanian men weave connections to imagined elsewheres while defiantly proclaiming their exclusion from the world (Weiss Reference Weiss2009).

Although their expectations for the future are tinged with anxiety, educated young men (and to some extent their less literate counterparts) everywhere continue to hope that things will work out. Rather than taking poorly paid jobs for which they have neither inclination nor training, many delay their engagement in the working world in anticipation of possible opportunities. In barbershops and at tea stalls, in casual discussion groups or through their participation in formal associations (such as political parties), they engage in tactics of ‘deliberate waiting’ (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2010: 33). This trend is so pervasive in some places that Heuzé, referring to India's idle youth, quips that waiting ‘may become a profession’ (1996: 105).

‘Tactical’ (de Certeau Reference De Certeau and Randall1984) as it may be,Footnote ⁷ the waiting leads to ennui, apathy and temporal anxiety. Yet it is not totally unproductive. Those who feel left out often occupy places that turn out to be critical spaces of cultural production and political practice (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty1999; Das and Poole Reference Das and Poole2004; Hall and Jefferson Reference Hall and Jefferson1979; Hoffman Reference Hoffman2004; Tsing Reference Tsing1993). How the experience of rupture and alienation leads to the emergence of improvised techniques for making meaning and organizing social life is precisely what I examine here through a focus on the fada as a space of recreation. Passing time at the fada has led to the cultivation of an elaborate economy of leisure centred on the practice of making and drinking tea. Shai preparation (and consumption) obeys rules designed to ensure a heightened degree of masculine conviviality among participants, whether they be two or twelve. When he is not called the ‘teaman’, the tea maker is referred to as a fakir, a term at once self-deprecating and enabling that captures something of the distinctive masculinities young men forge at the fada through the display of ‘a form of empowerment which expresses the fact of “powerlessness”’ (Mazumdar Reference Mazumdar2007: 99, quoted in Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2010: 93).

WAITHOOD VERSUS WAITING

How youth negotiate the terms of their social participation in the face of great uncertainty has implications for the way we conceptualize youth as an indefinite, rather than transitional, stage of life (Cole Reference Cole2005; Johnson-Hanks Reference Johnson-Hanks2002; Ruddick Reference Ruddick2003) as well as for the way we understand agency as more than simply a function of autonomous selfhood (Durham Reference Durham, Cole and Durham2008; Lindhardt Reference Lindhardt2010). To capture the predicament of young people in contemporary Muslim societies for whom the transition to full adulthood is fraught with difficulties, scholars engaged in the Middle East Youth InitiativeFootnote ⁸ coined the term ‘waithood’ (Dhillon and Yousef Reference Dhillon and Yousef2009). Waithood describes the period of prolonged adolescence experienced by unemployed or underemployed youth in the Middle East and North Africa. When the rate at which young job seekers enter the market outpaces the capacity of local economies to provide employment, youth find themselves in waithood, a period of stagnation characterized by helplessness, dependency and boredom. Unable to educate themselves, find steady jobs, marry, and start families, they are said to spend years in social limbo.

The concept of ‘waithood’ superficially captures the predicament of young Nigérien men trapped in informal jobs or facing long unemployment spells, but it is not adequately nuanced to address the specific temporalities emerging out of their attempts to confront the mixture of ennui, detachment and trepidation that is inevitably part of the waiting. Waiting, I argue, cannot be reduced to a passive experience of suffering but should be understood instead as a ‘tactical mode of life’ (Makhulu et al. Reference Makhulu, Buggenhagen, Jackson, Makhulu, Buggenhagen and Jackson2010: 12) out of which samari generate meaningful temporalities. In his discussion of barbershops in urban Tanzania, Weiss (Reference Weiss2009: 216) observes that

In this essay I address emerging perceptions of time, sociality and productivity through a critical examination of young Nigérien men's tea rituals at the fadas. Tea rituals are a coping mechanism through which samari invest themselves in the here and now, transforming ‘experience without qualities’ (Goodstein Reference Goodstein2005) into modes of self-affirmation and introspection. Despite young men's insistence that tea making is a legitimate occupation, for elders it typifies the younger generation's apathy and is symptomatic of a worrisome shift in the temporalities of youth. Aside from revealing how widespread anxieties about social reproduction have translated into tense debates about youth, their agency, and their temporality, my discussion of informal tea ceremonies sheds light on how young men go about their lives in circumstances of chronic crisis (Vigh Reference Vigh2008).

MEETING AT THE FADA

Like other youthful expressions of associative life elsewhere in the world, fadas have reconfigured the logics of sociality and the spaces of citizenship in Niger. After independence in 1960, the Nigérien government successfully mobilized the country's youth through the creation of the samaria, hierarchically structured youth organizations based on traditional models of associative life. For thirty years, the samaria constituted a springboard for the recruitment and control of youth by the political leadership. In the wake of the liberalization of national politics in the early 1990s, the samaria disappeared. In its stead (and thanks to the rapid expansion of private radios) the fadas spontaneously emerged. In fact, the fada as a site of youthful sociality is widely associated with the advent of democracy in Niger. The fadas are said to have first appeared in the streets of Niamey in 1990 when students and unions held strikes to pressure the government to institute a multi-party democracy. Against the backdrop of growing popular discontent, they provided a forum where young people – most of whom were students, civil servants and workers on strike – could socialize, exchange news and pass time, as well as debate the future of the country. Soon, the fadas spread to other towns. Like the Yemeni qāt chews described by Wedeen (Reference Wedeen2008), they became privileged sites for the performance of citizenship. In recent years, the number of fadas has mushroomed, leading to new forms of solidarity and social activism – with some fadas actively engaged in political campaigns, others acting as de facto NGOs, and yet others policing neighbourhoods at night. So prevalent is the institution as a forum for youthful expression that young men who don't belong to a fada are subject to merciless teasing. As their names indicate – ‘Imani’ (Faith), ‘Yau da Gobe sai Allah’ (Today and Tomorrow There's Only God) – some fadas have a distinct religious identity; others embrace the values of hip-hop (‘Weezy Baby’, ‘Mad Boys’, ‘Soldja Boys’) or martial arts (‘Boss Karate’, ‘Kung Fu’) or take on the name of a Nigérien political party. In some Niamey neighbourhoods it is not rare to have not one but two or three fadas on a single block.

The fadas’ main agenda is to provide a space where jobless and impecunious members can voice personal anxieties, frustrations and longings, and receive support from other young (and often equally cash-strapped) men. ‘The fada allows us to cultivate ourselves,’ a fadantché said. ‘We discuss problems; unemployment, poverty, politics, our problems with our parents.’ Critical as the fada may be to idle young men whose day-to-day existence is ruled by waiting, it is worth noting that a number of fadantchés are gainfully employed while others are full-time students. In Niamey some fadas are composed almost entirely of university students who meet in the evening and at the weekend – with senior students serving as de facto tutors to their junior peers. In other fadas members are primarily working men. The fact that men remain in their fadas while moving in and out of employment suggests not only that fadas exhibit substantial diversity but that they evolve over time – with younger members occasionally replacing elder brothers who, because they have left town or married, may be unable to meet regularly with age-mates.

In Hausa, Niger's lingua franca, the term ‘fada’ conventionally designates the court of the sarki (chief or emir), or the council of the mai gari (village chief), as well as the place of public audience and deliberation where rulers receive visitors. It is where meetings are held about community affairs and where news is shared and spread. Whether held in a public space or in the semi-private setting of the zaure, the fada is where ‘people meet to talk’. In contrast to the private courtyard where women engage in domestic tasks and conversation, it is a masculine space par excellence.

In the early 1990s the fada's connotation as a customary form of community assembly was recuperated by young men to designate their own social gatherings. Eager to escape the family compound and its matricentric activities, unemployed young men get together in a particular locale soon after waking up. Those who have jobs (or are still in school) meet their fellow fadantchés in late afternoon to enjoy a game of belote (card game) and a few rounds of tea. In some instances these informal gatherings have evolved into a formal, hierarchical structure. Similar to the original chief's fada, these groupings are headed by a president who is assisted by a vice-president, a secretary and a treasurer elected by the membership. Some fadas appoint a taxeur (or taxman) who levies taxes on fadantchés caught using foul language, fighting with one another or engaging in inappropriate behaviour. They have an established règlement (set of rules) dictating the code of conduct members must follow. Many fadas function as tontines, with members making monetary contributions to a fund that is given as a lump sum to contributors on a rotating basis.Footnote ⁹ Aside from supplying the capital needed to start a micro-enterprise, these funds buy necessities like tea, sugar, cigarettes and food while also financing fadantché’s weddings or providing assistance to financially strapped members. Young men I met admitted buying lottery tickets with the cash received: as they saw it, they stood a better chance of improving their livelihoods by trusting to luck than relying on their earning power.

More often than not, fadas bring together young men who have known each other since childhood. Aziz, a member of Face Cachée (Hidden Face), explained how his fada evolved organically: ‘When we were younger we went to school together. Some of us didn't want to go home after school. So we chatted, drank tea and ate together. Then we went home.’ With time, the informality of early gatherings gave way to a formal configuration with an elected leadership. The concept of fada thus covers a diverse set of social configurations ranging from informal discussion groups to highly structured associations requiring members to adhere to rules and regulations, wear uniforms and engage in ritualized expressions of sociality. Gainfully employed older men with households to support still meet friends after work, but their gatherings tend to be informal, devoid of the performative quality their fada membership once may have had. Having successfully attained social adulthood, they no longer need to call themselves into existence by identifying as members of, say, ‘Texas’ or ‘Killer Boys’. Yet, the affective ties they share with peers remain strong.

Before they became the Cowboys, a group of longtime friends met daily on a street corner next to a tailor's shop: ‘We lived on the same street. We hung out together.’ As the friends got older, they felt the need to formalize their affiliation. Sani explained:

Aside from publicizing the young men's infatuation with Hollywood westernsFootnote ¹⁰ and US culture more generally, this fada's name betrays the enduring appeal of the American cowboy as a figure of heroic masculinity.Footnote ¹¹ Although not enjoying the same currency as Bruce Lee and other martial arts heroes, the cowboy is nevertheless an icon of toughness and bravery to young Nigérien men grappling with their inability to inhabit normative masculinities. The Cowboys founded their fada in1996. Ten years later, most members had moved away. Those who hadn't saw each other sporadically. Yet the corner was still known as Fada Cowboy.

By meeting daily at the same spot, fadantchés mark these locales with the visible signs of their presence, transforming anonymous spaces into ‘places’ (Augé Reference Augé1995), which they inhabit and make their own. Though these territorial appropriations are largely symbolic, they become literal when members etch the fadas' names on the walls against which they sit – sometimes adding an arrow that marks the spot. In this regard these inscriptions are comparable with the graffiti through which European and North American inner-city youth, excluded from the world of work and wages, make ephemeral conquests in their urban neighbourhoods. Yet I argue that the significance of Nigérien conversation spots attaches less to the mastery of space and more to the making of place. ‘The fada is a meeting place,’ is how many youth put it, highlighting the socio-centric character of these spaces. Like the sitting area of East Africa, in which conversation ‘reflexively construct[s] the space as well as the participants in the conversation as a baraza’ (Weiss Reference Weiss2009: 83; Loimeier Reference Loimeier2005), the fada as a place and as a gathering of people is concretely instantiated by the social interactions it enables. Emerging out of diverse social relations, ‘meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ (Massey Reference Massey1994: 7), it is both an occupied space and a spatial practice.

One of the fada’s essential features is its capacity for inclusion. The extroverted nature of these social gatherings is occasionally reflected in their names: Kallon Kowa (‘We watch everyone’), Sai Kun Zo (‘Till you get here’), Ko Da Wace Ka Zo (‘Come whoever you are’), and Planète (‘Planet’). As inclusive as any is the net cast by RFI, an acronym for le Rassemblement des Frères Intimes, the gathering of intimate brothers. RFI also stands for Radio France Internationale, a radio station that broadcasts in several languages, including Hausa and Kiswahili. Members of RFI, most of whom had attended university, described their daily gatherings as ‘une radio mondiale’, underscoring not only their unique relationship to the French radio but also the fada's consciousness of its links with the wider world. ‘At the fada’, an RFI member told me, ‘we talk about everything and we are open to everyone. It's the RFI club.’ This deliberate reference to a global order that knows no boundaries speaks for young Nigériens' efforts to insert themselves in a worldwide network of communicative practices from which they feel excluded despite their growing reliance on cellphones and internet servers. At the local level, it is also about creating what Warner calls a ‘co-membership with indefinite persons’ (2002: 76), that is, a form of engagement with an audience of imagined others – including members of other fadas. RFI members liked to think of themselves as enlightened and sophisticated. They displayed their competitive spirit by holding annual feasts during which they impressed guests by offering them large amounts of food in classic potlatch fashion.

Note that RFI's slogan underscores at once openness (‘we are open to everyone’) and closeness (members are ‘intimate brothers’). As such it echoes Herzfeld's (Reference Herzfeld2005) notion of ‘cultural intimacy’, suggesting how fadas function as expressive outlets for the release of emotion (and the display of conduct) that contravenes norms of civility and adult comportment. Indeed the preservation of intimacy occasionally becomes central to the fada's identity. Take the case of Face Cachée. The name, Aziz told me, implies that ‘[outsiders] don't see us, don't know who we are,’ illustrating fadantchés’ need to secure a space where they can be themselves without fearing opprobrium. The fada affords a refuge (from the constrictions of the world of work and responsibility) in which insiders find ‘assurance of common sociality’ (Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld2005). When young men, feeling rejected by disapproving elders, leave the parental household or stop talking to their parents, fellow fadantchés take on the role of surrogate kin, offering moral support as well as material sustenance. According to a young man, ‘In the fada, we help each other. We educate the younger ones. The fada is like a family.’ More than one youth I met referred to their fadas as a second family, acting as a bulwark against the daily humiliations they experienced in their quest for a viable future. They stressed the affective ties uniting fadantchés and the importance of shared rituals (such as playing cards, making tea or sharing jokes) for making life bearable.

As sites of masculine conviviality, fadas offer an antidote against loneliness, boredom and despair, enmeshing young men in an ‘economy of affect’ (Richard and Rudnyckyj Reference Richard and Rudnyckyj2009) that counteracts the damaging impact of the economic downturn. ‘With the problems we have, if we stay alone we'll go crazy. We must confide in friends,’ is how one young man, whose girlfriend had left him after he lost his job, put it. In the absence of concrete solutions to the problem of joblessness, samari find that having discussions with other young men, similarly confronted with an overabundance of time, alleviates worries about the future: Conversation, they claim, ‘is a useful thing’.Footnote ¹²

Fadantchés’ attachment to their fadas and to each other runs deep. ‘At the fada,’ a member of Top Star Boys said, ‘we share everything. When we go visit girls, we go together. … We share ideas, we share resources, we share problems.’ When joining a fada, the new member agrees to follow the rules of fada etiquette designed to preserve harmony and integrity. He is further expected to help friends in need. ‘The fada,’ twenty-two-year-old Bashir explained, ‘it's about sharing problems.’ Through their active cultivation of loyalty, and despite the jealousy and competitiveness that routinely infects relationships, young men create networks of solidarity that endure, even after members marry or move to distant cities: ‘You migrate; when you return home, at the fada nothing's changed. Your friends are still here.’Footnote ¹³ In the face of great uncertainty, fadas constitute an affective nexus out of which fadantchés forge some sense of belonging and define the terms of that belonging. As we shall see, tea rituals are critical to this process.

BOREDOM AND TEMPORALITY

Regardless of where they hail from, youth are typically perceived as the paradigmatic figure of potential and change (Cole and Durham Reference Cole, Durham, Cole and Durham2008; Zhen Reference Zhen2000). In Niger young people are often described as holding the key to the nation's future. In the past two decades, this image has been undermined by rising unemployment. Unable to outgrow their juvenile status and assume the mantle of responsible adulthood, young men in particular are perceived as problematic beings by the older generation. Without jobs, they are ineligible to enter normative structures of conjugality and participate in social reproduction. In the current socio-economic conjuncture, youth, once seen as a finite stage of initiation and experimentation, is now significantly extendable. Rather than being seen as a source of productivity and potential, it has become an object of anxiety.

In a more immediate sense, young men traditionally symbolized secure futures for aging parents in need of economic assistance. It was with such a future in mind that parents sent their children, especially sons, to school. At independence young men who had received an education went on to become Niger's first professional cohort. As salaried civil servants they were able to provide financial support to elderly parents. So did the following generation of educated Nigériens. For pious Muslims, sending sons to school was an additional guarantee that they would eventually subsidize their elders' pilgrimage to Mecca. Now that schooling no longer guarantees stable employment, however, parents cannot count on the young generation to support them. Instead of reaping the benefits of their investment in education, they must continue to provide for sons who, despite having reached chronological adulthood, cannot afford to feed themselves. In fact, a growing number of parents now financially support unemployed sons who have married and fathered children. Elders have complained to me that they work while male youth do nothing but drink tea all day. For the older generation, the figure of idle young men sipping tea conjures visions of a severely compromised future.

Aside from personifying endangered futures, penniless tea-sipping male youth evoke a distinct temporality, disconnected from the tempo of industrious life. They are disparagingly referred to by Hausa-speaking elders as masu zaman banza, ‘those who sit idly’. More than simply communicating idleness, banza signifies worthlessness. Describing someone as banza not only means that he is an unproductive, lazy person but also implies that he is self-indulgent and dissolute. Unless he is straightened out, he may end up leading a life of delinquency.

Elders equate the idleness of youth with a futile, often decadent, and occasionally criminal form of existence that leads to moral indiscipline, sexual licence and economic failure (Cowan Reference Cowan, Loizos and Taxiarchis1991). Although I met sympathetic parents who understood their sons' need for companionship and spoke of fada activities as harmless distractions, many elders bemoan young men's propensity to engage in supposedly immoral pastimes. Disillusioned parents told me it was at the fada that young men picked up bad habits such as smoking and drinking – not to mention taking drugs. It was allegedly there as well that they learned to disrespect elders and steal from them. Muslim preachers, too, accuse fadas of corrupting young men who develop addictions (to card-games and telenovelas), prompting them to ignore the call to prayer. Meanwhile newspaper editorials attribute low exam scores and, in particular, failure to pass the Baccalauréat, to fadas’ harmful influence on male youth.Footnote ¹⁴ Although fadantchés largely deny any involvement in crime, they are commonly identified by community leaders as voyous (hooligans) and accused of running gangs and engaging in criminal activities (Seidou Reference Seidou2008). The thuggish reputation some have acquired for frequenting bars, picking fights with members of other fadas, and selling drugs is allegedly well-deserved. With the rise of fadas involved in neighbourhood sweeps, school constructions and other civic-minded activities, however, the perception that fadas are dens of delinquency is changing.

Even as they continue to submit applications for administrative or teaching positions, young men harbour few illusions about their ability to obtain secure jobs. Paradoxically, they remain hopeful that something will change, and life will improve. Trapped in a state of ambivalent expectation, they feel disoriented, unable to channel their energies towards particular tasks. Instead of finding fulfilment in the stuff and spread of time, as people normally do when the activities they engage in create a sense of progression in their lives, they are jammed in a place where nothing happens. Out of their disengagement with the flow of things emerges a distinct feeling of alienation and anomie. The result is what Benjamin (Reference Benjamin2003: 316; see Salzani Reference Salzani, Pezze and Salzani2009) calls ‘the atrophy of experience’. In a word: boredom.

Despite substantial evidence that boredom is a key component of the experiential texture of modern life everywhere, anthropologists, save for notable exceptions (Mains Reference Mains2007; Musharbash Reference Musharbash2007; Ralph Reference Ralph2008; Schielke Reference Schielke2008), have been remarkably silent on the subject. On the other hand, philosophers, psychologists and cultural critics have produced an extensive literature on boredom, although they cannot seem to agree on precisely what it is. For Baudelaire, boredom is a demon, whose emergence is tied to processes of modernity. To be modern, according to the poet, is to be bored, caught in a dull state of permanent anticipation that heightens one's awareness of the ‘futility of being in this world’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2004: 746). Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1976) defines boredom as a state of ennui that filters experience through a screen: what is filtered out and lost is precisely that which gives life meaning. Such a definition approximates young Nigérien men's experience of life as dull and depleted as well as their feeling of being ‘deprived of the pleasure that is presumably available elsewhere’ (Jervis et al. Reference Jervis2003: 53). So does Heidegger's (Reference Heidegger1995) characterization of boredom as a state of suspense that – by taking one away from one's normal focus – opens one to the world. Young men told me that thanks to their idleness they were better positioned than people caught up in the pace of their labouring lives to appreciate how the world had changed: after all, what is a fada if not a place of productive observation, a ground-level mirador from which to watch the world go by?

Whether conceived as loss or longing, confusion or sharpened awareness of what one is missing, boredom is directly connected to the perception of time. As such it provides a convenient window into the experience of young men who are simultaneously deprived of meaningful work and of the small pleasures that ideally follow moments of toil. For young Nigérien men waiting for jobs that do not materialize, boredom is arguably a central dimension of everyday life. From the moment they awaken until they go to sleep, they are forced to live a diminished existence in which there can be no time off since time (in the form of meaningful engagement in the world of work and wages) is never on in the first place. Devoid of the various happenings that ‘create intervals in social life’ (Leach Reference Leach1968: 135), their time stretches out amorphously, endlessly. It is felt as an ‘emptiness into which each moment fades’ (Raposa Reference Raposa1999: 60) without leaving an imprint in the form of a memory. Like the bored Aboriginal Australians at the Yuendumu settlement to whom nothing ever happens, jobless samari experience the flow of time as ‘an endless repetition of the same’ (Musharbash Reference Musharbash2007: 313).

Consider the samari who, powerless to alter their state of ennui, baptized their fada MDR, an acronym that stands for manger-dormir-recommencer (eating-sleeping-starting over) (Hassane Reference Hassane2003). Unable to escape life's tedium, they embraced it by boldly proclaiming their boredom and disengagement from the world. For these fadantchés, the acronym implies, life was experienced as a daily repetition of dull routines structured around the mundane tasks of eating and sleeping, not as a progression towards a future that was qualitatively different from the present. Whereas time ideally oscillates in such a way that daily life is experienced in terms of both endless repetition and inexorable change (Leach Reference Leach1968), for members of MDR everyday was essentially more of the same.Footnote ¹⁵ Their experience of time had dissolved to the point of irrelevance. Put simply, at MDR, there could be no future: life was one long, dead stretch.

The MDR acronym was an ironic commentary on the meaninglessness of life when there appeared to be no purpose to one's existence but to fill one's stomach and catch some sleep. It captured something of the absurdities of the current era in which rather than embodying the hopeful potentialities of their country's future, samari were made to bear the dystopic implications of neo-liberal policies that relegated large segments of the population to ‘bare life’ (Agamben Reference Agamben1998) by excluding them from meaningful social existence and rendering them dispensable. The MDR moniker was also a defiant admission of failure. By literally spelling out the dreary regimen to which their lives were reduced, MDR fadantchés signalled that they wanted to be noticed for what they had become: young men for whom time would stand still for as long as they were denied the professional careers and concomitant social positions to which their education entitled them. Boredom, they forcefully reminded us, was a form of disempowerment.

Though at some basic level the concept of boredom so dear to modernist theorists translates adequately the numbness felt by MDR fadantchés, it does not quite capture the spatio-temporal experience of reduction I am trying to describe. The French concept of ‘désœuvrement’ (generally translated as idleness) comes closer to summing up the combination of dullness, dread, frustration and restlessness that characterizes young Nigérien men's temporalities.Footnote ¹⁶ By implying imposed inactivity, it evokes the condition of ‘enforced presentism’ (Guyer Reference Guyer2007) in which un(der)employed male youth are trapped, as well as the frustrated (yet also hopeful) anticipation they experience. Désœuvrement is at once an emotional state and a tactical posture from which young men deploy a horizon of expectations as they debate the form that their future will take. When asked what he and his friends talked about at the fada, a young man responded: ‘We speak of our future. It's very important to us,’ illustrating how sentiments like hope and anxiety orient people to particular kinds of expectations, thereby creating the possibility of a future (Cole and Durham Reference Cole, Durham, Cole and Durham2008).

Young Nigérien men's aspirations, it worth noting, are fairly ordinary: to have a secure job, achieve financial independence, marry, and found a household. Yet these expectations are projected against the backdrop of an idealized past fostered by narratives of normative masculinity (the pervasive man-as-provider ideal) and nostalgically sustained by elders. Put differently, young men's temporal anxieties are inextricably tied to a discourse of loss and decline that is itself shaped by intergenerational interactions (Berliner Reference Berliner2005). Tea rituals, perhaps because they are not associated with elderhood, have become a vital medium for young men's articulation of viable futures.

PREPARING TEA

Young men's infatuation with tea, it is widely acknowledged, started in the 1990s with the liberalization of politics and the rise of unemployment.Footnote ¹⁷ Before the impact of neo-liberal policies began to kick in, the practice was primarily associated with Tuareg people, for whom tea is a central part of daily life,Footnote ¹⁸ though civil servants were also known to break for tea in the afternoon. As secure job opportunities evaporated, young men confronted with the challenge of what to do with their time took to drinking tea while hanging out with friends (Seidou Reference Seidou2008). Before long they were hooked. ‘Tea drinking caught us like a virus,’ twenty-three-year-old Issa explained, ‘we were contaminated by the Tuaregs.’ There is no space to unpack the rhetoric of contamination that shapes youthful understandings of joblessness, poverty and leisure. Allow me simply to point out that the language of disease resonates powerfully with the recent history of political repression and social discrimination suffered by Tuareg minorities in post-colonial Niger. By alluding to the Tuareg ‘infestation’ that turned young Nigérien men into tea afficionados, Issa implicitly compared the current situation of unemployed youth to Tuareg marginalization from Nigérien society: both groups have been victimized by national policies aimed at preserving the privileges of an entrenched oligarchy.

More than simply infectious, the sugared infusion is also addictive. ‘Tea is our drug,’ I was told. Just as Tuareg people have long relied on the fortifying effects of tea (as well as its power to numb hunger pangs in times of famine), so samari now count on tea to give them the necessary boost in depressing times. ‘Tea is young people's gasoline,’ Issa observed. To benefit fully from the stimulating effects of tea, one must consume it in the company of other drinkers, never alone. As a site of intimate sociality, the fada provides the ideal setting for tea drinking. Indeed teatime has become the quintessential ritual of fadantché life: no gathering at the fada is complete without at least three servings of frothy tea. ‘Tea unties tongues,’ a young man volunteered. ‘When you bring tea to people, they're happy, they'll want to talk to you,’ another fadantché explained.

The significance of tea as a medium of conviviality is captured in the distinction young men make between Lipton tea (black tea) – which is made quickly, necessitates minimal tea-making skills, and is drunk individually – and Tuareg tea (green Gunpowder tea)Footnote ¹⁹ – which requires patience and dexterity on the part of the tea brewer, is obtained following a multi-step procedure, and must be enjoyed by a party of at least two (but preferably more) people.Footnote ²⁰ According to Boube,

More than one young man told me that they struck up new friendships while preparing tea: ‘Some guys stopped by when they saw me making tea and we became friends.’

Preparing tea is not only a complex process but also a time-consuming affair requiring a precise calibration of experience and intuition on the part of the tea maker, as Ralph (Reference Ralph2008) demonstrates in his analysis of tea ceremonies in urban Senegal. The fakir first lights coals and waits for them to start glowing. Then he fills the kettle with tea and water. Since three servings are obtained from each batch of tea, the tea maker measures the proper quantity of tea for optimal taste: too much tea will make the first round of tea too bitter, too little will make the third round too weak. Then he sets the teapot on the coals and waits for the water to boil, fanning the stove to keep the embers burning. Here again, a mixture of precision and patience is key. If the tea boils too quickly, it will bubble over. If the coals don't stay hot enough, the tea will not brew. Meanwhile everyone else sits around the tea maker and chats, pleasurably anticipating the moment when tea is finally served.

When the tea starts frothing out of the pot's spout, it is time to add the sugar. More waiting is then required. As the tea boils again, bubbling around the sides of the lid, it diffuses a fragrant smell, signalling to the fakir that he can proceed to the next step. Now comes the most delicate procedure as the fakir pours the tea into a metal glass, holding the kettle low, then high, and finally low again as the glass fills. Pouring from a height aerates the tea and creates the mousse, a thick layer of foam that protects the brew from dust and flies. Once the tea is poured back into the kettle, it is ‘cooked’ further. This last step is repeated several times until the concoction reaches the right colour and consistency. When the tea is ready, it is poured into shot glasses and served. The beverage is drunk in slow, slurping sips. Once the glasses are empty, water and sugar are added to the teapot and a second serving of tea is prepared. And then a third. By the time all the flavour has been extracted from the clump of tea leaves at the bottom of the teapot, an hour or two has elapsed.

Making tea is a skill that most young Nigérien men acquire, though some claim they never did. Through a graceful economy of motions informed by the canons of tea making etiquette, the teaman distills not only tea but a whole aesthetic experience where auditory signals interact with visual, gestural and olfactory clues.Footnote ²² The gurgling sound of the tea splashing into the metal glass (or the soft crunching sounds of embers being stoked), the fragrant smell of hot coals coated with drops of the sugary liquid, and later the taste of sweet tea flow together in an epicurean experience that makes participants forget their fears and pain. By immersing themselves in the here and now of teatime – a temporality ritually set apart from the rest of their otherwise dull waking hours – un(der)employed young men escape the oppressive weight of idleness to delight sensually in the texture of time.

TEATIME

Ideally the temporality of everyday life combines recurrence with linearity. As Leach (Reference Leach1968) noted, life is experienced through a tension between series of repetitive phenomena and the sense of irreversible change. Although it is structured around endless repetition (from day to night and night to day), we experience each day and each night as unique, different from previous ones. Repetitive actions such as eating, working and sleeping are themselves embedded within larger cycles of repetition (weeks, seasons, years and so on) in which each cycle is experienced as qualitatively different from previous ones. These temporalities are irregularly punctuated by special or unexpected events (a wedding, political elections, a famine and so on). It is this tension between regularity and novelty that makes time flow and creates a sense of forward movement. Regularity provides a sense of stability in a world in constant flux, while linearity enables one to experience progression through time.

For jobless young men waiting for something to happen, temporality is essentially cyclical, largely devoid of the linearity that signals one is advancing in life. Instead of being experienced as a constant flow, it feels like ‘dead time’, at odds with the drive towards progress and accumulation that should ideally shape life. Trapped within the dull temporality of waiting, samari feel excluded from the forward-moving time of modern society. The life they experience is, in Felski's words, ‘belated … lagging behind the historical possibilities of modernity’ (2000: 82). As they lament the lack of employment opportunities, they are keenly aware that time is running out.

Through their engagement in fada activities, samari ward off ennui by ‘killing time’, as they say. Yet tea rituals do not kill time so much as they enliven it. In contrast to idle time, teatime constitutes a purposeful temporality; it produces a particular experience of how time unfolds when one is engaged in an activity (rather than being stuck in a moment devoid of relevance). This is what Lefebvre calls ‘appropriated’ time (2004: 76). Whether normal or exceptional, this is a time

‘Drinking tea gives you something to do,’ a young man told me. His friend Hamissou clarified further: ‘Tea drinking is an occupation. You cannot just sit there and watch people go by. People will say you are like a woman. Women, they gossip, they watch people pass by and talk about them.’ By contrasting women's unproductive gossiping to men's purposeful tea drinking, Hamissou revalorized male temporalities, embedding tea rituals in a time flow that ‘forgets time’. This absorption in the preparation and consumption of tea brings fulfilment to samari, enmeshing them in the texture of time while also giving them a sense of purposeful agency, an experience aptly summarized in a young man's observation that ‘Without tea, we, young men, are nothing!’

Each tea session is at once predictable and unique in the way that it produces anticipation, pleasure and fulfilment. It shortens time while prolonging enjoyment. One could say that tea rituals resituate young men in time: time is no longer suffered but passed. It is ‘in time’ in the sense that one's occupation unfolds harmoniously in time while also contributing to one's future. It is during teatime that young men trade information regarding new job openings and engage in brainstorming sessions to find solutions to each other's problems. Tea, fadantchés say, ‘is the friend of conversation’. In the way that it energizes young men, heartening them in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges and acting as a catalyst for the articulation of ideas, tea is a central ingredient of the economy of hope within which young men orient themselves towards the future.

By disrupting the homogeneity of idle timeFootnote ²³ and creating a distinct temporality at once purposeful and productive, tea rituals counter the crushing weight of boredom. Not only does teatime confront arrhythmia by providing a semblance of structure in the absence of other temporal markers but tea's own ceremonial serving follows the pattern of life. The first round of tea is said to be bitter, like life. The sharp taste of green tea has not yet been weakened by several pots of water and the sugar only partially cuts its bitterness. As young men drink from the first round, they are reminded of how harsh life is. (Some avoid the first round altogether, arguing the strong brew gives them headaches.) The second round is said to be sweet, like love. The tea has lost some of its strength: it is now a perfect balance of sweetness and harshness. The precise dosage of sweetness and strength supposedly promotes conviviality. This is the round that ‘makes you talk’. The third round is said to be like the breadth of death. It has been considerably diluted, acquiring a smoothness that some tea drinkers find dull. Arguing that the insipid liquid is fit for women, not ‘real’ men, they pass on this round. Those who drink it are reminded that life is finite and takes its full meaning when set against the larger reality of death.

It would be tempting to overinterpret this life-love-death schema: by adopting a ‘life is a cup of tea’ philosophy, young men pierce the dull embrace of boredom. I don't think the reflective space opened up by the language of tea making stretches that far, however. Nor do I want to over-ritualize teatime. Tea making is about inventing tradition as much as it is about inventing routine. Granted, it is a signifying practice. Yet, it also becomes a habitus – a set of motions one unreflectively performs – that alleviates restlessness, creates durational enjoyment, and promotes conviviality in the same way that lighting a cigarette, taking a few puffs, and passing it on to a friend furthers détente and intimacy.

In this essay I have tried to discern something of the temporality and potentialities of waithood by exploring how un(der)employed young men in Niger punctuate time and create momentum in their lives through their engagement in tea making sessions. Waiting, for young Nigérien men hoping for a better job or a job tout court, is hard work. As a tactical modus operandi, it is about situating oneself in such a way as to maximize one's encounter with opportunity. Although some fadantchés work while waiting, many do not because the state of readiness that waiting requires precludes full engagement in the professional world. In exploring the generativity of waiting, I have been inspired by approaches that privilege creativity at the expense of crisis. When mobilized to capture the experience of Africans, the concept of crisis – Makhulu et al. (2010: 26) write – ‘oversimplifies and flattens the complexities of the lived world’. Understanding how young Nigérien men live means paying attention to how they carve out spaces of material and existential possibility for themselves within contexts of anomie and scarcity.

More than simply providing arenas of romanticized escapism from the real world, as elders contend, teatime provides a vehicle for the articulation of hope. As a dimension of futurity, hope is an ‘active and even agentive modality’ (Cole and Durham Reference Cole, Durham, Cole and Durham2008: 15), shaping the way in which samari project themselves in the future.Footnote ²⁴ Although idle, tea-sipping young men sitting in the streets of Niamey, Dogondoutchi, or for that matter, any other Nigérien town, are described as lazy, bored and uninspired, we must go beyond the terms of passivity and subjugation that have come to define them and consider critically how, despite great challenges and uncertainties, they ‘continue to produce, to aspire, and to fantasize’ (Makhulu et al. Reference Makhulu, Buggenhagen, Jackson, Makhulu, Buggenhagen and Jackson2010: 26).