Eaters of the Dry Season: Circular Labor Migration in the West African Sahel (review)

This informative study is based on Rain's field research as a geographer in Niger during 1995 and 1996. Two themes dominate the book. On the one hand, he argues that "circular labor migration," where people radiate out seasonally but also return to or at least maintain contact with home, is beneficial or at least not harmful to their families and communities. On the other hand, he examines the successive droughts that have hit the West African Sahel and savanna since the 1960s to evaluate to what extent famine and environmental degradation have been the result. Since one strategy for dealing with drought and famine is emigration, seasonal or otherwise, the two themes are linked.

Rain rehearses the arguments for and against the proposition that emigration contributes to village development, but a key ingredient in his concern is certainly that former President Kountché of Niger (d. 1987) held that emigration was harmful and attempted to prevent it. Rain takes the opposed, and perhaps more conventional position--that migrants are often helpful to their homes and families. Much of his evidence here comes from a series of interviews carried out with rural migrants in the city of Maradi, just north of the Nigerian border in central Niger, and with people in an established village north of Maradi. The migrants he interviewed in Maradi were barely scraping by, and so provided crisis aid rather than real investment for their home areas. Rain observes, and informants confirm (p. 180), that the better migrants do, the less they contribute, though we need more interviews with these success stories (See a trader on pp. 20-21), but where is the doctor son of the chief mentioned on p. 204? Rain provides some case histories of those migrants, including two women, who went further from home than Maradi (to northern Nigeria or the coastal cities), but this aspect deserves to be treated more fully than it could be, based on interviews with people in and near Maradi. Jean Rouch's classic if somewhat ancient study (1956) of migrations to Ghana from Niger provides a historical counterweight. I should also note that Rain hints at ethnic differences in migration behavior, but does not develop this theme.

In dealing with the second question, Rain draws heavily on historical data on the settlement of this northern frontier. Motivated by political reasons (avoidance of the main Hausa power centers; French encouragement) and profiting by a temporary upswing in the rainfall from the 1920s through the 1950s, Hausa farmers pushed north, cultivating food crops with groundnuts as a cash crop. As they pushed north, they encountered sedentarizing Tuareg and their attached Bougajé. Rain shows persuasively how a village, once established, would engender daughter villages, each one expanding the farmed area until almost the entire area was under cultivation (See maps on pp. 57 and 91). The elimination of "bush" meant the decline of animal husbandry and hunting as alternative sources of food, focusing all efforts on crops. The result has been a greater population density than the land can support given present technology, and there are no resources to introduce a more advanced one (fertilizer, animal traction). Thus the strategy has been to extensify rather than intensify as the Boserup tradition would predict. Rain's work is consistent with the twenty-year-old work of Franke and Chasin, as well as that of Copans and Meillassoux, mostly based on areas in Mali and Senegal to the west, who stressed that the crisis of the Sahel was generated by the incorporation of farmers into the world capitalist system as a marginal and vulnerable role (Rain cites all these works).

In this situation, the temporary outmigration of men, with some women and children, relieves pressure on the food supply. At the same time, Rain rightly stresses that people feel that wealth lies in social relations rather than...