Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today by Hans Lucht (review)

Darkness before Daybreak is a compelling chronicle of the geographical and existential trajectories of young Ghanaian migrants who have left their native fishing village for a life worth living in Europe. It provides a unique testimony of the flesh and bone behind the faceless numbers and figures of transnational migration appearing cyclically in our news and political demagogy. Without overdramatizing, anthropologist Hans Lucht traces the workings of exceptionally dramatic lives, as they move from fishing villages in Ghana with dwindling fish and even more dwindling possibilities, across the infamous Sahara desert where the survival of the fittest metaphor becomes tragically literal, just to arrive to the rundown outskirts of Naples. Here, the deadly speed of cars and trucks on the Naples-Rome expressway drastically contrasts the existential immobility of Ghanaian immigrants, tenaciously waiting by the side of the road for a chance in life. By melding compelling narrative with a concerted effort to theorize the geopolitical-cum-existential positioning of Ghanaian migrants, this moving book is an important contribution to the anthropological understanding of contemporary human movement.

Divided into three parts, the book traces the migration route of (mainly male) Ghanaian migrants in reverse. Thus, the book’s story begins in the Southern Italian city of Naples, then moves to the perilous migration route between Ghana and Italy, and ends in the Guan fishing village of Senya Beraku in Ghana’s Central region, where migration begins and, ideally for many involved, will one day end too. “Losses and Gains in Naples,” the first part of the book, traces the daily life of a group of Senya Beraku migrants living in the outskirts of Naples. Lucht describes the migrants’ survival strategies in a harsh environment, made of overcrowded high-rise buildings of flats, periodic racist attacks and attempted sexual abuse, targeted muggings, physically exhausting construction work, and, most importantly, the nagging sense of stasis and relentless postponement of hope. The scarce possibilities—financial and personal—Guan migrants encounter in Naples’s harsh underground economy become a reminder of the fact that “no matter how close one moves to the centres of mobility, inclusion in the circulation of material and symbolic goods always remains at a distance that cannot be bridged” (67). This emerges clearly in Lucht’s brilliant description of the social microcosm surrounding the section of the Rome expressway that passes through the rundown municipalities north of Naples, where most of Lucht’s informants live. For the Italian motorists driving at often ruthless speed between Rome and Naples, the expressway becomes the epitome of what Marc Augé terms a “non-place of supermodernity” (67). Lucht argues, however, that it has “retained characteristics of the old anthropological place to the immigrants living along it, walking along it, having things thrown at them along it” (67). The expressway comes to life in Lucht’s description, as he traces how the road becomes the place where West African immigrants position their hopes for daily employment and long-term achievements, where they come into contact with the locals—be they employers looking for cheap labor, fellow bus travelers, or hopeful curb crawlers—and where most of their daily life slowly unfolds. Roundabouts and pickup points along the expressway become crucial places of possibility, failure, and threat in Lucht’s description; places where, at the sight of a car slowing down, migrants find themselves fighting mercilessly against one another for the chance of (miserably paid) day labor hire.

The ethnography of Ghanaians’ harsh livelihoods in Naples provides the empirical basis for the book’s main theoretical argument, presented as a coda to the first section and further developed throughout the book. Lucht opens his theoretical discussion in Chapter 3 with a simple question: “why this suffering in Naples is preferable to life in the village in Ghana with one’s friends and family” (83). The conundrum is addressed through a discussion of the classic anthropological notion of reciprocity, which...