https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3533-1825
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ABSTRACT
This article documents the social generation and experience of potentiality in the context of radical uncertainty. After a booming decade, the oil bust in mid-2014 wrought havoc on Angola’s economy. Immigrant traders and entrepreneurs from West Africa responded to the crisis by assessing their possible livelihoods in and away from Angola. They further couched their search for economic potential in a discourse on Angola’s own potential for recovery. By (de)potentializing economies and livelihoods, traders entrenched potentiality, rather than actuality, as a pervasive aspect of their sociality and their ethical orientations.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this article have been presented at the Ethnological Colloquium of the University of Bayreuth (2017), the Colloquium of the Institute for Anthropology and African Studies (Ifeas), University of Mainz (2019), and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Colloquium of the University of Zurich (2021). I am grateful to the participants of these events, as well as to the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal, for their invaluable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The bulk of my interlocutors were Soninke speakers from the Gambia and surrounding countries, among whom I had previously conducted fieldwork (2006–2008; 2012; 2014). However, I interacted with a wider constituency of migrants themselves, often labelled as ‘West Africans’ – a label that I in turn have used.
2 Or more precisely, by the way the country’s oil wealth was governed (Blanes Citation2019).
3 The Western Sahel was closely linked with Atlantic Africa as a cradle of capitalist globalization, which long shaped what we tend to label as local or traditional social and economic institutions (Guyer Citation2004).
4 The title of Ricardo Soares de Oliveira’s (Citation2015) seminal study of postwar Angola, ‘Magnificent and Beggar Land’ is precisely a reference to such paradoxes. While they became starkly visible in the post-war period, the dynamics of its growth and crisis are rooted in a longer history of capitalist and colonial extraction.
5 The West African community in Angola is originally an offshoot of the historical diaspora in the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (Whitehouse Citation2012), and some migrants have commercial and social ties with (Muslim) Congolose/Bakongo traders based in Luanda (Pereira Citation2004).
6 West Africans entered the country either with a temporary visa or through unauthorized routes across the Congolese borders. Accessing and renewing permits for work, and for other needs, was, however, a tortuous and costly process, which resulted in widespread ‘illegality’ and deportability.
7 In addition to friction within and outside OPEC, the 2014 slump was triggered by a variety of geostrategic, financial and technological factors, including the expansion of shale oil and the strength of the dollar (see e.g. Khan Citation2017; Tokic Citation2015).
8 In April 2016, personal cash allowances for people travelling out of the country were further reduced to US $10,000 for foreign residents and to US $5000 for foreign non-residents. Taking cash along on a business trip, for example to China, was very popular among West Africans.
9 West Africans deployed their know-how and transnational networks to supply hard currencies to the parallel currency market. Angolans and several other migrant groups were also key stakeholders.
10 Encounters with the police by illegalized or poorly documented West Africans working in the informal market are especially fraught, and may result in arrest, detention, abuse and, generally, the payment of heavy bribes.
11 A number of the longer-term migrants lived with their wife (or wives) and children in Angola. However, the 2014 crisis further reduced this small but nevertheless significant part of the West African community.
12 Mobility is a key to exploring this field of potentialities, metaphorically, experientially and existentially (Gaibazzi Citation2015).
13 By the fact of being European, I was often granted authoritativeness.
14 Analytically speaking, I distinguish potentiality from possibility. Rather than a mere hypothesis or eventuality, potentiality is a concrete, latent capability or power to become a specific object, being or event. Its unique characteristic is that it always presumes impotentiality, the faculty of not becoming actualized. By contrast, a possibility cannot be simultaneously an impossibility (Bryant and Knight Citation2019, 107–111; Agamben Citation1999, 177–179).
15 Saudi Arabia’ determination to keep its market share by maintaining its production levels was a key element of the 2014 oil crisis.
16 It simultaneously reminds us that the capacity to envisage possible futures is unevenly distributed (Appadurai Citation2004; Hage Citation2003).
17 The opacity was partly the result of the ‘unnameabilty’ of the debacle, while at the same time the crisis became a discursive artifice to conceal the mismanagement of Angola’s assets (Blanes Citation2019). Many West Africans would nevertheless identify the elite as a root cause of the crisis.
18 Bear, Birla, and Puri (Citation2015, 387–388) define speculation as a mode of anticipation that suspends calculus and probability. Their preoccupation with calculability seems to be couched in debates about the cultural economy and critical approaches to mainstream economics (Callon Citation1998; Appadurai Citation2013; Knight Citation[1921] 2012). Although I find it difficult to draw a neat line between modalities of anticipation that are based on probability and those that are not, liberating speculation from the straitjacket of calculus widens our analytical scope so as to include traders’ affective approach to potential futures.