Evolución del cooperativismo en las constituciones del Ecuador

A last concept that is central to my analysis of the various itineraries of royal slave

descendants is the concept of the Road. The expression ‘having a Road’ (FF: Hebbude

laawol) links mobility to changing opportunities. It points to the liberty to move and the option for social promotion is expressed as ‘having a Road’. When someone does not

manage or is not permitted to do something, Fulɓe say ‘he has no Road’ (FF: omo

hebbaai e laawol). To have a Road is about the importance of having access, being given or actively seizing opportunities and experiencing possibility and agency. Put simply, besides spatial movement over physical Roads, ‘having a Road’ underscores the symbolic Road of social mobility and advancement in life.

The saying indicates how such advancement corresponds to mobility to other places. The Road is a literal and symbolic way out of existing constraint. But does the mobility of people of slave descent generate a certain social distance from existing hierarchies and inequalities? Does mobility transform people’s ideas of opportunities in life or does their identity travel with them? What connections and disconnections has mobility brought about and in what ways?

In the Fulfulde expression ‘it is the master that binds the feet of his slave’, the Road and the Rope become linked. An informant used this expression to indicate that there is an irreversible power relation between the master and the slave. In this literal sense, the binding refers back to the Rope, while the feet stand for the Road. The expression points to the controlled and often forced (im)mobility of slaves. Reference to the Rope thus indicates how the mobility of slaves was curtailed by their masters who ‘tied’ them. Masters controlled or mastered the mobility of their clients and impeded them from ‘having roads.’ However this form of power (mastering mobility) has been reconfigured over the past century. There are three ways in which slave descendants tried to obtain

social promotion: one was by specializing in noble behaviour (FF: Ndimaaku); the

second by specializing in religious piety (FF: Juulde); and the third was by moving out

of slave status, sometimes even actively contesting it. This thesis mainly focuses on the third, spatial strategy of social promotion. The originality of this study lies precisely in taking mobility as the central point of departure to analyze strategies of social pro-

motion as related to (control over) mobility.22

22 _{Few other studies have taken mobility or migrants as their point of departure to analyze social change} in what I called cultural fields of hierarchy in the Sahel. The exceptions are Leservoisier (2005), Boyer (2005), Sy (2001), Giuffrida (2005) and Ruf (2000).

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The road as a trajectory of social promotion

There are two important remarks to be made about the use of teleological concepts like

social mobility and social promotion. I decided not to use the notion of social mobility23

as it can easily be confused with the notion of spatial mobility. I therefore use the concept of social promotion when pointing to those individuals who have managed to move up the social ladder. However having said this, I should emphasize the temporary nature of such a move, whether up or down. The roads travelled by slave descendants and freeborn are necessarily bifurcating and winding and are taken to go or to return. Thus social promotion is not a unilinear trajectory from A to B, which is often impli- citly associated with notions such as emancipation and promotion.

Secondly, in addition to temporal variety in the roads travelled, there are structural limits to social promotion in terms of professional specialization. The range of existing slave conditions do not correspond to the spectre of options available to each slave. Instead, slave positions in the past could range from positions such as agricultural assistants to top-level state officials.

This need not mean that the state official began at the bottom and worked his way up, or that persons acquired by farmers have the slightest chance of becoming state ministers, as has sometimes been interpreted. All it may mean is that the acquired strangers were from the beginning marginal to quite different institutions - the peasant household in one case and the palace in the other. (Kopytoff & Miers 1977: 20)

In short, since slaves’ possibilities for social promotion used to be intrinsically tied to the position of their master, the trajectories of emancipation of their descendants are also specific to their masters’ position. This is why the methodological approach of studying one single group of slave descendants, namely those who used to work at the royal court, was selected. (See methodological section below.)

To summarize, the notion of the Road refers to strategies by which slave descendants contest the hegemonic aspects and sometimes even the ideology of the cultural field of hierarchy as a result of their mobility. Some migrants have benefitted from encounters with alternative social realities, often while studying abroad in countries like Libya, Russia and Morocco. A small number of them started a social movement (see Ould Ahmed Salem 2007 for Mauritania) that contests the stigma of slave status. In so doing, these leaders have turned hegemony into ideology, in other words they have turned a passive and invisible form of power into an active and discernible one. However, not all migrants have done so: Most migrants who left and lived elsewhere have no interest in contesting existing relations. They simply make their living as much on distance as possible from possibly constraining hierarchies back home. In fact, they no longer hold onto the Rope and the ties of their past. Still others instrumentalize existing relations by actively referring to their slave past and engaging with the Rope to make claims to the ties that bind them to patronizing freeborn elites. Various strategies to obtain social promotion thanks to or despite spatial mobility exist. It is important to realize that the Road can be travelled in different ways and both as a move towards as well as a move

23 _{Kopytoff & Miers (1977) describe how the changes in ‘degrees of social mobility’ of slaves and their} descendants occur in three main dimensions: Formal (slave) status, informal affect, worldly achieve- ment and success.

away from. The Road can be travelled in two directions: Towards social promotion or rather towards social degradation: People can move in or out of their slave status while on the road. It is a two-way process.