Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic research offers distinctive insights into the hyper-precarious livelihood strategies besetting ‘beach boys’ as low tier informal vendors of tourism products and services amidst continued dehumanisation as sex predators and swindlers in the Gambia’s tourism industry.

Paper long abstract:

The popularity of the Gambia as a tourism hotspot in West Africa has been accompanied by the proliferation of media and research attention on ‘beach boys’. Mainstream conversations on tourist-local relations in the country goes without citing beach boys as nuisance and sex predators in the tourism industry. Formal discourse describes this group of workers as low skilled, semi or uneducated young able-bodied men whose predominant livelihood strategy is tied to befriending (western) tourists with the aim of swindling and/or engaging in transactional sex for monetary/material and/or travel opportunities to the West. This paternalistic framing continues to overshadow and suppress discourses on the hyper-precarity of beach boys as low tier informal vendors and service providers in the industry. The ascendancy and potency of such derogatory characterisation has been the longstanding economic marginalisation, vulnerability and disposability of such precarious workers in the industry. Elements of dehumanisation stems from social stigma, state-sanction profiling, criminalising and securitising of this group. With insights from my field ethnography of beach boys, I sought to deconstruct the livelihood strategies and situate discussions of this group within the political economy of tourism as opposed to the reductionist, apolitical and derogatory homogenising delineation. From a political economy standpoint, my contention here is that growing labour precarity and dehumanisation of beach boys is tied to the complex arrangements of ‘neoliberal tourism’ in the Gambia. To this end, the study unveils and re-centres the humanity, heterogeneity, and social solidarity mechanisms integral to their livelihood strategies and resilience on the beaches.