Paper short abstract:

This paper traces connections between religion and mobility in Africa. It highlights how pilgrimage emerges as a strategy for cross-border movements, to satisfy dreams, urges to travel and explore remote spaces

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores connections between religion and cross-border movements in African settings. In the Dogon village of Songho, Mali, multiple social implications unfold from the experience of pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). The individual trajectories reveal connections between pilgrimage, adventure and migration. This paper is based on an ethnographic study in Songho, where Islam has been adopted as the only authorized religion since the 1930s. The narratives of hajj shed light on the connection between religion, mobility, pilgrimage and changing social relations within the community (age groups' power relations, social change, desires, imaginaries, dreams and intergenerational conflicts). Men and women from this community have been crossing different countries "on foot", from town to town in order to accomplish their duty of hajj, which in some cases took longer than a decade. Diseases, marriages, divorces and emerging jobs became part of the pilgrims' experience. Pilgrimage illustrates the society's extraversion, which is evident in recent local strategies of development such as promoting Songho as a tourist destination, the society's openness to learning, especially in relation to Islam as well as the growing seasonal migration.