Paper short abstract:

The children and youth living on the streets of Ouagadougou form mobile networks of acquaintances. Shaped both by age and gender, this solitary experience of individualization and autonomy is only accepted as long as it remains temporary.

Paper long abstract:

In Burkina Faso, the children and youth living and sleeping on the streets of the capital prefer to describe themselves as bakoroman — following the local urban slang. The bakoroman describe themselves as young adventurers "in search of money". Through theft, begging and petty jobs, the bakoroman participate in different niches of the urban economy that ensure their everyday survival, their access to various leisure activities and the possibility of sending occasional money to their parents when they feel like it. They form mobile networks of acquaintances, ordered by the hierarchy of age and precedence, but do not present any form of group or gang organization, nor share a moral economy of solidarity. If the argument of camaraderie can be strategically brandished by their peers on a day of need, the street is primarily experienced as a space where they have the freedom to dispose of their money as they see fit, because after all, "they came as retail" (ils sont venus en détail) so "it's everyone for himself" (chacun dans son chacun).

Instead of looking at their lifestyle as a form of social disintegration and marginality, I show that juvenile mobility is locally considered a normal form of individualization from the native community. But, shaped both by age and gender, my two years of ethnographic fieldwork on their side showed that this experience is only accepted as long as it remains temporary, and that it excludes girls from living a comparable erratic way of life.