Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the notion of 'entanglement' as a form of labour which migrant property guardians living and working in Dakar’s unfinished diaspora-built homes utilise to confront and negotiate their presence in a highly fraught and complex relational property market.

Paper long abstract:

African urban geographies are replete with unfinished, half-built, and incomplete infrastructures that are often viewed pejoratively to denote the apparent ‘lack’ or ‘failure’ of African cities. However, this assessment occludes analysis of the diverse economies and socialities emanating from these same structures (Guma, 2020). By taking ‘incompleteness’ as a starting point, this paper explores the everyday lives of migrants living and working as gardiens (property guardians) in the unfinished diaspora-built homes of Ouakam, Dakar. By combining critical theorisations of postcolonial land and property markets with an ethnographic account of gardiens’ everyday strategies of living with uncertainty, this paper argues that gardiens negotiate themselves into Ouakam’s lively and complex relational property market in ingenious ways to secure a presence in an environment seeming to marginalise them. This practice of negotiation – which I read as a form of labour – is what I term entanglement. In sharp contrast to a politics of occupation that challenges and/or resists the extractive logics of private property (Vasudevan, 2015a; 2015b; 2017), gardiens assemble multiple fragments of labour – aiding in incremental construction of the house, lying awake at night guarding materials, facilitating transactions on behalf of absent owners, acting as brokers in local property deals and short-term rentals – which at times undermines and at other times reifies claims to propertied ownership in their efforts to remain in Ouakam. From this situated study, I argue that entanglement holds important lessons for thinking through the often ambivalent and contradictory politics of resistance at the margins.