Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros52VariaFuture horizons at the fishing ha...

Varia

Future horizons at the fishing harbour in San Pedro (Côte d’Ivoire). “We’re world champions in waiting”

Claire Chevallier
p. 153-169

Résumés

Me basant sur le cas d’une vendeuse de poissons au port de pêche de San Pedro en Côte d’Ivoire, qui réunit les thèmes de l’attente et de la construction de l’avenir, je soutiens deux arguments. Premièrement, je montre qu’il y a de l’agency dans le fait d’attendre et que l’attente peut être une ressource clé dans un environnement extrêmement imprévisible. Deuxièmement, prenant en compte le fait que le port de San Pedro est considéré comme vecteur d’avenir et que les espaces sont temporalisés, je soutiens que l’espace dans lequel la vendeuse attend ajoute une couche à son orientation temporelle future, celle du temps des projets. Par ce positionnement intermédiaire dans la durée, entre l’avenir immédiat et l’avenir lointain qui dépend du bon vouloir de Dieu, elle peut s’impliquer dans la construction de l’avenir. C’est précisément parce qu’elle attend au port qu’elle peut envisager et agir sur ce nouvel horizon temporel.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

Vignette

  • 1 All names are pseudonyms.

1Bernice1 and I are sitting in her small, stuffy living room drinking water, a rotating fan rhythmically providing each of us in turn with a welcome gush of air. It is a hot and humid afternoon in San Pedro and the ocean breeze does not reach her neighbourhood, Bardot, six kilometres inland. Bernice has just returned from the hospital. It has been a long day, a long few weeks even. Bernice does not know how she hurt her ankle; she only remembers that it was suddenly very swollen and sore when she woke up one morning several weeks ago. She worried that it was an occult spell having to do with her daughter’s upcoming wedding so she prayed intensely, imploring God to heal her as swiftly as possible. When that did not mend her ankle, Bernice concocted a mix of clay and medicinal plants she had brought back from her village near Gagnoa in the south-central part of the country. That did not work either, so she visited a traditional healer several times, still to no avail. After weeks of hobbling about with no improvement, Bernice ultimately sought treatment at the hospital, the costliest option, where the doctor put her ankle in a cast. With her foot immobilised and with no crutches because she could not afford them, Bernice could not muster the energy to go hail a cab in the street several hundred metres away. She had no way of returning home and no one at the hospital offered to help her. As she limped out of the building, she saw a woman in the shade of a lush mango tree and sat down next to her. She sat there, waiting. Eventually, she lay down and fell asleep for a while, helped by the fresh breeze that had started to blow. When she woke up, she stayed there and waited some more. She sat, feeling calm and collected, hoping that a solution to her problem would materialise. A good three hours later, a fisherman from the harbour where Bernice works walked past, recognised her, and called a taxi driver friend of his to drive her home.

  • 2 At the risk of sounding tautological, I use the term “future temporal orientation” because a tempor (...)

2Bernice is used to waiting for this is how she spends most of her days working as a fishmonger at the fishing harbour. In this article, I make two arguments. First, I unpack the way Bernice waits and show that it is the exercise of her agency rather than simply a passive attitude towards the passage of time. In so doing, I contribute to the relatively recent and growing anthropological literature on waiting (Hage, 2009a; Janeja and Bandak, 2018; Stasik et al., 2020) by adding a focus on waiting within a very short timeframe. Second, I argue that the space in which Bernice works, the harbour, adds a layer to her ambiguous future temporal orientation2, which oscillates between the immediate future, in which she has agency, and the remote future, in which she does not. Because of this new temporal positioning, Bernice can shape her future.

Introduction

3Waiting is ordinary, we are all waiting for (un)desired futures, in our own way and at our own rhythm (Rundell, 2009). It is not a homogenous activity and can take many different forms (Hage, 2009b). Waiting is a common feature in African cities where people wait for jobs and effective adulthood (Honwana, 2012; Masquelier, 2013), homes (Nielsen, 2014), miracles (Turner, 2015), even unrest (Vigh, 2015). Much of the anthropological literature on the subject focuses on waiting as a transitory state, either through notions of “waithood” (Honwana, 2012) and “stuckedness” (Hage, 2009c) or with regard to displaced people (Janeja and Bandak, 2018; Turner, 2015). This article, in contrast, focuses on a type of waiting that is structural rather than liminal and is oriented towards the immediate future rather than a more distant one. It offers a contrasting perspective to J. Guyer’s (2007) thought-provoking contention that the temporality of the near future has been thinned out to such an extent that it has all but been evacuated in favour of the distant future, which now holds the predominant place in temporal perspectives. In the present case, the immediate future is omnipresent.

4Waiting, writes G. Hage (2009b: 2), “emphasises a dimension of life where the problematic of agency is foregrounded”. While waiting can often be uneasy (Rundell, 2009), helpless (Malik, 2009), or endured by suffering subjects (Janeja and Bandak, 2018), G. Hage (2009c) shows that waiting can be a forceful expression of agency, even when heroically experiencing situations in which one might feel stuck. Similarly, C. Jeffrey (2008 and 2010) demonstrates that waiting can be a conscious, active, and materialised practice. As evidenced by the articles in a recent special issue on temporalities of waiting in Africa, waiting can also be productive and creative (Stasik et al., 2020).

5Thinking about waiting inevitably conjures up notions of the passage of time, oriented towards the not yet of an unrealised, (un)defined future, whether immediate or far away (Adam, 2010). As such, studying the dynamics of waiting naturally raises the issues of time and future making (Stasik et al., 2020). E. Minkowski’s (1970) structure of time offers a useful analytical tool for conceptualising the future. He suggests that the future can be categorised into three temporal experiences: the immediate, mediate, and remote futures. The immediate future, characterised by activity, closely nears the present. The remote future, which involves prayer and ethics, is tied to metaphysics. In between lie the hope and desire enshrined in the mediate future, the horizon that involves making plans and which C. Mattingly (2019: 20), in her article on waiting in the context of terminal illness, calls “the time of projects”. As C. Mattingly (2019) explains, each temporal horizon has its unique qualities. In terms of E. Minkowski’s structure of time, the immediate future is coloured with the busy now-ness of accomplishing things, the mediate future is the domain of plans, and the remote future is expansive and depends on an agency other than one’s own. While I acknowledge the legitimate questions on the universality of such structures of time, and in particular V. Crapanzano’s (2003) critique of the transculturality and translinguality of E. Minkowski’s proposition, this debate falls outside the scope of the present article which focuses on waiting. And while the linearity between the present and the future is also moot (Nielsen, 2014), E. Minkowski does provide for nuance by explaining that time horizons are not necessarily strictly sequenced, they can expand or contract depending on one’s capacity to act in terms of the future.

6Plans, as S. Abram and G. Weszkalnys (2011) point out, concern the articulation of time and space and the future has to with the workings of both (Minkowski, 1970). Time unfolds in space; the future is both temporal and spatial. Future making therefore not only involves the question of time but also the question of space. Of significance in this article are the specific spaces of the fishing harbour and the fishmongers’ cooperative, within the broader promising space of the city of San Pedro and its harbour, and the national context of the Ivorian political economy.

7The future holds an important place in the Ivorian imaginary. It is the common thread that ties first president Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s conviction in the merits of modernisation on the heels of independence to Alassane Ouattara’s current strategy of Emergence 2020 in which he promises a glorious future of economic and social development and international prestige (Piccolino, 2018). Because of its unique history, San Pedro is one of those places in Côte d’Ivoire where the future has always been expected to materialise. The city was conceived and built during the so-called 15 glorieuses, the economic boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, a time of unbridled optimism for the future driven by high cocoa and coffee prices, two of the country’s main export commodities (Bamba, 2016). It would be an alternative to the rapidly expanding economic capital Abidjan and was central to F. Houphouët-Boigny’s national strategy of developing and exporting the west’s rich natural resources and disenclaving the under-populated and geographically isolated region. Right from the arrival of the first dredger in the San Pedro river estuary in 1968 – the harbour was built before the city – Opération San Pedro epitomised the country’s faith in the future (Grah Mel, 2010).

8Beyond simply a “new Abidjan”, San Pedro was to be a cutting-edge city that would bring the entire south-west region into the fold of modernity (Bamba, 2016; Haeringer, 1973). Today, it is the world’s main harbour for cocoa exports – Côte d’Ivoire contributes 42% of global cocoa production, 70% of which comes from the south-west (El Makhloufi et al., 2018) – and the second most important economic hub in Côte d’Ivoire after Abidjan. From the outset, the deepwater commercial harbour was framed as the promising space that would bring about the modern future. To this day, the Port Autonome de San Pedro (PASP) remains the driver of the city’s economic development, the place where bold new projects and investments are made, where wealth and the promised future are expected to flow from. “The harbour is ahead and pulls the city” explains Gervais, an employee at City Hall, as we sit in his dusty office (interview, 4 August 2015). Spaces are temporalised (Lefebvre, 1991) and the harbour in San Pedro is the space of future making; it is the avenir (future) part of the ville d’avenir (city of the future).

9In this article on Bernice waiting at the fishing harbour, I bring the topics of waiting and future making together and structure my reasoning into three parts. First, I unpack the way Bernice waits at the harbour by looking at what she is waiting for and how. This reveals that what can easily be brushed off as passively waiting for days on end is actually a dense and heterogenous activity that turns out to be a key resource in the highly unpredictable environment that is the fishing harbour. It is in waiting that Bernice has agency. Second, this analysis also indicates that Bernice appears to be caught in what C. Mattingly (2019: 24) calls “temporal ambiguity”. The tyranny of the immediate future seems to shut out the mediate future and Bernice oscillates between two separate and qualitatively different future horizons, in this case the incessant demands of the immediate future and the openness and indetermination of the remote future upon which she has no agency. Third, I point to the way the harbour opens up this missing temporal horizon for Bernice, who can now act within mediate time, and argue that this is made possible by the way the harbour is temporalised. To illustrate this, I describe the process of forming a cooperative that Bernice and the other fishmongers have engaged in and how this alters her future temporal perspective. Contrary to what M. Di Nunzio (2015) has shown concerning precarious livelihoods, the present is no longer the only temporality with potential.

Fishermen, ice, and the big move

  • 3 Fieldwork was carried out in San Pedro from July 2015 to July 2016.
  • 4 The West African CFA Franc (XOF) is the currency in Côte d’Ivoire, with XOF 656 worth 1 euro.

10Back at Bernice’s house that April afternoon3, I could not help but ask why she had waited under the mango tree for so long. She could have called me or one of her relatives. No, she had forgotten her cell phone at home. Why not borrow someone’s phone to make a quick call, a small expense of XOF 50?4 Bernice finally explained that “there was no emergency requiring me to be home so I took the time to think” (interview, 20 April 2016). She was tired from the doctor’s appointment and from hobbling in pain for the past several weeks. Taking her time, waiting, seemed the appropriate course of action. Her strategy worked; Bernice eventually made it home and there had been no particular situation that required her to arrive there earlier. She thinks she might even have had a more restful afternoon waiting under the mango tree at the hospital than she would have had at home tending to her children and the afternoon chores.

  • 5 The Fanti ethnic group of eastern coastal Ghana has a long history of fishing in Côte d’Ivoire (Cha (...)

11Bernice is used to waiting. For the past seventeen years, she has been working as a fishmonger at the fishing harbour, where she spends six days a week mostly waiting. Located just behind the commercial harbour, the city’s raison d’être, the fishing harbour relies on small-scale, artisanal fishing from dugout canoes. The vast majority of fishermen are Ghanaian Fanti5 who go on long fishing expeditions of up to two weeks all the way to the coast of Guinea. When they return, they sell the main part of their catch to wholesalers – also called boxiers because they have a box, a cooler in which they store large quantities of fish – at a preferential price because they pre-finance the fishing expeditions. Some fishmongers who can afford to pre-finance fishing expeditions, if only to a very small extent, are also allotted a (small) portion of the catch. The fishermen’s wives sell whatever is left to the other fishmongers.

Waiting for the fishermen

12Bernice cannot afford to pre-finance fishing expeditions and has no direct contact with the fishermen, so she mostly buys fish from the fishermen’s wives. Sometimes, she buys some from another fishmonger, and only rarely from the boxiers as they are generally more expensive. Bernice deals in small quantities and lives from hand to mouth. A widower, she is the only provider for her five children, one grandchild, and a teenage niece who was chased out of her parents’ house because of an unwanted pregnancy.

13Because Bernice has no direct contact with the fishermen, she never knows when they are going to come in. If she is not there when they unload and distribute their catch to the boxiers and to their wives, she misses out, making attendance at the harbour a vital necessity. She therefore goes to the harbour every day, no matter what. She arrives early every morning and sits on her bucket in the shade of the concrete covered area near the dock, in a small circle with five or six other fishmongers. One or two are trusted friends, the others are acquaintances. She stays there all day until just before nightfall when she returns home to her late husband’s compound, which she shares with her two co-wives, all of their children, and various members of the extended family.

14Bernice lives in Bardot, the most populated neighbourhood in San Pedro located six kilometres from the harbour, where the provision of basic services such as sanitation and electricity is lacking. Initially a small fishing village of around 40 inhabitants, the population of San Pedro had grown to around 42,000 six years only after construction of the deepwater commercial harbour had begun, due to the influx of migrants from northern Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and above all Mali and Burkina Faso (Haeringer, 1976; Schwartz, 1993). The harbour was the main priority and construction of the city itself became a secondary concern. Two years after construction had begun, P. Haeringer (1973) noted that the harbour was nearing completion, while the city lagged far behind. As a result, the numerous immigrants settled haphazardly, clearing plots of dense forest as they could. This was supposed to be temporary until construction of residential neighbourhoods had been completed, but the influx of job seekers, traders, and retailers was such that this improvised settlement quickly reached the threshold where it became impossible to move. P. Haeringer (1972; 1973) described it as a vast, sprawling, alternative city where everyday life networks and social relations had already taken root. Bardot has constantly grown and spread since then as waves of immigrants have continued to roll in, attracted by the prospect of economic success in the rapidly expanding city and its agricultural commodity-producing hinterland. Commonly referred to as Sans Pitié (Merciless), it is Opération San Pedro’s “most embarrassing failure” (Bamba, 2016: 133).

15At the fishing harbour, the only indication that a fisherman might be coming in is whether his wife is there, also waiting, in which case Bernice becomes hopeful. Although she trades with these women, they hardly maintain any social contact and only rarely does Bernice manage to glean any useful information from them. Sometimes there is no fish for an entire week and yet Bernice is there, waiting, for she never knows exactly when the fishermen might return.

Waiting for ice

16Ice is a crucial commodity at the fishing harbour. In her office one morning, Hélène, the PASP employee who runs the fishing harbour, evocatively explained that “ice is to a dead fish what water is to a live one” (interview, 10 March 2016). Aside from being the fishing harbour’s main source of revenue, it is also an absolute necessity for everyone involved. The fishermen must secure significant quantities of ice before heading out to sea for their long voyages, the boxiers need ice to store fish in their box, and the fishmongers need ice to keep their fish fresh in the tubs in which they store them, either next to them during the day or in the cold room at night. But the fishing harbour’s two ice machines produce insufficient quantities; they are twenty years old and in desperate need of repair. Instead of producing the necessary eight tons of ice per day, they only produce around two, if at all. Several parts were changed a few years ago and the machines now need replacing but according to Hélène, the PASP cannot afford to purchase new ones.

17The ice salesman is a key figure at the fishing harbour. When there is some, he buys most of the ice produced by the harbour’s two ice machines but he also has other providers, notably two private frozen goods import companies that operate in the harbour. He sells his ice almost exclusively to the fishermen and the boxiers. The fishmongers generally do not have direct access to him and have to scramble for small quantities of ice here and there. Ice therefore creates a hierarchy between the different groups at the fishing harbour; there are those who have preferential access to it and those, like Bernice, who struggle to obtain any.

18Ice also adds two temporal layers to the fishing harbour. First, there is the temporality of its availability, which is tied to the ice machines’ state of (dis)repair and the salesman’s capacity to source some from other providers. Second is the temporality of ice in itself: ice melts, and particularly fast in San Pedro’s equatorial climate. As a result, ice is often a greater limiting factor for Bernice than is cash availability.

Waiting for the big move

  • 6 This word, common in Ivorian French, presupposes some form of violence (Bouquet and Kassi-Djodjo, 2 (...)

19Finally, Bernice is anxiously awaiting the big move that has been announced, the déguerpissement6 (eviction). The fishmongers will have to move to a different, smaller site further away from the water’s edge because the harbour is seeking an international certification that requires a clearly defined customs zone. The first time we met, as she was giving me a helpful overview of the inner workings of the fishing harbour, Hélène explained that “we want to turn [the fishing harbour] into a real harbour” (interview, 4 November 2015). But Bernice and the other fishmongers sit within the customs zone, and the fishing harbour seems more like a village: the women bring their playful children, vendors stroll around selling food, drinks, medicine even, one person offers pedicures and manicures, Malian women settle in for months to sell bazin fabric, and so on.

20The déguerpissement has been a long time coming. It was planned in 2005, but nothing happened until 2013, when an attempt to implement it created havoc and the fishermen’s wives went on strike. The move was postponed and everyone returned down to the bigger site by the docks. The PASP established a new formal date for the move, 5 October 2015. This time, the déguerpissement would be swift and complete. Between that date and 27 June 2016, however, I recorded 22 instances of conflicting instructions and procedures. By 9 July 2016, when I left San Pedro, the move had still not taken place, and it continued to loom over Bernice’s daily life at the fishing harbour. To this day, the déguerpissement has not been fully implemented. Bernice tells me that the situation remains volatile because while all of the fishmongers have theoretically moved, the majority of them bribe the guards so that they can access the docks and spend most of their days down there.

21The new covered site is only half the size of the one by the docks, so once the déguerpissement will have been fully implemented, some unlucky women will be stuck waiting hours on end and selling their fish in the sun. What is more, the new site is located behind a high wall so they will be visually cut off from the docks, the fishermen, and the canoes. Because they are not automatically allotted any part of the catch, the fishmongers consider that a visual connection with the water and the fishermen is absolutely essential. Yet both the Fanti wives and the boxiers will still have access to the current site along the water’s edge. The harbour authorities agreed to this after the fishermen, coming to their wives’ defence, threatened to start unloading their catch in other coastal towns. Bernice and the other fishmongers therefore worry that they will be pushed aside not only physically but also commercially, but they acknowledge that they are not strong enough as a group to go against the harbour’s decision.

22Bernice therefore goes to the harbour every day and waits for the fishermen to come in, for ice, and for the déguerpissement to become effective – all elements over which she has no control – to make sure that she can claim her stake in this highly unpredictable working environment. She proudly claims that she and the other fishmongers are “world champions in waiting”.

Not just sitting there

23Most of the time, Bernice passes the time merrily chatting with her small group of friends, sharing a meal, doing each other’s hair, and looking after each other’s children. Other times, she discreetly walks around the selling area trying to glean information from other fishmongers, Fanti wives, or even wholesalers concerning the timing of fishing expeditions and the quantities expected, recent fish prices, and such. She does this on her own and does not share any of the information she might gather because it can be her only competitive advantage. When time is really slow, she naps. At times, she prefers to sit on her own with a newspaper or go over the records of her transactions which she keeps in a black notebook. In this case, she isolates herself in the shade near the ice machines and cold room where she might also come across the men who operate them and find out some useful information from casual banter. When Hélène walks by, she likes to chat with her, thereby maintaining a cordial and open rapport.

  • 7 It was obvious from the conversation that when Bernice said “cross your fingers”, she did not mean (...)

24Although she spends her time at the fishing harbour mostly sitting on her bucket – “we’re just sitting here”, she often says – Bernice asserts that she has found a way out of hardship because she “rose”. She explains that “I’ve experienced hunger, just a bit […]. Thank God those times did not last too long. Because I rose” (interview, 29 January 2016). When her good friend Fanta describes how she began working as a fishmonger, she says “I came and sat here”. Sitting at the fishing harbour was in effect setting herself in motion. That same day, when discussing the difficulty of earning a living, Bernice said “you can’t just sit, cross your fingers7, and wait”. She was referring to people who do not take any initiative; while she is physically sitting, she has figuratively risen.

25While she waits, Bernice is neither idle nor passive. She is alert, attentive to what is happening and changing around her, carefully observing and gathering information that enables her to negotiate her way through the fishing harbour’s unpredictable environment. The intensity of waiting varies greatly and shows how what L. Bear (2014) calls the thickness of time can change depending on what is at stake. For example, it can feel long, drawn-out, boring, on a rainy day when no fishermen are expected back. But waiting can be tense when sitting by the docks on the day of the announced déguerpissement as a sign of protest. The feelings of anticipation and satisfaction on days when incoming fishermen are expected and they actually unload their catch contrast with the uneasiness and worry when waiting for them to finally come in after an entire week of waiting. Writing about university graduates in northern India who are unable to secure salaried work and who engage in “timepass” to occupy their days, C. Jeffrey (2010) also describes how waiting entails navigating antithetical states marked by boredom and feelings of powerlessness on the one hand and cleverness and activity on the other. As she waits, Bernice oscillates between feelings of purpose and gratification, frustration and disillusionment, boredom and lassitude.

26Like the Indian graduates C. Jeffrey (2010) discusses who, as they timepass, acquire useful information on employment opportunities and foster social contacts that will potentially be helpful in their quest for work, while she waits, Bernice is investing in and maintaining social relations which are crucial for her to access fish and ice, face unforeseen disruptions, and handle times of trouble. Sitting under the concrete roof of the selling area during a heavy downpour, Fatou, an acquaintance of Bernice’s, tells me that the fishermen generally do not come in on rainy days but that she was there “because the others, Gafou and them, are coming” (interview, 12 April 2016). The fishing harbour is not an easy environment to navigate – “this place is a jungle” (interview, 22 March 2016), Bernice mentioned as she was describing the intricate network of buyers and sellers, highlighting all the possibilities for disruption – so creating ties of mutual support is crucial.

27For example, Fanta, who used to pre-finance several canoes and became a powerful fishmonger, experienced major problems with both the fishermen and the fishmongers. Several fishermen took her money and never returned to San Pedro; some resettled in Ghana, another went to Guinea. In addition, Louise, another fishmonger, went to one of the fishermen behind Fanta’s back and persuaded him to allot the fish that would normally go to Fanta to herself instead. As a result, Fanta had to pay Louise a fee in order to secure her rightful share of fish. In the meantime, Yvonne, the wealthiest of the fishmongers, who wields considerable power, paid Louise a significant sum to sell her the fish Louise would normally have sold to Fanta. Louise told Fanta she would reverse things if she paid her the high price of XOF 100,000. In an attempt to save her business, Fanta, whose financial capacity was seriously dwindling, paid Louise XOF 50,000 but still Louise continued to sell the fish to Yvonne instead. Discouraged and counting her losses, Fanta stopped going to the harbour altogether. Bernice is a close and long-time friend of Fanta’s, so in order to defend her interests, she keeps a watchful eye on Louise and pays Fanta a small commission on any fish she buys from Louise, even if Fanta is not there. This way, she respects the fact that Fanta would normally have been the intermediary. Bernice believes Fanta would reciprocate should she ever be in a difficult position.

28Finally, all the waiting paid off for Bernice: she managed to obtain a box that she rents from a wholesaler whose previous tenant left. She is the only woman and small-scale retailer to have done so, a pioneer of sorts. She succeeded by using the information she gathered through careful observation and the network she created through her investment in social relations. Despite appearances, waiting is not passive, it is a “skill and source of knowledge” (Jeffrey, 2010: 474). Thanks to her box, Bernice has entered the more privileged ice distribution network. Not only is she certain that she can secure ice for herself, she can now also conserve fish for longer. This in turn enables her, cash flow and access permitting, to buy more fish since she does not have to worry about selling it as quickly as before. As a boxier, she will in principle also continue to have access to the docks once the déguerpissement is fully effective. Within the boxier area, she has slowly but surely started to build new social relations with the other wholesalers. All those years sitting on her bucket, actively waiting, Bernice has been watching, listening, making meaningful observations, and investing in social relations. She has been busy considering not only the immediate future, wondering how she will make ends meet, but also attempting to seize the opportunities that appear around her.

29Bernice is not stuck at the fishing harbour despite herself, by no means is she what M.K. Janeja and A. Bandak (2018) call a suffering subject. When she arrived in San Pedro in the early 1990s, she found a job working as a cashier at the city’s only pastry shop (she had taken a short cashier training course in Abidjan years before). She only started selling fish when the pastry shop went bankrupt. After she had been working at the fishing harbour for some time, she was offered a cashier teaching job at a high school in San Pedro. Although she believes it would have been easier, Bernice declined, preferring to stay at the fishing harbour because “at least you have actual food to bring home” (interview, 1 April 2016). One of her adult sons who works on a Turkish cargo ship worries about dwindling fish stocks and insists that Bernice should change her business and sell wax print fabric for example. But Bernice will not consider it; she is not simply biding her time at the harbour until something better comes along. She is not in a liminal condition, caught in a state of neither-here-nor-there, as are so many people who wait (Hage, 2009b; Honwana, 2012; Janeja and Bandak, 2018; Stasik et al., 2020). Bernice is fully engaged in her activity at the fishing harbour. It is in waiting that she has capacity for action, in waiting that she has agency.

The time of projects

30As Bernice waits for the fishermen to come in, for ice, and for the big move, her temporal horizon is short: today, tomorrow, a few days at most. The pervasive unpredictably at the fishing harbour makes planning for the mediate future difficult. Her precarious livelihood also leads to immediacy in her personal concerns. Putting food on the table every night. Making sure her children have lunch money for school. Keeping enough so she can pay the taxi fare to the harbour and back. On a slow day at the harbour, she explains:

We have enough worries as it is so […] we are busy with the present […] one day at a time. We worry about tomorrow or after tomorrow, but not about one year or six months from now, we don’t think about that. (interview, 26 May 2016)

31Her concerns effectively reduce Bernice’s future temporal horizon to the immediate future, seemingly shutting out the mediate future, C. Mattingly’s (2019) time of projects. She does have plans, such as buying a scooter and, like many of my informants, a plot of land on which to eventually build a house, so one could argue that she does engage with the mediate future. However, whenever she discusses these plans, Bernice, a fervent Christian, systematically mentions God. For example, when discussing ideas to expand her business one afternoon, she concludes “That’s what I’ll do, if God allows it” (interview, 20 April 2016). Her Muslim friends at the fishing harbour share a similar perspective. When I ask about making plans, Sali nonchalantly answers “God can just take care of that”, while Fanta explains that she would like to build her own house but “God hasn’t helped yet” (interview, 2 June 2016). Because of the precariousness of their lives, the remote future is not the only one characterised by prayer, so too is the mediate future. E. Minkowski (1970) shows that time horizons can expand or contract depending on one’s capacity to act in terms of the future. Here, the mediate future fades, as does the agency normally associated with it. No longer the realm of projects, it fades into the remote future and contracts Bernice’s temporal horizon, placing her in what C. Mattingly
(2019: 24) calls “temporal ambiguity”. Bernice oscillates between two separate and qualitatively different future horizons, where the incessant demands of the immediate future contrast with the indetermination of the remote future. As I show below, the temporality of the harbour acts to expand Bernice’s future horizons by opening up the mediate future.

The future at the harbour

32During his National Day speech in August 1969, F. Houphouët-Boigny declared that:

San Pedro for us means hope. For by giving life to a region, it will provide new jobs and considerable tracts of land to those who are willing to develop them and thus create a growth pole that is likely to bring balance to our economy. It is also the rational bet in enthusiasm and faith in the will to equip our country with an infrastructure that befits its needs. (Bamba, 2016: 116)

33In these few sentences, F. Houphouët-Boigny crams the vocabulary of voluntarist development – infrastructure, job development, economic growth – and associates it with optimism for a bright future. As S. Abram and G. Weszkalnys (2011) point out, plans represent the physical expression of the promise of a better, more attractive, idealised future filled with possibility. San Pedro would be a city of opportunity.

34The harbour has always been the main entity that would bring about the promised future in the ville d’avenir. This is significant because, as evidenced by H. Lefebvre (1991), space plays an instrumental role in shaping people’s lives, in part because they are temporalised. Movement, excavation, construction, transformation, those have been the clear signs of the materialisation of that promise at the harbour, which has expanded several times since its inauguration in 1972. With its motto “We are building the future with optimism, determination, and realism”, the PASP situates itself as a place where optimism for and confidence in the future are of the essence. These words of futurity are meaningful in that they correspond to the temporal dimension of that space. This is the place where the future is in the making and where opportunities will arise. Most citizens echo this sentiment: “The harbour gives us hope” or “So long as there is the harbour, San Pedro will evolve” are oft heard statements from different informants around the city.

35An island of light in a sea of darkness during the city’s frequent power outages, the harbour is a beacon in San Pedro. The PASP itself generates around 15% of the city’s wealth and is responsible for 4,000 direct (formal) jobs in the city and over 40,000 more direct and indirect (formal) jobs across the region (El Makhloufi et al., 2018). When touring the PASP, the French Consul-General in Abidjan even compared it to his country’s most iconic monument, claiming that “not visiting the harbour in San Pedro is like visiting Paris without stopping by the Eiffel Tower” (PASP, 2017). In addition, the harbour is connected to transnational networks through its maritime links. The international transport and logistics companies such as Bolloré Africa Logistics, Maersk, MSC, and the like that line the access road tell of the harbour’s business dealings with some of the world’s biggest private companies, and more broadly of its interactions with faraway metropolitan centres.

36The PASP is positioning itself as a serious alternative to the most important and congested harbours in West Africa, hoping to capture 20% of both Dakar and Abidjan traffic. In addition, due to its geographical position, it claims to be the “natural harbour” for neighbouring landlocked Mali, as well as a closer gateway to the ocean for commodities produced in Eastern Guinea and Liberia. To realise this potential, the PASP is planning numerous projects8, which attest to a clear “future positivism” (Pels, 2015: 786), based on a certainty about “events that have not yet happened”, and maintain an intense movement towards that future state. R. Bryant and D.M. Knight (2019) explain that such images of the future transform the “not yet” into the “could be”. They speak of the ability to shape the future by breaking down and sequencing the incommensurable future into closer temporal horizons. At the harbour, the mediate future is very present.

37Although they say they are not aware of the specifics, Bernice and her friends have heard of the harbour extension plans. While they maintain that their main concerns are immediate, they do consider these plans positively. Sali is looking forward to the large trawlers having access to a renovated fishing harbour. Belle says it will be better when the harbour is bigger because there will be “many things” there. For her part, Bernice proudly explains that the harbour arouses envy within the population; it is the place to be. She inhabits that space, and its projects inhabit her hopes and desires.

The cooperative

38Bernice and the other fishmongers at the fishing harbour are in the midst of creating a cooperative, spurred on by Hélène who saw them all expending significant individual effort, often for very little gain. She explained they would have a louder voice and be able to benefit from different types of support if they were organised into a formal entity. Created in 2014, it is still not fully operational. Establishing the cooperative has been a difficult and lengthy process as the bureaucratic and financial hurdles are numerous. Once functional, the cooperative plans on buying its own ice machine and a motorised tricycle for deliveries.

39The general atmosphere within the cooperative has gone from one of promise to one of frustration as arguments about the costs involved and the actual benefits of membership have increasingly broken out. Because of this, Yvonne, the president, feeling the heat of rising dissent, decided to put the remaining administrative procedures on hold indefinitely. None of the women I spoke to have any idea of when and how the situation will be resolved. No one dares ask the president about her intentions or a timeline, as that would be considered disrespectful and could in turn lead to business troubles. From what Bernice tells me, the cooperative is still only trudging ahead.

40So far, the cooperative has arguably made little progress in reaching its initial goals. Resolute, Bernice explains, however, that “We have no choice but to continue this long and complicated process because we put money into it” (interview, 5 October 2015). This process requires patience and perseverance to negotiate the bureaucratic maze and navigate the many peer disagreements. Writing on such processes of collective organisation, M.K. Janeja and A. Bandak (2018: 8) contend that the persistence involved requires “a shift in perspective from the immediate to the long term”. Even if establishing the cooperative continues to be an unsteady and non-linear endeavour, it provides those involved with a sense of direction. It is a new temporal stance in which shaping the mediate future becomes possible, and hitherto unforeseen opportunities can arise. As M. Nielsen (2014) indicates in his discussion of would-be housebuilders in Maputo, the future opens up the present. For example, Bernice has been asked by the national fishmonger federation in Abidjan, of which the cooperative is a member, to participate in their bimonthly meetings as the San Pedro representative. “I’m gonna need a passport!” she exclaimed, already imagining herself travelling regionally in her new role (interview, 5 January 2016).

41By participating in the cooperative, Bernice is shaping mediate time. It is precisely because she is at the harbour – in that space – that she can engage with the time of projects. The harbour opens up the mediate future which, for Bernice, had faded into the remote future. This new layer deepens her future temporal horizon, and while the immediate future remains her focus, she is no longer caught in a temporal ambiguity. Her temporal stance shifts to include what M. Nielsen (2014) calls a continuous multiplicity. Different futures exist within her present; as she tends to the immediate future and prays for the remote future, she is also engaged in shaping another layer within her future horizon. This also shows that although apparently linear and static, E. Minkowski’s (1970) structure of time does allow for a dynamic reading of the future in which horizons may fade, reappear, shift, and overlap.

Conclusion

42Engaging with Bernice’s practices and imaginaries of waiting shows how there can be agency in waiting for the immediate future. Waiting is Bernice’s strategy for dealing with the uncertainty that permeates every aspect of her working life at the fishing harbour. She is actively engaged in waiting for this is where she has capacity for action. Bernice’s concerns maintain her focus on the immediate future and the mediate future fades into the remote future which relies on another agency, namely God.

43This article also shows how space can co-constitute temporal orientations. The harbour is where hope for the promised future has concentrated in the city. Numerous plans create a momentum towards the future and as such open up a new layer of futurity in Bernice’s life, the mediate future or project time, thereby deepening her temporal orientation. Bernice’s agency no longer solely rests in the immediate future but also in this new temporality. She is actively participating in setting up a cooperative, the materialisation of her shifting temporal stance. Although the cooperative has had a wobbly start, it does not matter exactly what form it will take because, as M. Nielsen (2014) has shown, the mere fact that projects exist changes the reality of everyday life. For Bernice, this means shaping the mediate future. It is precisely because she is waiting at the harbour, where the future is not solely God’s gift (Adam, 2010), that she can consider and act upon this new temporal horizon. Contrary to what N. Malik (2009) has found, waiting does not necessarily go with helplessness; at the fishing harbour, it goes with future making.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Abram S., Weszkalnys G., 2011, “Introduction: anthropologies of planning – temporality, imagination, and ethnography”, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, n° 61, pp. 3-18.

Adam B., 2010, “History of the future: paradoxes and challenges”, Rethinking History, n° 14(3), pp. 361-378.

Bamba A.B., 2016, African miracle, African mirage, Athens, Ohio University Press.

Bear L., 2014, “Doubt, conflict, mediation: the anthropology of modern time”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n° 20, pp. 3-30.

Bouquet C., Kassi-Djodjo I., 2014, “‘Déguerpir’ pour reconquérir l’espace public à Abidjan”, L’espace Politique, n° 22, pp. 1-16.

Bryant R., Knight D.M., 2019, The anthropology of the future, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Chauveau J.-P., Eyolf J.-L., Chaboud C., 2000, Les pêches piroguières en Afrique de l’Ouest, Paris, Karthala.

Crapanzano V., 2003, “Reflections on hope as a category of social and psychological analysis”, Cultural Anthropology, n° 18(1), pp. 3-32.

Di Nunzio M., 2015, “Embracing uncertainty: young people on the move in Addis Ababa’s inner city”, in E. Cooper and D. Pratten (eds.), Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa, Houndmills and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 149-172.

El Makhloufi A., Mota M.M., Van Damme D., Langenberg V., 2018, Towards a sustainable agro-logistics in developing countries: the case of cocoa’s supply chain in San Pedro region/Côte d’Ivoire, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, multigr., 210 p.

Grah Mel F., 2010, Félix Houphouët-Boigny : l’épreuve du pouvoir, Abidjan, Les Éditions du CERAP, Paris, Karthala.

Guyer J., 2007, “Prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time”, American Ethnologist, n° 34(3), pp. 409-421.

Haeringer P., 1972, “L’urbanisation de masse en question : quatre villes d’Afrique noire”, Colloques Internationaux de l’ORSTOM, n° 539, pp. 625-651.

Haeringer P., 1973, “San Pedro 1969 – la première vague d’immigrants”, Cahiers de l’ORSTOM, n° 10, pp. 245-267.

Haeringer P., 1976, Chronique de San Pedro III: San Pedro 1974, les effets d’une crise sur les données de population : fasicule 2, tableaux, Abidjan, ORSTOM.

Hage G., 2009a, Waiting, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.

Hage G., 2009b, “Introduction”, in G. Hage (ed.), Waiting, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp. 1-12.

Hage G., 2009c, “Waiting out the crisis: on stuckedness and governmentality”, in G. Hage (ed.), Waiting, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp. 97-106.

Honwana A., 2012, The time of youth: work, social change and politics in Africa, Washington, DC, Kumarian.

Janeja M.K., Bandak A., 2018, “Worth the wait”, in M.K. Janeja and A. Bandak (eds.), Ethnographies of waiting: doubt, hope and uncertainty, London and New York, Bloomsbury, pp. 1-39.

Jeffrey C., 2008, “Waiting”, Environment and Planning, n° 26, pp. 954-958.

Jeffrey C., 2010, “Timepass: youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India”, American Ethnologist, n° 37(3), pp. 465-481.

Lefebvre H., 1991, The production of space, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

Malik N., 2009, “Waiting for Imam Mahdi and development: the case of Pakistan”, in G. Hage (ed.), Waiting, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp. 54-65.

Masquelier A., 2013, “Teatime: boredom and the temporalities of young men in Niger”, Africa, n° 83(3), pp. 470-491.

Mattingly C., 2019, “Waiting: anticipation and episodic time”, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, n° 37(1), pp. 17-31.

Minkowski E., 1970, Lived time: phenomenological and psychopathological studies, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

Nielsen M., 2014, “A wedge of time: futures in the present and presents without futures in Maputo, Mozambique”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 166-182.

Port Autonome de San Pedro (PASP), 2017, “Visite du consul général de France en Côte d’Ivoire au Port Autonome de San Pedro”, http://www.sanpedro-portci.com/site/actualités/visite-du-consul-général-de-france-en-côte-d’ivoire-au-port-autonome-de-san-pedro (accessed 30 March 2021).

Pels P., 2015, “Modern times: seven steps towards an anthropology of the future”, Current Anthropology, n° 56(6), pp. 779-796.

Piccolino G., 2018, “Peacebuilding and statebuilding post-2011 Côte d’Ivoire: a victor’s peace?”, African Affairs, n° 117, pp. 485-508.

Rundell J., 2009, “Temporal horizons of modernity and modalities of waiting”, in G. Hage (ed.), Waiting, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp. 39-53.

Schwartz A., 1993, Sous-peuplement et développement dans le sud-ouest de la Côte d’Ivoire. Cinq siècles d’histoire économique et sociale, Institut Français de Recherche Scientifique pour le Développement en Coopération, Paris, Éditions de l’ORSTOM.

Stasik M., Hänsch V., Mains D., 2020, “Temporalities of waiting in Africa: introduction to special issue”, Critical African Studies, n° 12(1), pp. 1-9.

Turner S., 2015, “‘We wait for miracles’: ideas of hope and future among clandestine Burundian refugees in Nairobi”, in E. Cooper and D. Pratten (eds.), Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa, Houndmills and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 173-191.

Vigh H., 2015, “Social invisibility and political opacity: on perceptiveness and apprehension in Bissau”, in E. Cooper and D. Pratten (eds.), Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa, Houndmills and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 111-128.

Haut de page

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms.

2 At the risk of sounding tautological, I use the term “future temporal orientation” because a temporal orientation can also be directed towards the past.

3 Fieldwork was carried out in San Pedro from July 2015 to July 2016.

4 The West African CFA Franc (XOF) is the currency in Côte d’Ivoire, with XOF 656 worth 1 euro.

5 The Fanti ethnic group of eastern coastal Ghana has a long history of fishing in Côte d’Ivoire (Chauveau et al., 2000). The Fanti arrived in San Pedro after the fishing harbour opened in 1977 (Schwartz, 1993).

6 This word, common in Ivorian French, presupposes some form of violence (Bouquet and Kassi-Djodjo, 2014).

7 It was obvious from the conversation that when Bernice said “cross your fingers”, she did not mean to hope for good luck but was rather referring to the French expression “cross your hands/arms” (se croiser les mains/bras), which means to do nothing.

8 For details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCpJFPMmtOw&lc=UgjoTqpy8ADwvngCoAEC (accessed 30 March 2021).

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Claire Chevallier, « Future horizons at the fishing harbour in San Pedro (Côte d’Ivoire). “We’re world champions in waiting” »Anthropologie & développement, 52 | 2021, 153-169.

Référence électronique

Claire Chevallier, « Future horizons at the fishing harbour in San Pedro (Côte d’Ivoire). “We’re world champions in waiting” »Anthropologie & développement [En ligne], 52 | 2021, mis en ligne le 11 juillet 2022, consulté le 17 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/anthropodev/1597 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/anthropodev.1597

Haut de page

Auteur

Claire Chevallier

Anthropologist, Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, University of Leuven; claire.chevallier[at]student.kuleuven.be

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search