Visual approaches have not been systematically employed in the study of contemporary borders despite their affordances in bringing to the fore individual perspectives and experiences (Kudžmaité and Pauwels 2020; Ball 2014). Drawing on the concept of borderscapes, whose plasticity and inherent aesthetic nature stimulates an exploration of diverse border universes (dell’Agnese and Szary 2015), this visual essay interrogates routiers’ border(ing) enactments and contingent meanings.[1]

Routier is the self-designation employed by Senegalese men driving heavily laden, aging vehicles from Europe into Africa. This perilous journey takes them through Morocco, the Western Sahara occupied territories, Mauritania, and finally to their destination in Senegal. Some even beyond. The vehicles used by routiers are eventually sold and integrated into regional transportation systems. In Senegal, popular models include the Peugeot 504/505, older versions of the Renault Trafic, Volkswagen Golf, and Toyota Hiace. During their journey and upon arrival, routiers deliver money remittances and personal belongings. They also barter and trade diverse goods, mostly second-hand objects, some of which in need of repair: clothing, household appliances, toys, spare parts, rice, cosmetics. Not only do the vehicles they travel in regain value as they move south, but even items that are considered obsolete or even waste in Europe gradually become valuable (Neto and Falcão 2022).

Below, we present ten captioned images that depict and explore the borderscapes of routiers as they perceive, imagine, and experience the multitude of borders in which their livelihoods are embedded. Selected still images stem from audiovisual materials collected between 2017 and 2019 during ethnographic fieldwork and the filming of a documentary among Senegalese routiers.[2] Our research included extensive fieldwork in Lisbon and Dakar, as well as two ten-day journeys from Portugal to Senegal, travelling in late 1980s Peugeots 504s with the same seasoned routier: Mbaye Sow, who is now 63 years old. However, since pandemic restrictions were introduced in early 2020, most of this activity has disappeared, and the actors who once participated in it have either moved elsewhere or had to find other means of making a living. This is not to say that the flow of goods came to a halt, only that it has found other trajectories, from individual carriage by plane or bus to container shipping.

The result is a constellation of more or less singular perspectives that feed an on-going debate not only on how to visually represent borders writ large (Kudžmaitė and Pauwels 2020), but also on how certain groups of people embody (Mbembe 2019; Agier 2016), see and are seen by those very borders (Ball 2014; M’Charek 2020; Plájás, M’Charek and Baar 2019). Ultimately, our exploration is an invitation for the reader/viewer to embark on a journey of discovery.

A SENEGALESE ENCLAVE

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2019.

The Senegalese workshops in Reboleira, a parish of Amadora in the outskirts of Lisbon, are located along a short segment of a former military road. In the mid-2000s, following the violent clearance of an existing informal neighbourhood, routiers seized the opportunity to set up their open-air car workshops in the area.


BORDER LEXICON

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2017

This image depicts the road entering Rosal de la Frontera, located approximately 4 km away from the official border between Portugal and Spain. The only elements that acknowledge the existence of an international border are the road signposting and the border-lexicon applied to localities. Border checkpoints were dismantled in the mid-1990s following the implementation of the Schengen Agreement, and nowadays, there is virtually no control or surveillance, at least at the gateways and moments of crossing well identified by routiers. For them, this is essentially an economic frontier, which they master well, strategically juggling with the differential cost of things, particularly in terms of fuel, which is more affordable on the Spanish side.


ACROSS THE STRAIGHT

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2017.

Some 11.000 nautical miles (20 km) separate the ports of Algeciras (Spain) from Tanger Med (Morocco). (…) For routiers, crossing this border means that while obstacles may not suddenly disappear upon entering “Africa”, things can be more easily managed, and the relative value of the vehicles and goods carried automatically increases.

MNEMONIC BORDER

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2017.

The unknown and occult, fear, and landscape elements but also mountain ranges, rivers, forests, have represented – and still represent – some of the foundational and empirical arguments at the origin of many border demarcations and imaginaries throughout history.

INVISIBLE LINES

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2019.

In the near horizon lies the borderline between Morocco and Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony known for its rich fishing and phosphate resources. That rectilinear imaginary line, which we cannot see but only grasp through other elements, shall remain invisible inasmuch Moroccan sovereignty is not called into question. Subtler aspects inform about the status and plight of this territory. As routiers move into Western Sahara occupied territories’, urban settlements gradually fade away, and the distances in between grow larger.

BORDER SOUNSCAPES

Source: © Ricardo Falcão 2022

At the Morocco-Guerguerat strip border post, a huge, ten-meter tall scanner analyses vehicles. (…)

The straight horizontal line of the spectrogram (first 53 seconds) depicts the sound emanating from the scanner: a humming noise mixed with a warning siren that is repeated in short cycles. The humming low noise is interrupted (final seconds) by a hissing sound from the release of a truck’s air brake, now ready to move forward. Indifferent to the geopolitical limit, birds fly and sing continuously across the arid and littered landscape.

“KANDAHAR”

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2017.

A cemetery of vehicles grows by the day in the roughly 5 km of the Guerguerat buffer zone between Morocco and Mauritania border posts.

TRAVELLING BORDER

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2019.

The road is the routiers’ own country. Beyond the roadside lies the unknown, an immense uncharted territory.

BORDER TWINS

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2019.

Between the twin border towns of Rosso-Mauritania and Rosso-Senegal, a smoky barge ferries cars, trucks, people and goods across the river Senegal. Locals cross freely without any form of control. This sudden in-betweenness of the river as a border provides an unique opportunity to capture images.

THE BORDER WITHIN

Source: © Pedro F. Neto 2017.

Mbaye Sow negotiated for extra time to meet a police officer responsible for overseeing the convoy of routiers travelling from Rosso-Senegal to Gambia. (…) It is worth noting that according to Senegalese law, vehicles older than eight years are not allowed to remain but only to traverse the country. However, this does not prevent the routiers’ networks from finding alternative ways to re-enter Senegal.

Despite their resilience, routiers constantly feel like foreigners no matter where they go. (…) Be it in Europe or in West Africa, routiers embody the frontier (Mbembe 2019; Agier 2016; Konrad 2015), a shifting, mobile frontier that remains within them.

THE MISSING PICTURE

In early 2020, the routier activity came to a halt due to the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to the closure of international borders. Since then, most routiers have sought alternative sources of income in Europe or Senegal. Mbaye Sow, for instance, first migrated to France to work as a fruit picker, then moved on to Germany to work in an Amazon sorting facility, before eventually returning to Portugal to work on a construction site in Lisbon.

Although land borders have since reopened, most of the routiers we met did not return to Reboleira.

Pedro Figueiredo Neto e Ricardo Falcão

NETO, Pedro Figueiredo (pedrofneto@ics.ulisboa.pt) – ICS-ULisboa, Portugal. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7687-7202 
FALCÃO, Ricardo (ricfal@gmail.com) – CEI-IUL, Portugal. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7419-865X

Para citar esta versão:
Pedro Figueiredo Neto e Ricardo Falcão, «Seeing like a routier: routiers’ borderscapes between Southern Europe and West Africa», Etnográfica Ágora-Multimodal Alt [Online], 2023, posto online no dia 10 novembro 2023.
URL: https://etnografica.cria.org.pt/ptcms/multimodal-section-audiovisual/175

REFERENCES

AGIER, Michel, 2016, Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition. London: Polity Press.
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KONRAD, Victor, 2015. “Toward a theory of borders in motion”, Journal of Borderland Studies, 30 (1): 1-1 DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2015.1008387.
KUDŽMAITĖ, Gintaré, and Luc PAUWELS, 2020, “Researching visual manifestations of border spaces and experiences: conceptual and methodological perspectives”, Geopolitics, 27 (1): 260-291. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1749838.
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NETO, Pedro F., and Ricardo FALCÃO, 2022, “Routiers’ transformational trajectories of waste, from Portugal to Senegal”, in Giulia Daniele, Manuel J. Ramos and Pedro F. Neto (eds.), Border Crossings In and Out of Europe, 87-105. Available at: < https://cei.iscte-iul.pt/en/publicacao/2022-border-crossings-in-and-out-of-europe/ > (last consulted October 2023).
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