Residential Location, Postcolonial Familiarity and Everyday Segregation Among European Lifestyle Migrants in Saly, Senegal

Privileged migrants forming residential enclaves is a familiar story in research on lifestyle migration and residential tourism. Less familiar, and less studied, is why some migrants instead build stronger everyday ties with the people already living there, and how the history between a sending country and a receiving one might shape that difference. Saly, Senegal is the case examined here, through sixteen semi-structured interviews with European residents, interviews with institutional and professional stakeholders, direct observation, and documentary material, all gathered during a broader doctoral study. An existing typology runs in the background throughout: secondary residents, entrepreneurial migrants, quasi-permanent residents, weekend visitors. It is not, however, this article's main object. Residential location does more of the explanatory work than migrant category does. Life in a gated, high-end extension gets organized around expatriate spaces, the bridge club, the pétanque club; a mixed neighbourhood brings considerably more everyday contact with Senegalese residents instead. There is a postcolonial thread running through the interviews as well. French migrants kept returning, unprompted, to linguistic ease, familiarity, a sense of being welcomed. Non-French Europeans settle in Saly for much the same reasons, climate, affordability, an expatriate infrastructure already in place, but the France-Senegal relationship specifically seems to be what explains how Saly became an established European destination in the first place.