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Hans Lucht, Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 306 pp.
Darkness before Daybreak is a compelling chronicle of the geographical and existential trajectories of young Ghanaian migrants who have lefttheir native fishing village for a life worth living in Europe. It provides a unique testimony of the flesh and bone behind the faceless numbers and figures of transnational migration appearing cyclically in our news and political demagogy. Without overdramatizing, anthropologist Hans Lucht traces the workings of exceptionally dramatic lives, as they move from fishing villages in Ghana with dwindling fish and even more dwindling possibilities, across the infamous Sahara desert where the survival of the fittest metaphor becomes tragically literal, just to arrive to the rundown outskirts of Naples. Here, the deadly speed of cars and trucks on the Naples-Rome expressway drastically contrasts the existential immobility of Ghanaian immigrants, tenaciously waiting by the side of the road for a chance in life. By melding compelling narrative with a concerted effort to theorize the geopolitical-cum-existential positioning of Ghanaian migrants, this moving book is an important contribution to the anthropological understanding of contemporary human movement.
Divided into three parts, the book traces the migration route of (mainly male) Ghanaian migrants in reverse. Thus, the book's story begins in the Southern Italian city of Naples, then moves to the perilous migration route between Ghana and Italy, and ends in the Guan fishing village of Senya Beraku in Ghana's Central region, where migration begins and, ideally for many involved, will one day end too. "Losses and Gains in Naples," the first part of the book, traces the daily life of a group of Senya Beraku migrants living in the outskirts of Naples. Lucht describes the migrants' survival strategies in a harsh environment, made of overcrowded high-rise buildings of flats, periodic racist attacks and attempted sexual abuse, targeted muggings, physically exhausting construction work, and, most importantly, the nagging sense of stasis and relentless postponement of hope. The scarce possibilities-financial and personal-Guan migrants encounter in Naples's harsh underground economy become a reminder of the fact that "no matter how close one moves to the centres of mobility, inclusion in the circulation of material and symbolic goods always...