ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the young Cape Verdeans manage to progress their emigration plans despite the unpromising circumstances. The volume analyzes migrants’ temporal and spatial horizons of expectation and possibility and how these horizons link to mobility practices in contexts of uncertainty and precariousness. The chapter argues that hope constitutes a fruitful analytical framework in which to link questions of political economy and mobility regimes with analyses of the collective social imaginaries and aspirations which imbue migration projects—to examine the social effects of the mobility paradox, in other words. Rising inequality constitutes another relevant dimension for examining the mobility paradox. Inequality in an African context is the novel, of course, given the history of the extraction of human and natural resources over several centuries, from the slave trade to colonization and a postcolonial predatory regimes in some parts of the continent.
