Abstract

Part of the first generation of Africans to retire in Switzerland, Congolese pensioners who came in the 1980 and 1990s as refugees and students now find themselves entering a new category of person – the retraité – amid Swiss ambivalences of openness, privacy and xenophobia. Retirement comes with changes to existing care relationships, as they slowly transition from primarily providers to more recipients of care. Meanwhile, leaving the workforce eases a decades-long pressure to integrate, and organisations and events based on African conviviality are encouraged as sociable support groups to get people out of their apartments.

In this talk, I consider entangled forms of (im)mobility and ideals of successful aging. Fear of loneliness, ‘bad deaths’, and structural racism in the care system as much as a desire for African companionship brings pensioners together in self-organised religious and commercial social spaces. Shared prayer, food and drinks create a sensory and convivial escape from the Swiss public sphere, described as fundamentally therapeutic, where one can feel ‘cared for’ and enjoy ‘African values’ in a very particular manner. While Congolese seniors engage with Swiss ideals of the ‘independent’ and ‘active’ pensioner in certain ways, developing intragenerational care relationships among peers is considered as an alternative way to age successfully. I argue that becoming a retraité among African migrants in Switzerland scarcely resembles stereotypes of aging as a static, imagined ‘life stage’, but rather an interaction between multiple temporal rhythms as part of an evolving self.

Clara Devlieger has recently joined the Swiss anthropological community as associate professor at the University of Lausanne, following appointments at the London School of Economics and Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. Her research has focused on disability, urban livelihoods, and the pursuit of social justice in moral economies of distribution and welfare. Her current research builds on and departs from these interests to focus on practices of socioeconomic care and critical conceptions of integration in the livelihoods of mobile and marginalised people in Central Africa and Switzerland.