‘God has decided’: Destiny, luck and uncertainty in migrant return and decisions about undocumented migration to Europe from the Gambia

Abstract

Tracing the story of a Gambian migrant’s clandestine journey to Europe, his failure and return, and analysing other Gambians’ decisions about undocumented migration, I analyse the role of destiny and ‘luck’ in these processes. As much as the idea of destiny plays an important role in dealing with past failures, I argue in this paper that it also features in the background to decision-making in the present and about the future. Whereas in undocumented migration the success and even survival of the migrant is radically uncertain, a matter of chance, the idea of destiny allows people to engage with uncertainty in a specific way. It allows people to dismiss chance by viewing it as an individual quality, part of everyone’s unique destiny, as the Gambian concept of ‘luck’ illustrates. By sustaining hope and a sense of possibility, destiny also allows people to reframe uncertainty as a condition of potentiality.