Senegalese Immigrant Entrepreneurial Entanglements and Religious-Cultural Continuities

Abstract

Senegalese entrepreneurship in South Africa is a typical example of how entrepreneurial entanglements are beginning to pose huge challenges to the theorization and understanding of modern African forms of business. This group of immigrant entrepreneurs finds it difficult to separate the use of charms and magic in the day-to-day running of their businesses. The invocation of magical means to promote a modern form of business among the Senegalese immigrant entrepreneurs of South Africa directly undermines purely economic and scientific explanations to business success. Modernity suggests a breaching and disenchantment of the world, which is premised on a break of tradition and magical means to a more progressive, technologically infused approach to the world. The ideology of entrepreneurial success viewed from purely a modernity perspective appears to be misleading. Our argument is that the practice of enchantment is embedded in the ethos of modern business with a significant interplay between the two. This religio-economic behaviour in South Africa is beginning to create its own enchantment with its unique origin which has been (until now) covertly embedded in the making of modern prosperity among Senegalese entrepreneurs. In this article we discuss such enchantment and it is hoped that this will change the way immigrant entrepreneurial success is viewed.