‘All of us are excellent!’ Middle-class youth, contestification and desires for ‘just’ a proper job

‘I just want a proper job’ stuck with us as a poignant statement encapsulating why young people joined the competitions. The ‘proper job’ was an articulated object of desire in both of our field contexts. University training in Mali and Sudan is shaped by an aspiration to gain careers as civil servants who work indoors in ‘clean’ offices, drive a car, have a family, own houses and can afford a decent education for their children. The equivalence between visions of bureaucratic jobs and middle-class respectability is linked to a pattern inherited from colonialists. In a context of indirect rule, colonial leaders needed a few local bureaucrats and engineers, either to help administer cash crop production (in Sudan) (Bernal Reference Bernal1997) or to support lieutenant governors in different sectors (in Mali) (Sabatier Reference Sabatier1978). These loyal bureaucrats were compensated with a regular wage and a distinguished status, which set them apart from earlier pastoral lives. According to scholars who write on contemporary middle-class lives in urban Africa, this colonial moral economy continues to shape values such as respectability, nobility, cleanliness and modernity (Bernal Reference Bernal1997; de Koning Reference de Koning2009; Schielke Reference Schielke2015). In postcolonial Mali and Sudan, the subsequent socialist, Islamist and/or military leaders maintained the emphasis on creating an educated elite, while also expanding higher education, arguably also to maintain ideological control over the citizenry (Bleck and Guindo Reference Bleck and Guindo2013; Ille Reference Ille and Cantini2017; Steuer Reference Steuer2020).

Meanwhile, the combined effects of urbanization, structural adjustment and economic downturn have led to a profound mismatch between academic qualifications and contemporary labour market opportunities (de Koning Reference de Koning2009; Engeler and Steuer Reference Engeler, Steuer, Steuer, Engeler and Macamo2017). The public sector has been downscaled either in size (Mali) or in wages (Sudan), so government jobs are much less accessible or barely pay enough for people to make a living. During Mali’s post-independence years and the country’s transition from a military regime (1968–91) to democracy in the 1990s, a university degree almost guaranteed formal employment in government administration. Today, however, less than 2 per cent of graduates attain formal employment that corresponds to their qualification. Stefanie’s descriptions of unemployment in Sudan are set in a pre-war context and do not reflect the current realities experienced by millions of civilians in Sudan. The Mashrouy competition was discontinued in 2019, due to street protests (in which youth graduates took a leading role) and rising political instabilities after the toppling of the decades-long reign of military leader Omar Al-Bashir. Since the outbreak of the war in April 2023, many middle-class families have fled to Egypt and other countries where they are still relatively safe compared with Sudan’s internal refugees, many of whom are suffering from hunger, a lack of medical treatment and tremendous violence (such as mass atrocities in El-Fasher; see Andersen et al. Reference Andersen, Howarth, Mooney and Raymond2025).

Back in the 2010s, the use of the word ‘just’ (as in ‘just a proper job’) meant that graduates felt that they were calibrating their expectations of finding a decent job that would maintain (rather than improve) their families’ social status. Because job positions had value as symbols of class status, many would rather remain unemployed than accept a job that diminished their families’ dignity. The focus on office work as respectable labour overlaid other aspects, such as the specific domain of work, job satisfaction, or how well the role suited one’s personal abilities and preferences. While finding their own ways of muddling through (Sambaiga Reference Sambaiga, Engeler, Steuer and Macamo2017), the youth described their job search as an opaque, quest-like game and expressed anxieties that this transitional stage would never end (for similar issues in other parts of Africa, see Honwana Reference Honwana2012; Mains Reference Mains2012; Schielke Reference Schielke2015; Sommers Reference Sommers2012).

Beyond being an aspiration and index of class status, the proper job is tied to a wider imagination of economic progress in African countries – one that universalizes salaried employment as a domain of development (Ferguson and Li Reference Ferguson and Li2018). Confronted with large numbers of graduates, public, corporate and development sector agents organize spectacular annual competitions to enable talent-based selection (jobs for the best). Despite their different histories and forms, Mashrouy and Le Concours offer comparative ground by being paradigmatic cases of how states and development organizations use competitions not only as a standardized low-cost tool to administer scarcity (of jobs), but also to enable ‘development’ (following a logic of ‘the more competition the better’) (McCarthy Reference McCarthy2022). By design, Mashrouy and Le Concours imply that the graduates’ degrees are not a sufficient qualification for a job, and that only the best deserve one. At the same time, the strong focus on only specific occupations – the engineering entrepreneur or the civil servant (as professional roles framed as prestigious outcomes of these competitions) – reinforced older colonial ideals of loyal state workers and kept the youth occupied while failing to improve their situation. Despite the fact that there were barely any jobs available, the overall rationale of these competitions was to motivate youth to ‘fight their way into’ work. Instilling in youth a competitive ‘mindset’ was the declared aim of some of the organizers we interviewed. For instance, various leading employees of the Malian Agency for youth employment mentioned ‘the lack of entrepreneurial spirit’ as a key factor in youth unemployment; and a Mashrouy organizer emphasized that Sudan needed a ‘mentality change’. The implicit or explicit messages uttered about youth were that they should acquire additional capacities to deepen their expertise both within and beyond their field to qualify for jobs in different state sectors (Le Concours) or to improve their risk affinity, creativity and business ethos (Mashrouy).

Particularly striking were cases of youths who kept on returning to Mashrouy and Le Concours, year after year, seemingly not discouraged by the sheer number of competitors and repeated failures. In their biographical stories, interviewees presented long lists of events they had joined. Our interviewees often reflected on the unlikeliness of winning through recurring statements such as ‘few jobs, many people’ (Mali) or ‘we are just too many’ (Sudan), and emphasized that the whole cohort, and by extension this present generation of youth, was already ‘excellent’. Mashrouy candidate Emad, echoing others who similarly included numerical analyses in their reflections, proposed that all participating youths were the ‘same’, ‘excellent’ and ‘special’:

Youths like Emad avoided evaluative judgement between different candidates and perceived themselves as being the ‘same as’ them. Further, people criticized or ridiculed the selection process (Le Concours) and even the ‘prize’ (Mashrouy) of these competitions. Participants of Mashrouy frequently made fun of the prize (‘a wedding only’), whereas many participants of Le Concours were convinced that winners had been decided in advance. Since hundreds of candidates get full points in the test, it was obvious that other criteria were at play. See how Le Concours participant Muhammad openly reflects on the selection process:

Both Emad and Muhammad argued that a large pool of people were good and qualified enough to get the ‘prize’ and work in the respective jobs. In their view, performance alone was not decisive for success. In Le Concours, participants also found the questions so easy to answer that they felt they were being made fun of. By design, both competitions were organized around meritocratic ideals that did not play much of a role in how participants themselves (not even winners) rationalized individual success. The majority of our interviewees even ruled out the possibility of getting a position through Le Concours or Mashrouy. Arguably, displaying a sense of indifference may itself be part of performing in a competition. Yet, Emad’s and Muhammad’s statements reveal how youths asserted their dignity and capacities for work, rather than accepting the overall rationale of qualitative distinction.

Our shared observation that the participants insisted on their existing qualification provokes questions concerning critical literature on neoliberalism and competition in Africa. Critics of neoliberal competitions have explored competition as a tool of meta-governance (Jessop Reference Jessop2015), creating a particular bond between ‘nation, market and person’ (for a review, see Colloredo-Mansfeld Reference Colloredo-Mansfeld2002: 114). Reflecting on competition and gambling in Africa and beyond, scholars show how all kinds of ‘goods’ are shaped by expectations of performance and (self-)improvement. They problematize how processes of ‘contestification’ and ‘gamblification’ create a collective hunt for inaccessible goods and turn people into subjects of luck (Da Col and Humphrey Reference Da Col and Humphrey2012; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2001; Dolan and Gordon Reference Dolan and Gordon2019; Fumanti Reference Fumanti2015; Gaibazzi and Gardini Reference Gaibazzi and Gardini2015), whose labour of hope only reinforces their precarity (Pettit Reference Pettit2023). In their announcement of the yearly events, organizers and advocates of Mashrouy and Le Concours indeed framed these formats as if winner-takes-all competition is the gateway to middle-class life, for instance through messages such as ‘Make your dream come true’ (Mashrouy) or by further emphasizing the singularity and rarity of stable, well-paid employment contracts as something for which only a few people are eligible (Le Concours).

While we align with the critique of ‘contestification’ at a more abstract level of political organization, our analysis diverges from claims of a radical transformation of personhood and relationality, or the assumption that people become ‘involuntary gamblers’ subjected to contests, games and principles of neoliberal competition (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2001). In a second strand of literature we consider here, competitions create fields of practice that always exceed distinct ideologies or systems of political organization (Hopkinson and Zidaru Reference Hopkinson and Zidaru2022). Ethnographic insights into ‘actually existing’ forms such as sports, beauty contests, fishing grounds, diamond mining, singers’ competitions and more have revealed that competitions can foster solidarity (see, for example, Baann Reference Baann2024; Kovač Reference Kovač2023) and can also work towards tempering individualism and competitiveness (Crawley Reference Crawley2024), and how competitions ‘for development’ often fail to achieve desired ends (McCarthy Reference McCarthy2022). Scholars have also investigated how the value of being in competition may diverge from the competition’s surface appeal and symbolism (Alegi Reference Alegi2008), and how people in marginalized contexts may establish competitive sociality as a positive aspect of a desirable future (Buitron Reference Buitron2022). With a similar focus on practice, James Ferguson has argued that critiques should not too swiftly lead to presumptions about people’s behaviour as wholly transformed by neoliberalism, which are then juxtaposed with forms of solidarity or collaboration ‘outside’ market-based competition (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2015: 124–8). As others equally note, this dichotomous way of reasoning conflates knowledge about capitalism with knowledge about competition, and makes analyses slide too easily into a ‘capitalist slot’ (Hopkinson and Zidaru Reference Hopkinson and Zidaru2022; see also Crawley Reference Crawley2024). Overall, the point of these enquiries is not to celebrate competition, but to deepen understanding by privileging what competition does for people who engage in it.

Inspired by such calls to explore rather than presume ‘what competitions do’ (Hopkinson and Zidaru Reference Hopkinson and Zidaru2022), our contribution centres on distinct values and practices of participation as shaping the ways in which youths in Mali and Sudan engaged – and engage – in competitions. First, our cases show how contemporary competitions in realms of scarcity indeed mobilize mass activity, but that activity is not necessarily shaped by ‘competing’ as in the sense of ‘to battle’, ‘to challenge’ or ‘to contest’. While job schemes claim to reward merit, participants recognize how slim the chances of success are, and adjust their efforts accordingly. Whereas other research has documented manoeuvres oriented towards the ‘prize’ (see Piot Reference Piot2019 on visa lotteries), our cases show, in contrast, how Sudanese and Malian youth tailored their efforts to attending as good-enough engagement. Such tactics are what a classical analyst of competition, Georg Simmel, argued long ago: if a prize is too scarce, people stop competing (Simmel Reference Simmel2008 [1903]: 964). While we do not aim to provide general meta-contextual observations, Simmel’s analysis of general sociological processes of competition makes us consider how Malian and Sudanese youth intensified or lowered their engagement depending on what they felt was at stake. As evident in Emad’s and Muhammad’s statements on excellence and sameness in qualification, we realize that participants may not necessarily adopt the notion that competitions assess their value, instead presuming that they are already valuable (qualified, respectable) people who must hustle and network to get a job. Muhammad’s and Emad’s calculations and reflections reveal that participants developed their own takes on competing, most notably by insisting on the qualifications of the many, rather than the exceptionality of the few.

Second, we show that the competitions came to mean much more than just spaces where people hoped for a slim chance to get a job. They were also spaces of participation as partaking where people struggled for membership in social collectivities and for recognition by ‘third parties’. Again, following Simmel, competition in society is a ‘competition for human beings, a struggle for applause and attention, for acceptance and devotion of every kind’ (Simmel Reference Simmel2008 [1903]: 962). For Simmel, competitions are places of ‘expressiveness, communication, and creative responsiveness’ (Colloredo-Mansfeld Reference Colloredo-Mansfeld2002: 114) to a ‘third party’ or a ‘customer’ who holds a ‘prize’ (see also Gane Reference Gane2020: 41–3; Simmel Reference Simmel2008 [1903]). The ‘third party’ is not necessarily those who organize the competition; they can also be family, community and wider ‘society’, which are being addressed in a nuanced struggle for recognition and approval. Scholars have shown how, in times of un(der)employment, African youths who are being excluded from the arena of work and wages begin to forge new expressions of sociability and new spaces of belonging (Masquelier Reference Masquelier2019). In our case, job competitions were to some degree also forged as spaces of work. Standing distinct from other studies that ask what middle-class youth do in place of work, we explore how extant activities were to some degree also rendered work, with events providing occasions to collectively affirm respectability.

On le bras long, transnational mobility and the desire to work: from competition to participation

In this section, we show in more detail how participation rather than competition shaped graduates’ conduct, and how jobseekers’ tactics and practices are situated within broader cultural frameworks, relational networks and forms of transnational mobility. In Mali, le bras long (the long arm) was often mentioned in interviews; this is a local concept used to describe the actual and potential resources available to an individual, similar to Bourdieu’s (Reference Bourdieu1983) concept of ‘social capital’. Le bras long represents the idea of having a favourable position as a family member, especially when it comes to employment distribution. It is portrayed as an advantage: ‘You are going to be employed at a company because of your parents’ relations, and not because you [have] merit or because of the studies you did,’ asserted another graduate in Mali. While Le Concours’ results determine future public service agents, graduates often characterized the selection process as shaped by le bras long. Boubacar, for instance, was recruited by a Malian ministry via Le Concours immediately after graduation in economics at the University of Bamako back in 2010. Both his parents worked in a ministry. He has two younger brothers and an older sister; all of them were employed by the government, two of them in ministries. Boubacar, a man who was often claimed to have a ‘long arm’, denied that his family had helped in his victory in Le Concours. In an interview in 2013, and depicting again the graduates’ typical weighing of probabilities addressed earlier in this article, Boubacar recalled his trajectory. Susann took the chance to ask him straight away:

Boubacar argued that le bras long cannot be a guiding principle if so many participants have relatives in public services. But we cite Boubacar here to show another variant of how youth challenged the idea that the competitions were principally about performance. When prompted to connect success with personal accomplishment, Boubacar instead invoked the slim odds of winning, framing his chances in terms of contingency and God’s assistance. Thus, both the people suspecting the family of using le bras long and Boubacar himself deny that winning in competitions has anything to do with being the ‘best’ or outcompeting others through exceptional performance. Rather, kinship relations, contingency and chance, and the belief in ‘God being with me’, were key in graduates’ envisioned routes towards getting a job.

In Khartoum, Stefanie made recurrent observations on how jobseekers participated in many competitions, recruitment events, internships and part-time jobs simultaneously, engaging in a multidirectional job search within and beyond Sudan. Those running events, co-working offices and one startup investor complained about high dropout rates, and about people registering for events and then not attending. Such fluctuations or forms of partial participation are related to how people’s strategies involved showing up in different zones of job search and following new opportunities as they arose. The same graduates who joined competitions were, to shifting degrees, not only well networked in Khartoum, but also transnationally mobile, with their families maintaining kinship ties in a range of other countries. A temporal move to another country was very much part of their map of possible trajectories.

Such engagement in multiple, distributed and even border-crossing attempts at finding a job clearly affected how graduates engaged in Khartoum-based competitions and other offers. In 2016, Stefanie joined an entrepreneurship exhibition at a campus at Khartoum’s Technical University, where she was going to meet Maya for a second interview. Maya, a graduate in biomedical engineering, had developed breast cancer detection software; this had found much favour among the jury and she had landed the third prize in Mashrouy. Upon searching for her at the event, Stefanie located the stand but Maya herself was nowhere to be seen. Stefanie called Maya, who explained that she had spontaneously arranged a trip to Saudi Arabia. Her husband had just moved there and she wanted to check out employment opportunities for herself. Maya’s mobility is quite typical of how job search stretched across different types of jobs, domains and branches, and different geographical locations where family or spouses resided. Sudanese middle-class families maintain extensive kinship networks in different countries. These stretch and multiply possible routes towards employment and allow people to continue their hustling abroad. When Stefanie reached out to people including former participants of Mashrouy, it was not unusual to find some of them in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and even China. Even if many returned after their visas had ended or because labour markets in the UAE and elsewhere have tightened, jobseekers like Maya were simply weighing up effort, gains and other obligations, and pursuing alternative opportunities if they looked more worthwhile. Transnational mobility and partial presence were thus a self-evident part of jobseekers’ ‘muddling through’.

Combined with insights from the previous section, which illustrated participants’ views on the unlikeliness of winning and their insistence on their professional qualifications, cultural patterns like le bras long and transnational mobility help explain why an emphasis on good-enough engagement and building relations across settings made much more sense than focusing on how to outperform others within singular events. Many Malian youths proactively described themselves as ‘hustlers’ or as people who ‘just’ participate. ‘On fait le concours seulement pour le concours. C’est tout quoi’ – ‘We take the exam just to take it. That’s all, really’ – said a twenty-three-year-old graduate applying for the position of accountant in Le Concours. In Sudan, applicants for various competitions divided their efforts to remain eligible in multiple contexts, while literally often saying that they were ‘just giving it a try’ in each of them. The following two sections move deeper into two major practices of participation, attendance and partaking, and situate them in participants’ urban, postgraduate livelihoods and aspirations.

Participation as attending: multiple job paths, proper registry and collective tactics of a ‘good-enough’ engagement

In order to provide context for young people’s practices of participation, it is important to note that even though Mashrouy and Le Concours are unique in size and reach, they do not stand alone as opportunities for advancement. These bigger events were surrounded by a broad range of similar (if smaller-scale) developmental offers and activities, including NGO work, part-time jobs, further training or exploration of employment options abroad. It follows that none of the persons we talked to dropped everything else to commit themselves solely to the competitions. While youths invested work in the competitions, they also integrated and adapted their participation along with their other job search efforts.

Some Le Concours participants travelled all the way from Mali’s regions to Bamako, although the majority lived in the capital city. Most of them did not have a fixed or secure work contract; they were working or taking part in an internship that was directed towards some future opportunity. Some helped their parents, and some undertook vocational training. Participation in Le Concours is thus part of what youth in Mali refer to as ‘making do’ – ‘On se débrouille un peu.’ In competitions, such established practices of making do took the form of ‘just’ participation, a reduction of efforts to the merely necessary: ‘We are just doing the competition for the sake of the competition. That is all,’ summarized a twenty-three-year-old graduate applying for the position of accountant.

Such ‘making do’ was distributed across many offers, spheres and relational networks. Another of Susann’s interviewees, Siaka, reported a long history of participation in multiple concours and other offers, approaching them with a strategic mindset: given the challenging labour market, it makes sense to keep learning and developing new skills rather than specializing too narrowly in one domain. Two years after graduating in physics and completing an internship with Mali’s main energy supplier, Siaka passed a concours for further higher education at ENSUP (École Normale Supérieure) in order to become a secondary school physics teacher. Shortly afterwards, he also began a study programme in telecommunications at a private university. At the time of finishing his studies, he was admitted to ENI (École Nationale des Ingénieurs) for another three years of training, this time to further specialize as an electrical engineer. His daily routine became intense: leaving home at seven in the morning for classes at ENI, then in the early afternoon skipping part of those courses to attend his internship at a secondary school, and finally heading to ENSUP for classes until eight in the evening. In the years to come, Siaka will be eligible not just for teaching, but also for engineering jobs distributed via Le Concours. Just like youths in Sudan, Siaka’s individual educational/occupational assemblage diverges from purist and purposive ideals of professions, and is oriented towards securing a ‘foot in the door’ by being present and professional in multiple milieus from which job opportunities may unfold. Siaka did not improve his qualification for one particular job description; instead, he worked on increasing the number of employment competitions he would be able to participate in, thus his practice of attendance was distributed.

Not only did youths test their luck in different spheres, our ethnographic encounters themselves became potential avenues. In Sudan, Stefanie frequently interacted with a young man, Omar, who had joined a range of competitions. Omar had meanwhile secured himself a small startup fund to get his project going, but also asked Stefanie whether she could check his application to become a UNIDO youth ambassador, an unpaid representative role. The ambassador role was an appealing offer because of the wider prestige of working with international development organizations that could eventually lead to longer (and paid) involvement with these organizations. For Omar, this did not mean that he would stop his entrepreneurial project; rather, it would open up the possibility of an additional career track. During further conversation, Omar also asked Stefanie to advise him on study pathways into a master’s degree programme in Europe. Susann experienced a similar encounter with Issa, a graduate preparing for Le Concours to become an English teacher at the national school, who was also actively involved with an NGO that promoted access to language learning. The two of them lived in the same neighbourhood in Bamako and had regular informal conversations over tea for some years. At some point, Issa assisted Susann with interview transcriptions – small projects that he referred to as opportunities that arose because of his efforts to ‘stay in touch’, a bet on a potential future.

Both Omar and Issa worked on multiple options and pathways, in the hope that they would further multiply. The importance of the multiplicity, rather than depth, of pathways explains why we found many people dropping existing commitments when more promising opportunities popped up. Given the general difficulty of finding a job and the precariousness of income in times of inflation and political turbulence, it was essential to always hedge one’s bets. This observation is again not new; scholars have long highlighted manifestations of hustling in urban Africa (e.g. Reumert Reference Reumert2023), but we address it here to highlight that this general pattern of distributing efforts and attention affected jobseekers’ modes of participation in singular competitions. Next to the pursuit of quantitative diversification (many options), we must also consider the repetitive nature of these events, and the fact that repeated participation (even if met by repeated failure) was an established pattern to increase chances of landing a job. Mamadou and Bourama, for instance, are both graduates from the same class in law school at the University of Bamako. Both find themselves in very different situations today. While Mamadou runs several smaller businesses, Bourama works full time as a non-contracted intern at a government institution. However, they both view Le Concours as the pathway to a stable contract in a proper job. Therefore, both of them participate in Le Concours every year.

As part of trying to attend in many different spaces, our interlocutors laid particular emphasis on the short time span of registration or application. As illustrated by Omar’s act of reaching out to Stefanie for help with his UNIDO application (whiteness being perceived as having attributions of expertise), the youth invested quite some time and energy to make sure they were in the pool of potential ‘winners’ of opportunities. In Mali, participants must provide documents to register for Le Concours: a form indicating planned exams, their diploma, a CV, and a covering letter with a 200 CFA franc stamp affixed in the top right-hand corner. Before submission, making sure the dossier is correctly completed became one of the hottest topics at the daily tea-drinking sessions. Night after night, future participants brought their dossiers along, asking fellow participants to check the documents and spot any mistakes. Alassane, an English graduate who shared Susann’s commute, would head downtown for weeks before submitting his papers, with his dossier rolled up in his hands, meeting different people to ensure that everything was in perfect order. In Sudan, organizers themselves noticed a strong focus on the ‘entry document’ in Mashrouy’s two-page application form, as project manager Amir recounted. Amir observed that people seemed more concerned with this document than with the development of their business ideas. Similarly, Hoyam (Amir’s colleague) complained that a few business ideas kept reappearing because people handed in the same submissions again and again, rather than improving rejected proposals or developing new ideas.

This shows that attending – as the more formal among the two practices we describe – on the one hand required quite some work and graduates had ambitions to submit a proper application. On the other hand, we need to consider the repetitive nature of ‘submitting applications’ to (in the graduates’ view) rather dubious selection processes, and how youth diversified their engagements more than bundling all their energies into one competition event. This shows that the mere existence of competition as a system of selection does not necessarily mean that people adopt competition as a ‘mindset’; rather, they tried to rationally manage their ‘hustling’, submitting good applications but also submitting them many times to different places. Rather than believing that they must do better to win, participants followed a logic of repeated and distributed attendance in different formats and on multiple occasions. This doesn’t mean that youths didn’t suffer because of their situation, but they clearly saw the challenges as being structural rather than due to personal failure. In this way, the mere activity of multiplying participation showed that graduates had developed practices that allowed them to act upon their recognition of how unlikely winning actually is.

Partaking: friends, connections, work

The previous section has demonstrated how participants multiplied and distributed their engagements. Our second key term of partaking considers how participation was shaped not only by young people’s tactics, but also by their desires to belong and be included. While they were ambivalent about the process and ‘prize’ of competitions, they still valued these occasions as social events. In and around both field sites, we focus on two ways in which people partake: (1) by making friends and building relations; and (2) by transforming competitions into ‘normal’ spaces of work. First, much of the socializing at competitions involved forming connections with other people of the same generation, and spending time with ‘friends’ (a term used in both contexts) from similar academic backgrounds. When joining competitions, parti-cipants not only connected with people they saw regularly, but also reunited with former classmates they had not encountered since graduation, reinforcing a sense of community at Le Concours and Mashrouy. Such seeking of connections was not merely an emotional project, but to some degree was shaped by familiar patterns of ‘hustling towards a job’. Social ties are often essential for accessing jobs, political positions and other opportunities – what is referred to as le bras long in Mali and wasta in Sudan.

In Mali, graduates either already had a bras long or worked on creating one, partly by using Le Concours as a sphere for relationship building with potential providers of jobs. Administration graduate Mohamed had undertaken an internship at a bank in Bamako several years previously. Despite never gaining a job contract there, he is still in touch with his former boss, who has promised to find him a job. ‘They wanted me to work there, but they didn’t have the means to recruit me … This happens via the Concours, you know.’ Through his internship, Mohamed expanded his professional network. Everything seemed aligned for employment: he worked well, people liked him, they even wanted to recruit him. Still, Mohamed had to wait until the next Concours for his job opportunity to materialize and thus for a chance to partake in formal employment. In other words, qualification, effort and even le bras long cannot overcome the general absence of jobs; yet, participation in Le Concours is itself preconditioned by the strategic mobilization of jobs. In line with Mohamed’s account, recent events have shone a brighter light on the ways in which personal connections, favours and information circulate at Le Concours – often determining who gains access to opportunity. In 2023, the results of Le Concours were annulled after the discovery of large-scale fraud. Official investigations revealed that civil service jobs were sold through a corrupt network involving intermediaries and senior ministry officials. The fraud included tampering with admission lists, document forgery and collusion inside exam committees.

In Sudan, Mashrouy also became a place where people developed their connections or wasta (personal intermediation in Sudan’s professional labour market; see Mann Reference Mann2014). A few young men managed to secure jobs through the competition, even without ‘winning’. Because these events were often attended by employers – as sponsors or trainers – some participants were able to build connections with corporate representatives, or were recruited by the British Council. Contrary to the competitions’ stated aim of fostering entrepreneurship, these men had successfully used these events to establish proximity to, or to partake in, circles of businessmen and development actors in Khartoum. In other words, the patrimonial networks that had excluded these jobseekers from employment also became more accessible through competitions.

Second, because they had become somewhat routine, the competitions adopted features of the ‘normal, proper job’ in allowing youths an embodied experience of going to work or being at workplaces, notably in local worlds in which most forms of employment are temporary or underpaid. Let us return to the scenes we addressed at the beginning of this article. When Susann first arrived at Le Concours in Bamako, she found the lycée resembling a busy office building – like a company or a ministry – where everyone seemed to have a task or a deadline. People hurried in and out of classrooms where others were already writing their exams, or walked briskly along the corridors checking door signs that displayed the day’s exam schedules. All around the courtyard, there was motion – people eating, reading, flipping through documents, typing on laptops, talking to each other or on the phone – each person absorbed in what felt like the collective rhythm of a workplace in full swing.

In Sudan, Stefanie’s interviews with Mashrouy candidates revealed an alignment between working on projects and the ‘real job’ imagined as the competition’s ultimate outcome. During a multi-day startup weekend held in Khartoum, for instance, Stefanie observed people spontaneously forming small project teams that mimicked real firms, complete with departments for marketing, operations and finance, each led by a team member. During these ‘corporate meetings’, people experimented with the potential professional roles they might one day inhabit, for instance when a young man said: ‘I tried marketing, but this ain’t me. Now I am doing product development, this is what I am good at!’ Thus, the young man had ‘changed jobs’ and reoriented towards an occupation that he felt played to his talents and interests. Many also enjoyed ‘being entrepreneur’ for some time and involved their families or friends in their tinkering on prospective business projects, even if these never became real. In any case, within the atmosphere at entrepreneurship events, the experience of searching for work in a company and operating this company became more closely aligned.

This shows that people – alongside their hustling and moments of critical distancing – also actively immersed themselves in these events. Somewhat paradoxically, Le Concours and Mashrouy afforded occasions to dress for work, leave the house and work. In both settings, it was important to remain active and occupied, and also to portray such activity to their respective families and neighbourhoods. Participating in a competition, in combination with job search activities, reflects Simmel’s emphasis on competitions as shaped by desires for social recognition. Activities such as sending applications or calling a distant relative were perceived as work not only by the graduates but also by their families, who valued their activities purely due to the fact that they were trying in a difficult situation. In that sense, being in a competition allowed the momentary cultivation and enforcement of partaking in a setting in which graduates could either ‘make new friends’, including professional friends and potential employers, or be ‘just’ office people who do their work or run their businesses. The habitus of being working professionals who already participate in work-as-practice further explains why they were not particularly receptive to the meritocratic messages of the competitions. Instead, we found that many participants insisted on their worth as educated people, and sought ways to make connections, or enjoyed the competition for reasons other than competing itself.