When we were young, we would spend a lot of money’, Moustapha, a 20-something- year-old nursing student, said to me as he watched his adversary roll the dice and move one of his chequers across the backgammon board. We were sitting at the entrance of Moustapha's family home in Lamordé, a former village on the edge of the Niger River that has since been absorbed into Niamey, Niger's capital city. The sun was slowly setting into the hazy horizon. It was time for the mangariba prayer (Hausa equivalent of the Arabic maghrib; one of the five prayers Muslims perform daily). Two young men sitting next to the players were making their ablutions, pouring water from a plastic kettle, in preparation for worship. The air around us was thick with the smoke of women's cooking fires and the dust raised by young boys running after a deflated soccer ball just up the street. Absorbed in their game, neither player gave any sign that they had heard the muezzin's call to prayer. Moustapha rolled the dice and moved his pawn swiftly across the board. Then he turned to me:

Moustapha was alluding to his younger days, when he and his friends, all members of the Titanic fada (conversation group or ‘tea circle’), met every evening to listen to popular music, drink tea and plan their next evening of wild fun. Fadas unite samari (young men) who have grown up in the same neighborhood or attended the same school. They constitute a refuge from formal social constraints and function with their own moral codes, ethics of accumulation and expenditure, and their own pathways to self-fashioning.

At the fada un(der)employed young urbanites, whose daily lives are overshadowed by uncertainty, can unburden themselves away from parental pressures and, as one of them once put it, ‘enjoy [their] youth while [they] can’.