Rejuvenation by the state. Legal identity and the moral economy of age in Côte d’Ivoire

In Côte d’Ivoire, the state production of ID documents has to face the common practice of lowering one’s age for administrative and legal purposes. This is done by making a new illegal registration at the civil registrar under a new name and with a new date of birth. In Ivorian popular culture, identities having passed through this kind of “paper rebirth” are known as “René Caillié”, referring to the French explorer who in 1828 reached Timbuktu disguised as an Arab literate. The article shows that the René Caillié arrangements cannot be represented just as illegal overturns of the laws of civil registration. They are part of a popular mode of appropriation of the state, where the legal construction of identity is hybridized with the moral values stemming from Ivorian civil society. Through them, congruence between legal age and social age is restored, taming abstract bureaucratic procedures that would otherwise hinder the construction of the personhood of many Ivorians.