This book on rights, entitlements and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa shows how the playing field has not been as levelled as presumed by some and how racism and its benefits persist. Through everyday interactions and experiences of university students and professors, it explores the question of race in a context still plagued by remnants of apartheid, inequality and perceptions of inferiority and inadequacy among the majority black population. In education, black voices and concerns go largely unheard, as circles of privilege are continually regenerated and added onto a layered and deep history of cultivation of black pain. These issues are examined against the backdrop of organised student protests sweeping through the countrys universities with a renewed clamour for transformation around a rallying cry of Black Lives Matter. The nuanced complexity of this insightful analysis of the Rhodes Must Fall movement elicits compelling questions about the attractions and dangers of exclusionary articulations of belonging. What could a grand imperialist like the stripling Uitlander or foreigner of yesteryear, Sir Cecil John Rhodes, possibly have in common with the present-day nimble-footed makwerekwere from Africa north of the Limpopo? The answer, Nyamnjoh suggests, is to be found in how human mobility relentlessly tests the boundaries of citizenship.
The idea that human beings are inextricably bound to one another is at the heart of this book about African agency, especially drawing on the African philosophy Ubuntu, with its roots in human sociality and inclusivity. Ubuntu’s precepts and workings are severely tested in these times of rapid change and multiple responsibilities. Africans negotiate their social existence between urban and rural life, their continental and transcontinental distances, and all the market forces that now impinge, with relationships and loyalties placed in question. Between ideal and reality, dreams and schemes, how is Ubuntu actualized, misappropriated and endangered? The book unearths the intrigues and contradictions that go with inclusivity in Africa. Basing his argument on the ideals of trust, conviviality and support embodied in the concept of Ubuntu, Francis Nyamnjoh demonstrates how the pursuit of personal success and even self-aggrandizement challenges these ideals, thus leading to discord in social relationships. Nyamnjoh uses a popular Ivorian drama with the same title to substantiate life-world realities and more importantly to demonstrate that new forms of expression, from popular drama to fiction, thicken and enrich the ethnographic component in current anthropology.
This study of xenophobia and how it both exploits and excludes is an incisive commentary on a globalizing world and its consequences for ordinary people's lives. Using the examples of Sub-Saharan Africa's two most economically successful nations, it meticulously documents the fate of immigrants and the new politics of insiders and outsiders. As globalization becomes a palpable reality, citizenship, sociality and belonging are subjected to stresses to which few societies have devised a civil response beyond yet more controls.
""This play tackles the theatrically attractive but ethically complex issue of Christian fundamentalism. Nyamnjoh, as a sociologist is well qualified to explore the social problems and psychological pressures which give rise to the born-again phenomenon, and the strong appeal of fundamentalist religion. The Convert, however is no schematic sociological tract. It deals with the conflicting imperatives in 21st century West Africa, which push ordinary people into extraordinary situations, and provides no easy solutions to the issues raised. Although the play revolves around the Ultimate Church of Christ and the four main characters affected by it, the audience is given a deftly sketched picture of a corrupt world beyond it, lacking in spiritual or community values. [..] The characterization. is remarkable for its avoidance of any obvious protagonist; the audience is allowed no clear character with whom to identify. The four main characters . have both virtues and flaws, each providing insights into ways the consumer-oriented materialism of modern life impacts upon African spirituality and community values. - David Kerr, Professor in Literature and Drama, University of Botswana """"At the core of the implicit philosophy in Nyamnjoh's The Convert . is the theatrical manifesto that contemporary society has not only to liberate itself, and its productive powers from 'Pentecostal', freak religions and distortion, it also has to liberate these same productive capacities from their present prostration. There is a deep, engaging humanism that pervades The Convert, but it is a humanism emblematic, to speak analogously, of the Aeschylean variety."""" - Bate Besong, Africa Review of Books.
This book discusses the seminal role played by Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, in the founding of American-style public relations persuasive communication through manipulation of symbols and his huge (and cynical) impact on the American economic and political scene. It provides a substantiated and convincing explanation for what is happening today in Donald Trumps America. In the form of a history of ideas, the book makes clear that the present Trumpian manipulation of democracy and what it means to be American has a long pre-history and continues to go through different phases, involving the cultivation and institutionalisation of strong bonds between business and politics. The book shows how this is intimately linked with a science, intellectualism and practice informed by a series of binary oppositions in human action and interaction (e.g. rationality and irrationality, reason and emotion, mind and body, brain and heart, insider and outsider, us and them) and how unpredictable human nature really is. It makes a convincing argument that being human depends on how successfully we are able to negotiate such apparently contradictory binaries with the intricacies and dynamism of human agency. It is rich and thought provoking and very timely, given the exclusionary politics of fear, anger, hate and nativism we see unfolding not only in the USA but all over the world.
This book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research is conceptualised, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded “frontier African” at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The book uses Amos Tutuola’s stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa.
Intimate Strangers tells the story of the everyday tensions of maids and madams in ways that bring together different worlds and explore various dimensions of servitude and mobility. Immaculate travels to a foreign land only to find her fianc refusing to marry her. Operating from the margins of society, through her own ingenuity and an encounter with researcher Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, she is able to earn some money. Will she remain at the margins or graduate into DUST - Diamond University of Science and Technology? Immaculate learns how maids struggle to make ends meet and madams wrestle to keep them in their employ. Resolved to make her disappointments blessings, she perseveres until she can take no more.
In this juvenalia, his first collection of poems, Francis Nyamnjoh takes the reader back in time, even as the past catches up with the present, to show how unchanging and even painful life can be. Accordingly, the poems celebrate, mourn, ridicule, lambast, and lament, thereby highlighting Nyamnjohs characteristic fascination with the plight of the person in society, a picture which reaffirms his already established role as the conscience of spaces, especially those African.
This humorous tale of the na?ve and curious African student-cum-philosopher wandering between North and South, the rural and the urban, has been in gestation for a period of nearly two decades. With allusion to traditions of the philosophical novel and the picaresque, Nyamnjoh's protagonist travels from his African village to the sharply divided and socially cruel world of 1980s Britain. By casting aside his disillusion and the traps of servitude and victimhood, The Disillusioned African reveals his creative potential for curiosity and adventure. He brings a bird's eye view, always affectionate, gently mocking, to the cultural idiosyncrasies of the new world he encounters, which throws his own African culture, politics and socio-economic realities into light relief. Praise for The Disillusioned African 'Whatever the imagined future for Africa, this courageous book will certainly provide, for both its foreign readers and the young generation of Cameroonians, a provocative insight into the complex web of despair, frustration, paradox and hope . on the eve of the 21st century.' - Louise Cuming, Catholic University of Central Africa 'In his characteristically humorous style, Nyamnjoh portrays the various social ills in society and castigates the political elite he holds largely responsible.' - Piet Konings, African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands. 'Francis Nyamnjoh . has a particular way of saying very serious things in the most unserious manner. He entertains, and in the process he moralises, he teaches, he gives you lessons. learning experience and philosophy to give you a view of the dilemma of the African.' - Sammy Beban Chumbow, Professor of Linguistics, University of Yaounde I
In Mind Searching Nyamnjoh has attempted to do something rather clever - to expose, through the attitudes, feelings and thoughts of one man and a very simple story, the hypocrisy and corruption of Cameroon society and humanity in general, often using understatement and irony in good effect. The commentary is unremittingly cynical and returns again and again to corruption, callous squandering, exploitation, prostitution, and other fairly worn butts. The book depicts a society where basic freedoms are shackled, and thinking aloud treasonable. Hence the mental ramblings of the narrator and central character Judascious Fanda Yanda, in the form of an extended monologue full of observations, anecdotes and asides written from the point of view of an apparently insouciant naive. The basic method is to foreground the opinions and conversational elegance of the narrator, while having events going on as a background to his thoughts. We trace the narrator's progress from a disenchanted 'Damn? de la Terre' to a comfortably well off Private Secretary to a Vice Minister over a number of years. It is a clear illustration of how the system perpetuates its mediocrity and buys off any spark of initiative. Nyamnjoh has a good command of ironic tone and sound control over form and structure. He employs a very fluent style, and often has very urbane and neat turns of phrase. He captures the bored, superior, cynical and ultimately predatory tone of voice of his narrator extremely well.
This study of Cameroon captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the growing disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. It focuses on the resistance of Anglophone Cameroonians to nationhood, which is being pursued to the detriment of minority identities.
A Sweet-Footed African captures the sense of being James Jibraeel Alhaji; the milestones and challenges of his life and his reconciliation with emotions, decisions and circumstances of the past, and hopes for the future. James Jibraeel Alhaji's life is characterized by a diversity of personal ambitions, family commitments and economic motives, which lead him from his home in Cameroon to Cape Town, South Africa. The story situates the context of decisions that characterize the so-called quest for greener pastures, examining personal opportunities, triumphs and challenges before and beyond life as an immigrant in South Africa. The story explores what it means to move and to be mobile in Africa, the networks that fulfil and sustain mobile Africans during times of uncertainty, and the lineage to home that remains eternally active.
Chieftaincy in Africa has displayed remarkable dynamics and adaptability to new socio-economic and political developments, without becoming totally transformed in the process. Almost everywhere on the continent, chiefdoms and chiefs have become active agents in the quest for ethnic, cultural symbols as a way of maximising opportunities at the centre of bureaucratic and state power, and at the home village where control over land and labour often require both financial and symbolic capital. Chieftaincy remains central to ongoing efforts at developing democracy and accountability in line with the expectations of Africans as individual citizens and also as subjects of various cultural communities. This book uses Cameroon and Botswana as case studies, to argue that the rigidity and prescriptiveness of modernist partial theories have left a major gap in scholarship on chiefs and chieftaincy in Africa. It stresses that studies of domesticated agency in Africa are sorely needed to capture the creative ongoing processes and to avoid overemphasising structures and essentialist perceptions on chieftaincy and the cultural communities that claim and are claimed by it.
Set in the fictional and reluctantly bilingual land of Mimbo in contemporary Africa, this story revolves around the tragedy of the haunting Prosp're, a semi-literate Mimbolander who is searching for the finer things in life. The novel presents a graphic picture of the frustrations engendered by a society that values wealth over love.
This book richly documents the battles fought by the Anglophone community in Cameroon to safeguard the General Certificate of Education (GCE), a symbol of their cherished colonial heritage from Britain, from attempts by agents of the Ministry of National Education to subvert it. These battles opposed a mobilised and determined Anglophone civil society against numerous machinations by successive Francophone-dominated governments to destroy their much prided educational system in the name of 'national integration'. When Southern Cameroonians re-united with La R?publique du Cameroun in 1961, they claimed that they were bringing into the union 'a fine education system' from which their Francophone compatriots could borrow. Instead, they found themselves battling for decades to save their way of life. Central to their concerns and survival as a community is an urgent need for cultural recognition and representation, of which an educational system free of corruption and trivialisation through politicisation is a key component.
Dieudonnes life is spun from the threads of one of Africa's grand moral dilemmas, in which personal responsibility is intertwined with the social catharsis occasioned by ambitions of dominance and ever diminishing circles. We encounter Dieudonne at the tail end of his service as 'houseboy' to the Toubaabys, a patronising expatriate couple. In the company of a lively assortment of characters and luring music at the Grand Canari Bar, Dieudonne recounts his life. As he peels layer after layer of his vicissitudes, he depicts the everyday resilience of the African on a continent caught in the web of predatory forces. Yet, this enchanting failure also celebrates the infinite capacity of the African to find happiness and challenge victimhood.
This is a study of how Donald J. Trump, his populist credentials notwithstanding, borrows without acknowledgment and stubbornly refuses to come to terms with his indebtedness. Taken together with mobility and conviviality, the principle of incompleteness enables us to distinguish between inclusionary and exclusionary forms of populism, and when it is fuelled by ambitions of superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.
Childhood and growing up in Mimboland, Cameroon are infused with fascinating stories and adventures. Discover life in Abakwa with Tom and his friend, as they are chased through an orchard for secretly harvesting avocadoes and mangoes. Smile as Mathias Chi's overloaded canoe almost loses balance. Shiver as Roland runs through the dark streets and bleeding corridors of Mvog Mvog. And cry when Big Brother discovers how his siblings suffered when he was away at school. What happens to Esther when she finds the courage to make an announcement at the Abakwa Mountain Foot Radio Station about her husband's disappearance? Will Prudencia and Collette kill or give life? How does Prisca Lum deal with her dwarf husband? Some characters will remind you of people you know - or even of yourself. Drum beats and church bells, thunder and lightning, princes and princesses, visions and deceptions fill the pages. Discover your favorite stories waiting to be told and retold, again and again.
""One day, Mama Ngonsu told her son: """"Normally, a child grew up and stayed around to help his parents. The world has changed, and things are no longer as they used to be. Things must not be normal all the time, otherwise life would not be life."""" When Emmanuel Kwanga gets a University scholarship, he travels from the lake and hills of Abehema to the Great City. Everyone in the village has invested in him their hopes for the good life. When the life they've imagined is cut short by the University guillotine, Emmanuel Kwanga must struggle to make sense of what the good life means - for himself and for Abehema - in a world where things are no longer as they used to be. This novel is about coming of age and coming to terms in Mimboland. It is also about the fragility of life and the strength of the human spirit. The filth and screaming splendor of the city and the perplexed tranquility of the village are juxtaposed, as the tension and conviviality between tradition and modernity are lived and explored. Roads and drivers, dreams and public transport link different geographies. Faltering along or speeding away, these spaces of risk, frustration and solidarity are filled with popular songs as vehicles for understanding events and relationships. With every crossing of the Pont de Maturit? the story flows, and its mysteries surge. In this novel, the worlds of the living and the dead intermingle, as do the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible.
In the on-going democratic debate, the Cameroonian media have not played the role of objective mediators. A one-party logic, of which government, opposition and the public are guilty, has prevented Cameroonian multipartyism from addressing the major issue: that of how best to bring about real participatory democracy. So far, democracy has served mainly as a face powder, an empty concept or slogan devoid of concrete meaning used to justify reactionary propaganda by the ruling party and its acolytes on the one hand, and revolutionary propaganda by the opposition and some pressure groups on the other. This polarisation in the Cameroonian political arena corresponds to a similar polarisation in the Cameroonian media. One can identify two main political tendencies in the media: first, there are those who argue that all the government does is good and in the best interest of Cameroon, and that the radical opposition is void of patriots and motivated only by selfish, regional, or ethnic self-interests. These comprise the publicly owned, government-controlled electronic and print media on the one hand, and pro-government privately owned newspapers on the other. Second, there are those who claim that all the radical opposition does or stands for is in the best interest of Cameroon, and that the government and its allies are only motivated by a stubborn love of power and other selfish pursuits. These comprise the bulk of the privately owned papers. The media are polarised into two diametrically opposing camps, each claiming to know and represent the best interests of the Cameroonian people.
Life in Safang could not have been more idyllic for Ngoma and Shaka, his elder sister. Under the wings of an attendant and storytelling mother, they didn t miss the father they hadn t known. Later on, in the alluvial valleys of Bonfuma and the lands beyond, Ngoma experiences the thrills and challenges of schooling and being schooled. Adolescents will appreciate his stories and struggles as he tries to reconcile his village roots with the desire for a modern education. He has special relationships with his grandfather, stepfather and teachers, and becomes captain of the college football team. But growing up with a sister does not make him understand the subtleties and complexities of girls. Whether Collette or Camille, they seem to be two sides of the same coin. Ngoma successfully manoeuvres between the two, without the slightest crisis, for a while. He seeks balance between God and girls, work and pleasure, learning and mischief. While life can be well salted, it can also be bitter. Jealousy rises and he discovers who matters and who doesn t. His life brings together the bearableness and unbearableness of belonging, of being in love and being free, of...
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