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Jude Fokwang
Regis University, Sociology, Faculty Member
- Anthropology, Youth Studies, Voluntary Associations, Gender Studies, Popular Culture, Urban Anthropology, and 15 moreAfrican Studies, Sociology, Development Studies, Ritual, Social Movements, Postcolonial Studies, Violence, Citizenship, Globalization, Social Sciences, Political Anthropology, Historical Anthropology, Participatory Democracy, Ritual Practices, and Anthropology of Religionedit
- My area of research has focused on the cultures and peoples of West and Southern Africa. I teach and research on a wi... moreMy area of research has focused on the cultures and peoples of West and Southern Africa. I teach and research on a wide variety of topics including transnational migration, citizenship, associational life, the politics of traditional leadership and democratization, development and globalization, as well as contemporary African youth identities. My diverse interests are united by the anthropological assumption that human beings everywhere are meaning-makers rooted in the steady desire to order their worlds and improve their livelihoods. This assumption is true of Africa as it is of Europe or Asia. However, global forces and agents have often interfered with these processes, prompting new creative enterprises. My research in Cameroon and South Africa specifically aim to investigate the ways in which local people come to terms with these translocal forces as well as the internal developments that have shaped their world views, politics, aspirations and imaginaries of the future.edit
In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer, Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they... more
In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer, Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults. Faced with the decline of old predictabilities, the diminishing capacity of the postcolonial state to control its destiny and the precarity of waithood, young people instrumentalise the opportunities and resources afforded by associations to build reciprocal relationships that advance their individual and collective pursuits in a community that has increasingly become transnational. In positioning themselves as moral actors, the young people in this ethnography invest in high profile social and communal projects, including the enforcement of moral orthodoxies that enable readers to appreciate the ways in which moral citizenship is engendered, expanded and eroded simultaneously.
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Abstract This paper analyses young people’s political discourses and experiences, highlighting their disillusionment with the postcolonial state. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with young people in the city of Bamenda, the... more
Abstract This paper analyses young people’s political discourses and experiences, highlighting their disillusionment with the postcolonial state. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with young people in the city of Bamenda, the article argues that young people’s perspectives and discourses on politics constitute alternative forms of political involvement and resistance. Their actions, inactions and discourses about politics and political personalities are informed by their specific identities and positionalities. However, taken collectively, these voices reveal current national anxieties about the postcolonial state whose legitimacy is widely believed to have eroded.
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Much of the material in this book addresses sport-in-development as it is constituted through the overwhelming flow of resources from ‘Northern’ donor states to ‘Southern’ recipient states. In that sense it presents sport-in-development... more
Much of the material in this book addresses sport-in-development as it is constituted through the overwhelming flow of resources from ‘Northern’ donor states to ‘Southern’ recipient states. In that sense it presents sport-in-development as part of the classical development assistance process. As the introductory chapter indicates (and strongly echoed in Nicholl’s chapter in this publication) however, alternative perspectives on development are evolving, which question the efficacy of development assistance based on such resource transfer. Such perspectives variously concern themselves with the cultural specificity of development settings, the need for empowerment of indigenous communities in the development process and the recognition that knowledge transfer from South to North can contribute to some of the development dilemmas faced in a number of Northern contexts. By focusing on the engagement of Youth Associations in Bamenda, Cameroon, this chapter introduces to the book, a ‘Southern Perspective’ that is illustrative of such debate.
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ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the uniform, conceived as a special type of ‘social skin’, has been incorporated by individuals and groups into a complex chain of processes and meanings in the Cameroon Grassfields; I describe this practice... more
ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the uniform, conceived as a special type of ‘social skin’, has been incorporated by individuals and groups into a complex chain of processes and meanings in the Cameroon Grassfields; I describe this practice as the uniformization of socio-cultural life. I demonstrate that uniforms, unlike ordinary clothing, are salient precisely because of their unique role as markers of collective identity but also because they embody and simultaneously express the paradox of similarity and difference. Central to these processes and construction of meaning are community-based associations that have elevated the uniform to a new kind of orthodoxy. These perspectives are borne out by ethnographic interpretations of the ways in which variously positioned subjects in the Grassfields relate to and embody the special object that the uniform represents.
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The last two decades have seen a remarkable hike in the number of voluntary associations in the Cameroon Grassfields, which predictably have become important institutions of social organisation and identity. Most individuals belong to... more
The last two decades have seen a remarkable hike in the number of voluntary associations in the Cameroon Grassfields, which predictably have become important institutions of social organisation and identity. Most individuals belong to more than one association - ethnic, religious, professional, regional, neighbourhood, and rotating credit scheme associations popularly known as njangi . I argue in this article that associations have become key sites for the construction and articulation of identities, mediated partly by the “uniforms” that distinguish one group from the other. These uniforms, sewn from African wax prints imported from Europe, Nigeria, or locally produced have grown in importance in the post 1990 era which coincided with the liberalisation of politics and the right to assembly. I’ll argue that associations draw partly on sartorial distinctions to articulate the identities of their members as well as individual associations in themselves. Although evidence will be draw...
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The renowned South African social anthropologist, Isaac Schapera showed in his ethnography, Tribal Innovators (1970), that during the colonial era, Tswana chiefs in southern Africa played an influential role in the socioeconomic... more
The renowned South African social anthropologist, Isaac Schapera showed in his ethnography, Tribal Innovators (1970), that during the colonial era, Tswana chiefs in southern Africa played an influential role in the socioeconomic development of their communities, a project largely understood at the time and certainly today, as the quest for modernity. He showed with lucid conviction that chiefs did not only introduce new taxes and customary legislation, but also actively supported the Europeans whom they admitted into their chiefdoms. Chiefs encouraged their subjects to buy ploughs and other imported goods and to earn money for ‘new wants’ by going to work ‘abroad’ in the mines in Kimberley. That chiefs played a central role in the economic development of their chiefdoms have been used by advocates of chieftaincy, particularly in the current conjuncture of neo-liberalism, to sponsor the discourse that traditional leaders or customary leadership as a whole occupy a key status and ther...
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Contents Table of Figures..........................................................................................iii Preface ............ ............................................................................................ ...... more
Contents Table of Figures..........................................................................................iii Preface ............ ............................................................................................ ... ... Chapter Eight ....................................... ................................................... 147 Chieftaincy at the Crossroads: Politics, Society and ...
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115ff.). Kainz describes the role of the traditional elders and chiefs of the community extensively and explains that they represent the knowledge and the morality of their communities (p. 74). Chiefs and elders are further responsible... more
115ff.). Kainz describes the role of the traditional elders and chiefs of the community extensively and explains that they represent the knowledge and the morality of their communities (p. 74). Chiefs and elders are further responsible for the management of land and the requisite traditional ceremonies (pp. 117ff.). One elder partly blamed himself in an interview for the mal-development of relations with the Red Bull Academy. He explained that local community members should have introduced the local norms and values to the European employees because they were new in the region and therefore not acquainted with its culture (p. 120). However, other interviews suggest that this might not have changed much. Most of the author’s interview partners were not only disappointed with the European management of the Red Bull Academy but also perceived the imbalance of power between the academy and themselves as distressing (p. 120). Former local employees complained about their inability to par...
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Reposant sur l’experience camerounaise, cet article soutient que le style feminin de coiffure en Afrique revele la maniere dont la culture populaire africaine entre dans le marche mondialise. Les auteurs demontrent les modalites selon... more
Reposant sur l’experience camerounaise, cet article soutient que le style feminin de coiffure en Afrique revele la maniere dont la culture populaire africaine entre dans le marche mondialise. Les auteurs demontrent les modalites selon lesquelles les subjectivites en matiere de consommation revelent l’interaction entre les modernites capitalistes issues de la mondialisation et les modernites locales. Ils analysent en outre la maniere dont les inegalites entre les regions du monde et les disparites economiques locales structurent la rencontre entre la culture locale et la culture globale. Selon les auteurs, bien que dependant enormement de produits et modeles importes de l’Occident, les styles de coiffure des femmes en Afrique ne refletent pas une totale dependance vis-a-vis de l’Occident. Il existe toujours un espace ou la liberte d’initiative s’exprime. En fait, l’entree des femmes dans le marche mondialise signale precisement l’exercice du choix et les possibilites d’independance, ...
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... oriented Literacy Tools Milton Krieger Cameroon's Social Democratic Front: Its History and Prospects as an Opposition Political Party, 1990-2011 Sammy Oke Akombi The Raped Amulet The Woman Who Ate Python Beware... more
... oriented Literacy Tools Milton Krieger Cameroon's Social Democratic Front: Its History and Prospects as an Opposition Political Party, 1990-2011 Sammy Oke Akombi The Raped Amulet The Woman Who Ate Python Beware the Drives: Book of Verse Susan Nkwentie Nde ...
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This study explores the ways in which young people in the neighbourhood of Old Town in Bamenda negotiate the predicament of blocked opportunities and ‘arrested adulthood’ occasioned by the decline in the nation-building project and... more
This study explores the ways in which young people in the neighbourhood of Old Town in Bamenda negotiate the predicament of blocked opportunities and ‘arrested adulthood’ occasioned by the decline in the nation-building project and prolonged socio-economic and moral crisis in Cameroon. I investigate how urban youth in Old Town construct their moral and socio-cultural worlds through involvement in associations. The main finding suggests that faced with growing uncertainty, young people in Bamenda are positioning themselves as important social actors by drawing on local cultural resources such as associations to construct their social worlds that aim to circumvent their exclusion and marginality. In this light, I analyse youth associations as central although not exclusive to negotiating young people’s predicament by focusing on a range of practices through which they seek respectability and claim social adult status. Drawing on the concepts of transition, subjectivities and personhoo...
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The illusion of completeness pervades almost every sector of our lives, from politics, religion, science, through romance to name just a few. Such ideas, whether academic theories, methodological techniques or ideologies are often... more
The illusion of completeness pervades almost every sector of our lives, from politics, religion, science, through romance to name just a few. Such ideas, whether academic theories, methodological techniques or ideologies are often well-packaged in the most glitzy, flamboyant and reassuring labels, exported from the headquarters of modernity and their satellite locations for global consumption by all and sundry. The concept of ready-made perhaps best captures these packaged ideas and theories; labels drawn from the language of my childhood insofar as sartorial issues were concerned. For fathers who wanted to be taken seriously in the 1970s and 1980s, shopping for ready-made clothes for one’s children and wive(s) was something many aspired to; it signalled one’s ability to consume and glorify one of the ultimate trappings of modernity – imported luxury clothes. The prestige accorded ready-made clothes contrasted sharply with those commissioned by the masses who relied on the community tailor or second-hand clothes discarded by consumers in the global north for recycling on the bodies of their less fortunate underlings in the global south. In this chapter, I provide a critical review of Francis Nyamnjoh’s Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd (2017), peppered with a variety of proverbs that sum up the imperative to incorporate African epistemologies and worldviews in theorising African experiences.
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A close examination of Cameroon’s presidential elections since 1992 reveals a remarkable pattern – the plundering of state resources and use of its institutions to procure votes for the incumbent, Paul Biya; consistent irregularities with... more
A close examination of Cameroon’s presidential elections since 1992 reveals a remarkable pattern – the plundering of state resources and use of its institutions to procure votes for the incumbent, Paul Biya; consistent irregularities with the voters’ record and finally, legitimizing the elections by use of diplomatic channels and/or questionable election monitors as well employing state violence to win the population’s acquiescence. These patterns are by no means exhaustive. However, for the sake of brevity, I elaborate on the above points through a close examination of the presidential elections of 2011 and 2018 and conclude with the twin elections of the February 2020. My intention in this brief writeup is to inspire interest in detailed ethnographic studies on electioneering in Cameroon and beyond. The implications for such studies, both theoretical and practical are enormous.
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This paper analyses young people’s political discourses and experiences, highlighting their disillusionment with the postcolonial state. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with young people in the city of Bamenda, the article... more
This paper analyses young people’s political discourses and
experiences, highlighting their disillusionment with the postcolonial
state. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with young
people in the city of Bamenda, the article argues that young people’s
perspectives and discourses on politics constitute alternative forms
of political involvement and resistance. Their actions, inactions and
discourses about politics and political personalities are informed by
their specific identities and positionalities. However, taken collectively,
these voices reveal current national anxieties about the postcolonial
state whose legitimacy is widely believed to have eroded.
experiences, highlighting their disillusionment with the postcolonial
state. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with young
people in the city of Bamenda, the article argues that young people’s
perspectives and discourses on politics constitute alternative forms
of political involvement and resistance. Their actions, inactions and
discourses about politics and political personalities are informed by
their specific identities and positionalities. However, taken collectively,
these voices reveal current national anxieties about the postcolonial
state whose legitimacy is widely believed to have eroded.
Research Interests:
Reposant sur l'expérience camerounaise, cet article soutient que le style féminin de coiffure en Afrique révèle la manière dont la culture populaire africaine entre dans le marché mondialisé. Les auteurs démontrent les modalités selon... more
Reposant sur l'expérience camerounaise, cet article soutient que le style féminin de coiffure en Afrique révèle la manière dont la culture populaire africaine entre dans le marché mondialisé. Les auteurs démontrent les modalités selon lesquelles les subjectivités en matière de consommation révèlent l'interaction entre les modernités capitalistes issues de la mondialisation et les modernités locales.
This paper argues that the uniform, conceived as a special type of ‘social skin’, has been incorporated by individuals and groups into a complex chain of processes and meanings in the Cameroon Grassfields; I describe this practice as the... more
This paper argues that the uniform, conceived as a special type of ‘social skin’, has been incorporated by individuals and groups into a complex chain of processes and meanings in the Cameroon Grassfields; I describe this practice as the uniformization of socio-cultural life. I demonstrate that uniforms, unlike ordinary clothing, are salient precisely because of their unique role as markers of collective identity but also because they embody and simultaneously express the paradox of similarity and difference. Central to these processes and construction of meaning are community-based associations that have elevated the uniform to a new kind of orthodoxy. These perspectives are borne out by ethnographic interpretations of the ways in which variously positioned subjects in the Grassfields relate to and embody the special object that the uniform represents.
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See the link for a fuller length of the article including the references and archival sources.
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The illusion of completeness pervades almost every sector of our lives – in politics, religion, science, and even romance to name just a few. Such ideas, whether academic theories, methodological techniques or ideologies are often... more
The illusion of completeness pervades almost every sector of our lives – in politics, religion, science, and even romance to name just a few. Such ideas, whether academic theories, methodological techniques or ideologies are often well-packaged in the most glitzy, flamboyant and reassuring labels, exported from the headquarters of modernity and their satellite locations –for global consumption by all and sundry. The concept of ready-made perhaps best captures these packaged ideas and theories – labels drawn from the language of my childhood with respect to sartorial preoccupations. For fathers who wanted to be taken seriously in the 1970s and 1980s, shopping for ready-made clothes for one’s children and wive(s) was something many aspired to – as it signalled one’s ability to consume and glorify one of the ultimate trappings of modernity – imported luxury clothes. The prestige accorded ready-made clothes contrasted remarkably with those commissioned by the masses who relied on the neighbourhood tailor or second-hand clothes discarded by consumers in the global north for recycling on the bodies of their less fortunate underlings in the global south.
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It’s been over half a decade since Lela was celebrated in Bali Nyonga. Even before the separatist conflict erupted, Bali Nyonga had not been at peace with itself and by extension – its rulers. In his book, Lela in Bali: History through... more
It’s been over half a decade since Lela was celebrated in Bali Nyonga. Even before the separatist conflict erupted, Bali Nyonga had not been at peace with itself and by extension – its rulers. In his book, Lela in Bali: History through Ceremony in Cameroon (2006), anthropologist, Richard Fardon contends that Lela could be understood as a "barometer of the state of play in Bali politics: a ceremony that has adjusted to reflect the changing composition and external relations of the community" (2, italics mine). To extend this argument, it’s absence over several consecutive years could also index the state of politics – one that shows the growing dissonance between the ruled and the rulers.