Challenging Patriarchy: Trade, outward migration and the internationalization of Commercial sex among Bayang and Ejagham women in Southwest Cameroon

This paper documents the specific local and global socio-economic forces that led to the outward migration of Bayang and Ejagham women to work as commercial sex workers on the Cameroon-Nigeria border regions in the 1980s and 1990s. It demonstrates that these women’s personal accumulation strategies are adaptative- drawing on time and space specific modes of capitalist accumulation and kinship systems of power. The intertwined nature of these forms of accumulation demonstrate that patriarchal forms of power and capitalist forms of accumulation in this region were not competitive, but rather complementary systems. This conjuncture also gave women the latitude to claim some form of sexual and economic agency, suggesting that at least in Africa, patriarchy as a power field is dynamic and relational, simultaneously opening up spaces for both resistance and agency.The impact of sex work is disproportionate since most women of our study were involved in subsistence sex, with the risk of exposure to violence and HIV/AIDS. These women nevertheless sought to reconfigure gender relations

Modern State Law: Regulating Tradition or Protecting the Environment in the Mankon Kingdom of Northwest Cameroon?

Most African countries including Cameroon find themselves in a situation of legal pluralism and at crossroads with implications for the sustainable management of natural resources. Traditional institutions and knowledge systems have been hailed as invaluable mechanisms for the conservation of flora and fauna. This chapter examines the conflict between traditional institutions and State law in the hierarchically stratified Mankon Kingdom of the Grassfield region of Northwest Cameroon where the latter prohibits the harvesting of culturally valuable plant and animal species for myriad ritual ceremonies and for therapeutic purposes. It demonstrates that the lack of cultural sensitivity can be antithetical to conservation initiatives. In other words, there is the need to align current legislative regulations for the management of natural species with the traditional use of territory and gender roles as well as to raise the cultural and educational level of the population through sensitization on the need to conserve the natural environment on which their culture depends for its survival

The Fragility of the Liberal Peace Export to South Sudan: Formal Education Access as a Basis of a Liberal Peace Project

This study examines the disjuncture between the policy transposition of the Liberal Peace Project (LPP) in South Sudan from the country's local context. It underlines how deep rooted historical exclusion from social welfare services reinforces political exclusion and exacerbates poor civic engagement among different ethnicities in the country causing a constant relapse to violence. The study combines a qualitative review of data from Afrobarometer, the National Democratic Institute, international NGOs, and South Sudan's government reports within depth interviews and participants' observation. The research finds that restricted access to formal education alongside the conservative and orthodox approaches to peacebuilding, which broadly focus on centralised urban political institutions and exclude diverse local needs and preferences, limit citizenship participation to elections and preclude an equitable social order in South Sudan, establishing a continuum of fragile authoritarian peace, institutional peace and constitutional peace. In an emancipatory approach, the study proposes a framework that prioritizes an extended access to primary and post-primary vocational education as a more credible establishment for sustainable civil peace in the country. The LPP by the international community needs to be tailored to enhance the political will of the South Sudan government to extend free primary education access, incentivize primary education with school feeding programmes and to invigorate vocational training curricula. These will yield civil peace dividends, which avert South Sudan's structural source of relapse into violence with sustainable disincentives. Apart from women's empowerment through education and in all spheres of life, the government needs to ensure sustainability by guaranteeing a sustainable future for the present and for returning refugees by reducing the effects of climate change so as to cope with the increasing pressure on natural resources

Fortress conservation, wildlife legislation and the Baka Pygmies of southeast Cameroon

The indigenous Baka Pygmies of southeast Cameroon depend mainly on environmental incomes for their livelihoods, usually hunting and gathering and the sustainable use of their ecological systems. They are at the verge of profound political, socioeconomic, and environmental transformations orchestrated by modern state laws regulating hunting and international development actors and agencies whose development vision expressed through conservation often underlie a contradiction with their way of life. This ethnographic study aims to document the dynamics of the institution of the great hunting expedition among the Baka. An interplay between the overexploitation of forestry resources, the creation of protected areas (fortress conservation), the full protection of certain classes of large mammals, the use of specific tools forbidden by existing forestry legislation and the ruthless behaviour of ‘eco-guards’ have led to changes in the organization of the great hunting expedition. To better address the socio-cultural aspects of biodiversity conservation and consequently strengthen the legislation regulating the wildlife sector in the country, conservation stakeholders must be conscious of the multiple entanglements between human and other life forms and the ecology of hunting. This suggests the need for a rights-based approach to conservation that recognizes the entanglement of ‘multispecies assemblages’ and respects indigenous land rights

The 'gendered field' of Kaolinite clay production : performance characteristics among the Balengou

This article examines the 'gendered field' of kaolinite clay production and its integration into the local socio-cultural universe of the Balengou of the Western region of Cameroon. Kaolinite clay is produced and ingested mainly by women, especially during pregnancy so as to ensure that their children are born 'clean'. Used as a herbal additive, the clay is also believed to be imbued with sacred qualities and has a symbolic role in various communal rituals. Although geophagy—the practice of eating earth—is associated with harmful health effects, the various affordances offered by kaolinite clay as a valuable object of material culture constitute a specific entanglement of nature and culture. This study makes a modest contribution to the literature on the 'politics of value' and on the relationality of human/non-human interactions.Harmful traditional practice

New forms of land enclosures : multinationals and state production of territory in Cameroon

The 2008 financial crises led to a scramble for land and other naturalresources reminiscent of colonialism by foreign governments and multinational corporations to feed their populations and pre-empt the eventuality of another food crises through large-scale agricultural investment. This paper discusses the creation of capitalist frontiers in the colonial agricultural enclaves of Cameroon’s Littoral region where three multinational plantation companies hold sway. It demonstrates how the coming into the country of foreign investors has transformed the meaning of land and led to contesting legal orders between customary and statutory land tenure, the transformation of man-nature relationship and the dispossession of local communities due to the developmentalist state’s production of territory. In the present neoliberal context, the state is increasingly controlling people and their relations to natural resources including land through the production of territory that is subsequently handed over to foreign investors. The paper adopts the view that the use of the expression ‘new enclosures’ is a misnomer because these developments are taking place at the very sites of the colonial frontier in Cameroon’s Littoral region. It calls attention to the need for land governance reforms so as to restitute local land rights and for the need to respect internationally recognized environmental standards by multinational corporations

The governance of nature as development and the erasure of the Pygmies of Cameroon

The Pygmies are among the remaining ‘savages’ in West and Central Africa. This paper demonstrates how the governance of nature through sedentarization, the creation of national parks as a mechanism of forestry conservation and the failure to endorse standard environmental safeguards in the creation of the Tchad-Cameroon pipeline project have led to the devastation of the livelihood of the indigenous pygmies. Simultaneously, by categorizing the Pygmies as a ‘primitive other’ despite the very dynamism of the concept of culture, the state of Cameroon has excluded them from the benefits of postmodernist development. I demonstrate that projects aimed at modernizing them, and achieving sustainability have instead accentuated their exclusion because of their presumed cultural isolation, led to their deep entrenchment in poverty and resulted in complete erasure. The failure of these projects is due to the clash between global and local perspectives and interests over the Western protectionism and nature aesthetics that underpin conservation and development schemes, and the government’s failure to ensure that developers fulfill their obligations to affected communities, as well as the non-recognition of the multiplex relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers that is based on cultural, historical and political ecology. Against this backdrop, development has thus, become a process of erasure in which the livelihood of the Pygmies has been balkanized and their cultural existence and identity, negated

The social context of widowhood rites and women’s human rights in Cameroon

Since the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–1985) gender-based violence (GBV) has increasingly received global attention and eventuated in the earmarking of June 23rd, 2011 as the first-ever International Widow’s Day. This case study examines the social logic of superstitious beliefs and associated fears sustaining the dehumanizing practice of widowhood rites and practices (WRP) with its negative consequences on women’s well-being among the Balengou of Western Cameroon. It argues that WRP should be understood through the double process of disavowal and projection, “false consciousness” and as a “patriarchal bargain”. It argues for the strengthening of women’s rights through gender-neutral marriage, succession and inheritance legislation based on notions of equality and social justice between the sexes, the harmonization and humanization of WRP, and an intersectionalist approach to GBV and development