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2013 25: 269 originally published online 29 July 2013Cultural DynamicsRogers Tabe E Orock

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Manyu youths, belonging and the antinomies of patrimonial elite politics in contemporary Cameroon

Rogers Tabe E OrockAarhus University, Denmark

AbstractThis article explores the social and political connections between youths and political elites from Manyu Division in South-Western Cameroon. Unlike several recent studies on youths in Africa, it focuses on educated youths from Manyu, exploring their strategies to secure greater political inclusion and better chances for upward social mobility. With a critical attention to their discourses and practices, the article examines the disjuncture between the promise of Cameroon’s patrimonial state as an inclusive structure of political action and the sense of exclusion, anxiety, and uncertainty felt by many actors. It argues that this tension generates relations of mutuality and interdependence between elite and nonelite actors. Yet, the article finds that while the logics of political intimacy between Manyu students and their political elites in Cameroon are mediated by kinship, ethnicity, and patronage, these do not always guarantee inclusion and success in social mobility for the youthful actors. For these youths, they felt their exclusion to be more a result of the obstructive character of middle-aged elites who were reticent to acknowledge the values of kinship, ethnicity, and patronage as valid basis for granting opportunities to their younger kinsmen.

Keywordsbelonging, Cameroon, Manyu Division, mutuality, political elites, youths

IntroductionThis regime has killed us! This is our time! In Morocco, the King is my age-mate, why can’t I be the President of Cameroon. Cameroonians are docile, Southwesterners are docile. We should get up; we should revolt, stand on our feet and dictate the pace of our fatherland. If we don’t do it now, we will never do it. After 50 years of independence and reunification, nothing good has been realized in the Southwest Region; no good road networks, the future of the people is bleak.

Corresponding author:Rogers Tabe E Orock, Department of Culture and Society—Anthropology, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 5, Building 1463, 3rd floor, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Email: etnorteo@hum.au.dk;rogerstabe@yahoo.com

495211 CDY25310.1177/0921374013495211Cultural DynamicsOrock2013

Article

270 Cultural Dynamics 25(3)

I am not supposed to be where I am. I am a potential minister in this country. I teach students to be Tax Inspectors and Treasury Officers, the next day they are bribe takers here and there, feeding fat from a rotten system. (Richard Agbor, male, mid-40s, PhD in history and lecturer at the University of Buea)

Richard Agbor was speaking to the press only a few meters from where I stood, at the end of a very pompous event organized by elites of the South-West Region of Cameroon in January 2011 in Buea. He was clearly very bitter and wanted to make it abundantly clear. These elites came together to discuss strategies on how to lobby Cameroon’s Head of State, Paul Biya, who has been in power since November 1982. They aimed to per-suade him to declare Buea, the regional headquarter, or Kumba (another town in the South-West Region), as the city to host the commemorative ceremony for the anniver-sary of the reunification of French Cameroon and British Southern Cameroons 50 years ago, in January 1961. At the end, however, there was clearly a difference of opinion on how to go about it between the “old guard” of South-West politicians, such as the 90-year-old Chief Victor Mukete of Kumba, and others, such as Richard Agbor, who considered themselves as youthful elites.

The old and established elites, mainly barons of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) party, were generally “satisfied” with the state of affairs in the country. They were especially pleased with what they saw as Biya’s considerate attention to the South-West Region, especially because they held prestigious political offices or lucrative sinecures in the regime. Hence, they recommended that all partici-pants should endorse a letter of support thanking Biya for his good leadership of Cameroon. Much younger politicians such as Richard Agbor, led by the Mayor of Buea, Charles Mbella Moki, strongly disagreed. They favored a more critical approach or at least the non-issuance of celebratory remarks on Cameroon’s Head of State as a strategy that would better convey their sense of neglect and desire for greater inclusion into Cameroon’s ruling elites to enable them better enjoy the spoils of political power. In the end, the “older guard” prevailed, much to the bitterness of the members of the younger and so-called “progressive wing” of this group of elites. Their leader, Mayor Mbella Moki, who is himself in his mid-50s simply asked, “When will these old people think of leaving the stage for us to take over?”

This article examines the social spaces and modes of interaction between political elites and nonelites among the Manyu of South-Western Cameroon. It explores the cul-tural dynamics that mediate these interactions in Cameroon, a highly asymmetrical soci-opolitical context that has been largely represented in much of the recent scholarship as a patrimonial one (see Bayart, 1979, 1993; Bratton and Van de Walle, 1997; Hansen, 2003; Mbembe, 1992, 2001; Mbuagbo, 2002; Mbuagbo and Akoko, 2004; Médard, 1978, 1990; Nyamnjoh, 1999; Pigeaud, 2011; Van de Walle, 1994).

The country’s Head of State, Paul Biya (and before him Ahmadou Ahidjo), serves as its undisputed political leader and strong man, upon whom all other actors depend for favors, sinecures, and opportunities. Although several social and economic milieus such as churches and various social clubs also offer opportunities for social advancement to individuals and these are also often mediated by the logics of intimate connections between the actors, the predominant social site of attention for social mobility in

Orock 271

Cameroon is the state. The ruling CPDM party and the several influential politicians within it serve as channels to access these state-centered opportunities in the form of jobs, public contracts, and so on. Such patrimonial relations between state and society are the predominant analytical prism through which most actors imagine and seek to construct their social lives.

This explains the desire of South-West elites to effectively lobby President Biya for a town in their region to benefit from the opportunity to host a state celebration. Conversely, at the bottom of this sociopolitical pyramid marked by generalized “clientelism and dependency” as Bayart (1979) puts it, “women and youths” are understood as less pow-erful and are described as “cadet sociaux” or social juniors (pp. 33, 233–281). As a style of domination, however, patrimonial relations between elites and nonelites or even among elites on different scales of power and political influence are experienced and spoken of in different, often contradictory ways. For instance, Richard Agbor’s words above convey an ambiguity that simultaneously expresses his desire for greater inclusion in a system he castigates as socially “rotten.”

Nevertheless, irrespective of their various positions, most political actors (powerful political elites or less powerful nonelites) in Cameroon’s asymmetrical sociopolitical order are characterized by a high degree of anxiety and a deep sense of uncertainty regarding their present and futures. However, I suggest that since at least the mid-1990s, the cultural politics of belonging enfolded into Cameroon’s current democratization pro-ject has accentuated these anxieties and uncertainties among the political elites even as the economic hardships have increased uncertainties for the nonelites (cf. Mbuagbo, 2002; Mbuagbo and Akoko, 2004; Nyamnjoh, 1999). This politics emphasized by President Biya encourages elites to build ethnic and or regional bases of political support as proof of their legitimacy.

Although relations between elites and nonelites are usually fraught with tensions and struggles in terms of expectations and outcomes, I argue that both historically and today, these elements of anxiety and uncertainty constitute the basis for the current politics of mutuality and dependency between elites and nonelites in Cameroon. These complex relations of complicity in patrimonial domination are described by Achille Mbembe (2001: 102–103) as a politics of “conviviality,” precisely because they defy easy classification of nonelite subjectivities as either oppositional or passive (see also Bayart, 1979). These two elements have heightened the political pressures for both elites and nonelites to pursue such relations of mutuality and dependency even more aggressively. They do so within newer and more intimate political spaces as well as through ever more personalizing strategies of kinship, ethno-regionalism, and patron-clientelism. These tend to reinforce the logics of Cameroon’s patrimonial state (cf. Fonchingong, 2005; Mbuagbo, 2002; Mbuagbo and Akoko, 2004; Ngeve and Orock, 2012; Nyamnjoh, 1999).

I claim further that the moral tensions and much of the actual sense of exclusion expe-rienced by the majority of political actors in Cameroon arise from the assumption held by many that because patrimonialism is premised on logics and practices of intimacy between various actors, it necessarily resonates with the ethos of inclusion. Many in Cameroon like the Manyu youths examined here are therefore highly disenchanted when some elites do not seem to embrace this presumed ethos of inclusion. This leads them to

272 Cultural Dynamics 25(3)

talk about the patrimonial politics of such elites in quite bitter terms, even as they seek greater inclusion into the patrimonial structure itself.

I draw on my specific ethnographic observations on educated Manyu youths who are part of this broader youthful category underwritten as “social juniors.”1 This category of youth is appealing for the purposes of analyzing relations between elites and nonelites. As relatively highly educated youths, they are candidates for elite status and harbor the aspirations of upward social mobility much more than less-educated youths. But like the uneducated youths, they too are relatively marginalized and feel bitter about such exclu-sions. To explore their political experiences of this patrimonial elite domination, I pay attention to their discourses and practices as a way of offering penetrating insights into the underbelly of Cameroon’s patrimonial politics and its contradictions.

The anthropology of youths and patrimonial postcolonial orders in Africa

The fact that both middle-aged elites such as Richard Agbor and Mbella Moki as well as much younger Manyu students can invoke youth as a sociopolitical category to convey their differential expectations and experiences of Cameroon’s patrimonial state is inter-esting and challenging. It illustrates precisely the anthropological position that the notion of “youth” is a floating social category that Durham (2004) underscores as a “social shifter.” Its invocations by many people who are often of markedly different age groups in any society points to their differing and often contrasting positionalities that are expe-rienced from subjectively different standpoints in a changing field of power (Durham, 2004; Vigh, 2006a, 2006b). Common to all invocations of the notion, however, is the recurrent sense of marginality and exclusion by much older political agents as expressed in the everyday discourses of young persons, in a kind of intergeneration moral and material struggle (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999, 2005). As Werbner (1996) rightly observes, in the African or any other postcolonial context characterized by extreme hybridity, identities such as youth are not only “multiple,” they are also constructed through a “plurality of contested arenas” (p. 1).

As an anthropological category of sociocultural analysis, youth is therefore approached as a heterogeneous, contested, socially, and historically charged concept that varies from one sociocultural context to the other as well as marked by changing meanings attached to it within the same sociocultural space and time (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2005: 23; O’Brien, 1996: 57). Thus, Bucholtz (2002: 532) argues that “youth foregrounds age not as trajectory, but as an identity,” which like any other social category is “agentive, flex-ible, and ever-changing.” Whether used across different societies and times or in the same society and time, youth as a concept “indexes shifting relationships of power and authority, responsibility and capability, agency and autonomy, and the moral configura-tions of society” (Durham, 2004). Their anthropological challenge is to offer context-specific experiences of this relationship to structures and processes of power as experienced by persons who see themselves as “young.”

In African postcolonial contexts, such as Cameroon where youths and elites are situated in a shared patrimonial symbolic and material order, the recent anthropological literature on African youths is interesting and innovative. But much of it tends to emerge largely out

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of studies of conflict and post-conflict situations in which youth occupy a prominent place as agents and or victims of political action (Abbink and Van Kessel, 2005; Christiansen et al., 2006; Finnström, 2008; Hoffmann, 2011; Honwana and De Boeck, 2000, 2005; Le Meur, 2008; Peters, 2011; Simone, 2004; Utas, 2005, 2012; Vigh, 2006a, 2006b; for some more historical perspectives, see also Burgess, 2004; Burgess and Burton, 2010; Diouf, 2003; Mbembe, 1985). In general, most of these studies focus on socially excluded youths who have hardly received any secondary or university education mainly because of extended periods of protracted violent conflicts (see Christiansen et al., 2006; Finnström, 2008; Le Meur, 2008; Peters, 2011; Utas, 2005, 2012; Vigh, 2006a, 2006b).

Although all youths are generally seen to be less powerful, these post-conflict anthro-pological studies focus on how these less-educated youths negotiate their life-chances for survival within situations of conflict and or intense patrimonial “gerontocratic gov-ernance.” Most of this literature, correctly, represents these youths as an angry and frus-trated social category, while the old elites are represented as holding a monopoly over the resources and opportunities for better living conditions. This anthropological literature dealing with youth–elite engagements in situations of conflict and/or intense patrimonial governance suggests that such youths are often confronted with two options.

First, they can channel their frustrations through angry confrontations with the politi-cal order (Finnström, 2008; Honwana and De Boeck, 2000, 2005; Le Meur, 2008; Peters, 2011; Utas, 2005). Second, and building largely on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, some of this work conceives of the postcolonial social fabric as a social field permeated by patron–client relations between “big men” and “small boys” (notably, see Vigh, 2006a, 2006b). Here, these young persons (mostly men) could also choose to cooperate with the big men, quietly and gradually working their ways through the hierarchical order by negoti-ating their entry into these networks of power and influence. In this second option, the strategic practices adopted by these young people are seen as social navigation(al) ones (see particularly Christiansen et al., 2006; Evans and Furlong, 1997; Hoffmann, 2011; Lauterbach, 2010; Le Meur, 2008; Utas, 2005, 2012; Vigh, 2006a, 2006b; Whyte et al., 2008). They can do so by continually attaching and detaching themselves to and from the “big men” with the widest and most profitable “social networks” of protection, “influ-ence and wealth” (Hofmann, 2011: 18, 135).

While this recent anthropological discussion is correct in assuming a social position of marginality for youths in Africa as almost invariably similar, it has not often consid-ered how this experience of marginality could be experienced differently by different types of youths. In this study on Cameroon, which is also a highly patrimonial context, but devoid of violent conflict, I build on these anthropological discussions highlighted above. Like Vigh (2006a, 2006b), I see the patrimonial political and social order as a social field of power. Unlike Vigh, however, whose youthful subjects in Guinea Bissau are less formally educated due to the years of protracted violent conflict, I focus on the navigational tactics of highly educated Manyu youths (potential elites) toward their established political elites than those of their lesser educated counterparts. Moreover, unlike Vigh (2006a, 2006b) and others, cited above, who seem to see youths as almost always pitched against their big men mainly because they focus on extremely deprived and angry youths, my focus on highly educated youths (and thus potential elites them-selves) in Cameroon reveals a much more ambiguous picture.

274 Cultural Dynamics 25(3)

The politics of educated youth–elite relations in Cameroon: different modes of engagements

Like several other African states where youthful identities were imagined with tremen-dous “cultural prestige” (Diouf, 2003), the years between 1950s and early 1980s could be regarded as a “golden age” for the earlier generation of Cameroon’s educated youth. The educational and professional opportunities available to them enabled most to even-tually become part of the country’s ruling elites right as they emerged out of the educa-tional classrooms (cf. Bassey, 2009; Devisch, 1998: 229; Furlong, 2000; Toulabor, 1992: 131).

This was so not only because of the historical circumstance that they were Cameroon’s first crop of indigenous educated elites who were replacing the departing European colo-nial administrative elite class (Eboko, 1999) but also because the country’s economic situation was supportive of such opportunities. In those years, formal educational achievement, especially the possession of higher education qualifications, was a guaran-teed ticket into the ever-expanding class of state bureaucratic elites, especially because of the following: (1) The colonial administrations had for long controlled the number of young black men and women with access to education of any sort in their colonies let alone higher education (see Pigeaud, 2011: 12) and (2) the boisterous years of sustained economic growth that characterized that era ensured ever-widening opportunities (Jua, 2003).

It could therefore be argued that the period between 1950s and 1980s was a “boom” in terms of elite formation and access to elite circles (Bayart, 1979, 1993; Médard, 1978). From the mid-1980s, however, these opportunity-giving “old predictabilities” (Furlong, 2000: 133) or “vital conjunctures” (Johnson-Hanks, 2006: 3) have given way to newer conditions. Mass education from primary to university levels has become the norm. In addition, the country has barely recovered half of the grounds it lost to the difficult eco-nomic crisis of the 1980s and 1990s (see Konings, 1996; Jua, 1991; Orock and Mbuagbo, 2012). These changes have led to mass unemployment at a rate between 15% and 30% in Cameroon over these years, revealing the constraints on the government’s capacity to provide jobs to young graduates.

Educated youth in Cameroon today have thus become a “conjunctured” social cate-gory (see Fokwang, 2009; Johnson-Hanks, 2006; Mbembe, 1985; for a similar account of youth in Togo under Eyadema, cf. Toulabor, 1992), although this experience is more so for some than others. These youths endure both the consequences of protracted peri-ods of liminality as well as the symbolic and concrete exclusions that accompany these. They tend to depend on the older generation even after they have gone well past the 0–35-years age bracket defined by the Cameroon National Youth Council (CNJC) as the nominal bracket for being a youth (Fokwang, 2007a, 2007b; Fuh, 2012; for similar accounts in Cameroon, see also Courade, 2000; Johnson-Hanks, 2006; Jua, 2003; Konings, 2005; Mbembe, 1985; for similar accounts elsewhere in Africa, see, among others, Abbink and Van Kessel, 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2005; De Boeck and Honwana, 2000, 2005; Durham, 2004; O’Brien, 1996; Seekings, 1996).

These “conjunctured” educated youths now appear to live in a constant mode of deferred or anticipated achievement of deeply, and often secretly, nursed professional

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and/or political ambitions. This mode of deferral in youthful ambitions has been cap-tured as living in the “subjunctive” mood (Gibbons and Stiles, 2004: 56; cf. Whyte, 2002). It is one that seems to constitute “a politics of despair” (Abbink and Van Kessel, 2005; cf. Toulabor, 1992). These difficulties have been compounded by the insufficient or nonrenewal of the ruling elites. As Richard Agbor and Mayor Mbella Moki impa-tiently express their exasperation with waiting to take over in the introduction above, the old guard of elites persists in remaining in their positions of power, even in disre-gard of the senility that often impairs their abilities to govern (Eboko, 1999; Pigeaud, 2011: 6).

The response of the youths has not always been the same. In the earlier years of Cameroon’s democratization, much like various other marginalized social categories such as women or unskilled workers, most Cameroonian youths responded to these dif-ficulties and uncertainties more angrily toward the patrimonial regime of Biya. They did so through protests and violent confrontations with the state authorities and security forces, especially during the riotous years of political liberalization in the early 1990s (see Argenti, 2007; Konings, 2002; Mbuh, 1993; Monga, 1998). Today, occasionally, youths in Cameroon still resort to deadly confrontations with the political order, such as during the violent riots of February 2008, over the rising cost of living and elite manipu-lations of the constitution (Orock and Mbuagbo, 2012; Pigeaud, 2011: 7, see also Fokwang, 2009; Konings, 2002, 2009).

Such protests, obviously well-founded, create the sort of moral panics that have become associated with discourses on youth by the old guard of political elites in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa and beyond (cf. Abbink and Van Kessel, 2005; Diouf, 2003: 4). Unsurprisingly, such protests have consistently attracted violent crack downs by Biya’s paramilitary forces as, for example, during the February 2008 riots that saw the death of more than a hundred youths (see Orock and Mbuagbo, 2012). This has contrib-uted to dissuade youthful mobilizations against the political order.

To avoid such deadly encounters with the paramilitary units, most educated youths in Cameroon today tend to search for less confrontational modes of action to achieve social mobility. Many adopt fraudulent livelihoods through international Internet and domestic scamming schemes, and they are known as “feymen” or “419ers” like the infamous Nigerians known for exporting the practice to other African countries (see Jua, 2003: 14; Ndjio, 2008; cf. Apter, 1999). Others choose the path of international migration where they end up as economic migrants irrespective of their initial reason for traveling abroad (Jua, 2003; Pelican et al., 2008; Pelican and Tatah, 2009).

Among educated youths left back in Cameroon, there are those who do not want to choose the path of crime or cannot afford to leave Cameroon. Some among them increas-ingly choose to align their political interests with those of elites from their various ethnic or regional constituencies. They adopt cooperative strategies to overtly express their political support for those elites. These are the kinds of youths I discuss in this article through the example of educated Manyu youths. In a gradual turn, some of these edu-cated youths now increasingly hold the belief that this patrimonial postcolonial state that favors personalized relations and channels of distribution of state resources can also be productively engaged in ways that enhance their chances for inclusion and upward social mobility.

276 Cultural Dynamics 25(3)

As mentioned earlier, because Biya’s democratization project hinges, largely, on a politics of belonging, political elites are now expected by the regime to be actively involved in their various communities. The goal is to have them canvass for and obtain political support and electoral successes from their various villages and ethno-regional communities not only for the ruling CPDM of President Biya but also as proof of their own popularity and legitimacy in their own local communities (Geschiere, 2009: 39; cf. Mbuagbo and Akoko, 2004; Nyamnjoh, 1999). This is in a move that reverses the earlier ideological position which frowned upon elites indulging on ethnic politics during the one-party state under its First President, Ahmadou Ahidjo (1960–1982), and even for a few years under Biya himself (1982–1990).

The consequence, however, is that it heightens the political competition among elites from the same ethnic or regional areas more than pitching them against elites from other regions (Nyamnjoh, 1999). To succeed, many elites make promises to provide various favors to members of their local communities in the hope of getting them to write open letters or “motions of support” to President Biya whenever these elites desire them to demonstrate such support for the Head of State (see Mbuagbo and Akoko, 2004). This renders the positions of these elites extremely insecure; the slightest indication of unpop-ularity at the local base or shaky political connections at the central (national) level could mean their ejection from positions of political and financial power. Like many young Cameroonians today, Manyu youths hold a keen appreciation of the role of kinship and ethnicity in ensuring opportunities for social mobility for an earlier generation of youths, who are now in their middle ages, by political elites of an even older generation.

Ambivalent desires: Manyu youths and the discourse of patrimonialism

Discussing the case of Annang youths in South-Western Nigeria and their relationship to their elites, David Pratten (2006: 720) writes that “they challenge clientelism and yet demand cooption” (cf. Gore and Pratten, 2003). Such is the ambivalence that also char-acterizes the experience of formally educated youths of Manyu Division that I observed during my fieldwork on Manyu political elites and the nature of their political relations with their communities. I met Oben2 in March 2011 when I first went to the home of the Personal Assistant (PA) to a Minister and Deputy Secretary-General at the Presidency of Cameroon (PRC) in the Cité Verte neighborhood in Yaoundé for an interview with her. He is her son, a young man of about 25 years of age. The minister, a Manyu political elite from Ndekwai village, had recruited the PA, who was another Manyu woman in her late 40s from Ossing village and a government secondary-school teacher living in the capital city. She told me that she was the minister’s niece from maternal relations, although it was not exactly clear to me how considering that such classificatory kinship terminolo-gies were not always employed in their strictest designations in Africa. Oben, her son, had obtained a BA degree in Performing Arts from the University of Yaoundé I and was pursuing postgraduate studies in the same discipline and at the same university when I met him. Given the implied relation of kinship between his mother and the minister, it naturally meant that he too was a relation of the powerful minister, although far more removed than his own mother.

Orock 277

But I had met Taku3 a few days earlier, when I attended my first preparatory meeting to the fund-raising events organized by Manyu elites at the same minister’s residence in Yaoundé. Since January 2011, though, I had seen him in the regular company of people who were in the minister’s entourage during the various fund-raising events organized by the Manyu elite and chaired by that powerful minister. I had never really gotten to talking with him. Taku was a young man in his early 30s with a BA degree in History, also from the University of Yaoundé I and served as the PA’s driver at the time. Always calm and almost invisible once he had dropped off the people at those events and parked the white Toyota Land Cruiser car regis-tered to the PRC, he would often sit in it waiting for those very long and tedious fund-raisings to end before coming out of it to help the PA load any items into the car. As driver to his mother, Oben and Taku seemed to have become quite fond of each other.

Since knowing both of them, whenever I was on a field trip with the ministerial entou-rage and had spare time, we occasionally talked about the nature of my work, in which country I lived and worked while in Europe, and how I got there, as well as why I was so interested in researching these political elites. I found that Taku was actually from my village (Eyanchang) in Manyu Division, about some 10 kilometers in the outskirts of Mamfe town, the divisional headquarters. As we met at many of the political rallies or other sociocultural events and became more acquainted with each other, sometimes traveling together, both Oben and Taku became more open to discussing their true impressions about many of these political elites from the division. They often com-plained about the way most Manyu elites behaved in the patrimonial system of govern-ance in Cameroon these days. On 24 April 2011, I followed the PA to her village, Ossing, where they had the “Ossing Cultural Week.” Shortly before the activities began, I was joined by Oben and Taku outside the village town-hall where registration for the so-called “development assessment workshop” was going on. Sitting in an isolated corner outside the hall, we talked generally about Manyu political elites.

Oben complained bitterly about how most of these “younger” elites today were utterly “insensitive to the plight of Manyu youth if they are not their ‘direct’ kin relations,” even when they previously benefited from the patronage of the “older” and much established political elites on account of a wider understanding of belonging (to Manyu Division). For instance, he recounted this story:

A young political elite who is a director of a public corporation and very prominent within the Minister’s [Agbor Tabi] circle of close advisers as part of the CPDM campaign team for the Manyu Division is known to be so greedy and insensitive to the plight of other younger Manyu children. He not only claims to be too strict to help us get jobs, but every evening his young driver who is also from a village here in Manyu Division has to suffer the fate of having the government vehicle of the director verified by this elite himself. If anything is amiss with the car, such as a scratch on the car paint, the driver is obliged to pay for the cost of getting it fixed. I mean, can you believe this? This is somebody who the Minister also helped to get that top job not too long ago. Now he would not help any younger person who is not his close family relation get a job. This is why I say that this man (the Minister) is one of the very few Manyu political elite who helps other young educated Manyu children get jobs. And it is not because he recruited my mother as his PA; it is something very many other families in this division are saying. Among other current politicians with high political influence as well as past ministers few have been as helpful as he has been.

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To emphasize his point on how “younger” political elites are selfish, Oben went on to recount another personal story detailing how he failed to travel to Britain for postgradu-ate studies because another young politician from Manyu, who was serving as Minister for the Environment and Forestry at the time, refused to help provide him with a bank statement to enable him obtain a study visa for Britain. This led him to the conclusion that these younger elites from Manyu are selfish and reluctant to help young educated Manyu children today “because they do not want them to become competition for them afterwards and this is very much unlike in the past when the older elite was generally more helpful” (Fieldnotes, 24 April 2011, Ossing village).

As Oben talked, Taku often supported the facts by either nodding his head positively or saying “it is true.” Like Oben, he harked back to the selfishness and unwillingness of the younger generation of Manyu elites in their 40s and 50s to help the younger, unem-ployed Manyu students, sometimes even when they are their own distant family rela-tions. He also recounted a revealing personal story. He said that although he is a distant relation of the current director of wildlife at the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, which is a very important position, for long after graduating with his BA in History, he tried unsuccessfully to get this director to help him get a job, if not directly at the ministry where this elite works, at least somewhere else.

As I went back for a brief spell in the field in December 2011, I found that Oben had been offered a prestigious internship at the Central Bank for Central African States, pop-ularly known by its French acronym as BEAC, which he had just completed but failed to secure a position. Taku had gravitated from simply being the PA’s driver to an adminis-trative assistant at the PRC in his own right. In both cases, it seemed clear that their proximity to the minister’s (Agbor Tabi) “network” of relations had been instrumental to these successes. This seems to be a very distinct delimitation of the boundaries within which the patrimonial politics of belonging might be most efficacious: a combination of belonging (family or ethnic affiliations to a minister or director and a very active pres-ence within or around the latter’s own network of activities)

From the foregoing, however, there seems to be ambivalence at two levels. First, there is ambiguity on the role assigned to belonging in the mediation of changing rela-tions between elites and nonelites. Oben and Taku seem to hold that in the past distant family relations, and ethnic belonging seemed to have been more commonly acknowl-edged by political elites. As such, they think that belonging was more compelling as a ground for enabling much older Manyu political elites to help the preceding genera-tions of Manyu youths now in their middle ages into “familial” networks (families, villages, ethnic groups, regions, and friendship) that facilitated their access to state jobs and elite positions. They are bitter that it now seems less compelling and effective with the younger generations of elites who are reluctant to help them into jobs. Furthermore, they think that this moral economy of belonging4 still works much better with the much older generation of political elites in their 60s and beyond, represented by the powerful Manyu politician who currently serves as Minister and Deputy Secretary-General at the PRC.

But a further ambivalence lies in the fact that whereas these Manyu youths clearly condemn the current practices of their “younger elites” in not helping them on grounds of belonging, they do not seem to question Cameroon’s patrimonial state order itself. On

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the contrary, they condemn the much younger (but still relatively older) elites for trying to avoid making their influences available to their younger kinsmen. In other words, whereas the recent anthropological literature surveyed earlier has had the tendency to characterize the oldest big men as the main obstacles to the social, economic, and politi-cal emancipation of youths, what Oben and Taku seem to indicate is rather the opposite, pointing to younger big men as the major obstacles to complain about.

Thus, these educated Manyu youths exhibit much of the ambiguity that seems to char-acterize political subjectivity in Cameroon’s current context. Like Richard Agbor dis-cussed in the introduction and who also happens to be a native of Manyu Division in South-Western Cameroon, most of the discourses of these much younger Manyu youths reveal their bitterness at being an excluded social category. Unlike Richard Agbor, how-ever, their bitterness is pointedly directed at the middle-aged and relatively less powerful elites within the age bracket between mid-40s and mid-50s, such as Mayor Mbella Moki and Richard Agbor, who tend to also portray themselves as part of the youthful category, rather than at the much older political elites such as the likes of Chief Mukete mentioned above. They are thus less critical of the structure of the moral economy of patrimonial politics in Cameroon as they are of the middle-aged “youthful” elites in their 40s and 50s. They criticize the latter for failing to uphold the culturally rooted expectations that the logics of belonging—kinship and ethnicity—can be bet upon in the race toward upward social mobility.

Why are middle-aged elites less likely to help? I suspect that it is mainly because most of these “young elites” realize that they are still quite marginal to the dominant centers of patrimonial power and their influence quite fragile. As such, most desire first to be seen by the establishment with a semblance of credibility in terms of not seeking to over-exert or overreach their powers. Once they become more deeply entrenched in the patri-monial power structure and are more confident of their positions and influence in it, they often succumb to the social pressures for them to recognize belonging. The case of the gradual transformation of the “wicked young” elite discussed by Oben above is instruc-tive of this.

As I returned to Cameroon for fieldwork in between September 2012 and January 2013, I was told by another young Manyu student at Cameroon’s School of International Relations that this “young” director of a public corporation had now been fully co-opted into the Central Committee of the ruling CPDM party. He also told me that as many young people and their parents in his native village grew alienated with him, they asked the village council to convene a meeting back home in the village at which he was summoned. The village council just told him in plain language to stop being selfish and to start helping his kinsmen. As a result, it is now widely rumored by many that he is “gradually changing” and helping his fellow villagers into state jobs and opportunities.

The ambivalent dynamics of conflict and cooperation that characterize the relation-ship between Manyu elites and educated Manyu youths, especially expressed in the forms of complaints and support, have deeper historical connections with the implanta-tion of the colonial state and the entrenchment of the postcolonial state in Cameroon (see Argenti, 2007: 1159–1188). But this is certainly not unique to Cameroon. In Namibia, for example, Mattia Fumanti (2007: 156) found exactly the same kind of complaints and

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social expectations by educated youth about established elites as “they feel blocked in their careers and excluded from the public sphere by SWAPO’s5 party elite.” Beyond Africa, Craig Jeffrey (2010) offers a similar picture of unemployed and frustrated edu-cated youth in India. They adopt protest as a mode of politics against what they see as elite corruption responsible for their predicament (see also Jeffrey, 2008; for similar accounts from Nepal, cf. Snellinger, 2009). I will now turn my attention to the concrete practices of engagement adopted by educated Manyu youths, exploring their efforts at self-insertion in the patrimonial networks held by Manyu political elites through their invocations of idioms of belonging, namely, kinship and ethnicity.

Manyu youths and the praxis of patrimonial politics

In December 2011, I visited Honorable Rose Abunaw Makia at her riverside residence in Mamfe town for an interview. She is the CPDM Member of Parliament for the Mamfe Central and Upper Bayang subdivisions in the Manyu Division (1992–2012) and served as Second Vice President of Cameroon’s National Assembly between 2002 and 2009. As she led me into an inner sitting room designed for special guests for the purposes of “order and protocol” (at least that is what the notice prohibiting unpermitted entry into “this sec-tion of the house” said), I noticed that there were about seven or eight young people aged between 16 and 18 years seated in the ordinary and “permissible” living room. A few of them were seated with much older people who seemed like their parents.

Once seated for the interview in the ante-sitting area, I asked who these people were. She replied that they were all her constituents, both young and old, who want some form of assistance or the other, ranging from requests for help with paying school fees for their children to requests for assistance with helping someone paying hospital bills, or even obtaining a mobile phone. She disclosed that sometimes such requests from young peo-ple also involve her helping them get a job either by recommending them to friends or actually employing them in some of her own multiple small businesses. She also dis-closed that sometimes she gets written requests for assistance from various associations of people, both young and old, as well as written expressions supporting her politically, showing me one such written requests.

Just as we were about to begin the interview, one of the women who had been sitting in the designated “outer” section of the living room and who looked to be in her early 50s appeared at the doorway of the restricted section. My host looked at her and asked whether the other woman wanted to leave. She smiled and nodded positively. Madam Abunaw drew out a small bag and showed it to the woman, asking her to come into the room. “Did you think I had forgotten,” she asked the woman? By this time, the woman looked quite pleased and said she just wanted to remind Madam Abunaw about her promise to get her some things. Then, Madam Abunaw pulled out a box from the bag containing a new Nokia phone and the CPDM wrapper cloth for sewing a party uniform and asked the woman “these are what I promised you, right? I do not forget such things,” she concluded, handing over the items in the bag to the woman. The grateful woman took the bag and turned to me as if just seeing me for the first time and said jovially, “My son, this is our mother6 here. She takes very good care of us.”

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This theme of “motherhood” as a hallmark of Madam Abunaw’s political attributes seemed quite defining to the relationship that nonelites sought to establish with her. At the end of the interview, as we went out of the exclusive living room into the ordinary sitting area where these people had been sitting all along, I noticed a congratulatory letter offered to her in August 2002 by the National President of the Manyu All Students’ Union (MASU), following her election as First Vice President of Cameroon’s National Assembly. This had been framed and hung-up on a wall where it could hardly be missed as one entered or went out of this living room.

In the metaphor of kinship between mother and child, this congratulatory message conveyed the reciprocal relationship that, it claims, exists between Madam Rose Abunaw and Manyu youths. It described her as “a breastfeeding mother” to her Manyu youths, emphasizing her patronage to the youths in terms of financial and material support as “milk” for her suckling children. But the congratulatory message also conformed to the broader and fundamental contours of patron–client politics in Cameroon. President Paul Biya was recognized in it as the ultimate political patron to the political elites them-selves. Paying attention to the President through the local elite is a good way of shoring up Madam Abunaw’s political value for the President who sees such prizes as demon-strations of local ethnic or regional popularity for local elites. The message from MASU duly points out that although Madam Abunaw’s actions are salutary, it is President Biya who ultimately “deserves more credits” because of his wider policy on “the development of the youths.”

This message from the National President of MASU is part of a wider social practice in Cameroon’s political register. This practice consists of writing letters of support to political leaders such as the one older and established South-West political elite such as Chief Victor Mukete wanted all elites present at the Buea event to endorse, as mentioned in the introduction. Locally, they are referred to as “motions of support” and are tradi-tionally written to the Head of State, Paul Biya (cf. Mbuagbo, 2002; Mbuagbo and Akoko, 2004). Here, educated Manyu youths in MASU have modified it only slightly to express their support to Madam Abunaw. But the overall tenor remains unchanged. In praising Madam Abunaw, they are ultimately expressing gratitude to President Biya.

Yet, such forms of interaction with the elites by means of letters of support from young students could also constitute a good means of personal publicity for the presi-dents of youth organizations who sign off on them. MASU’s letter to Madam Abunaw is signed by Mr Tabe Ndip, as its president. In doing so, he could benefit even more person-ally, in the form of recruitment into Madam Abunaw’s narrow circle of trusted “advisers” or aides. This could eventually lead him to a lucrative position in the government or private sector, thanks to her “connections.”

More generally, however, the logic of public acknowledgment of or support to politi-cal elites is not at all peculiar to Manyu students. At the Manyu Youths National Conference in the town of Kumba in December 2010, an assimilated group of middle-aged men in their 40s and 50s who described themselves as “youths” employed a similar logic of belonging by invoking the metaphor of kingship instead of that of kinship to emphasize their support to a particular Manyu politician. Chief Tabe-Tando of Bachuo-Ntai village in the Mamfe Central Subdivision of Manyu was declared as “king of Manyu

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youths.” In reality, however, his chiefdom is only one small village among several other bigger and more prominent villages in Manyu Division.

Nevertheless, as a member of the Central Committee of the CPDM and wealthy Chief Executive Officer of Euroil Limited (an oil exploration company), most youths in Manyu Division understand that he commands sufficient political influence and financial resources to help them. With these, it is alleged that he has often enabled young men and women from Manyu to obtain jobs directly in his corporation and indirectly in the public and private corporations where his political networks extend. By metaphorically “crowning” Chief Tabe-Tando “king of Manyu youths,” most of these older, self-identified “youths” hoped to gain from his patronage (for those who had not yet done so) or to thank him while seeking opportunities to benefit even more (for those who had already been beneficiaries).

The metaphor of his kingship over Manyu youths is intended as one of belonging: it signals that those Manyu youths acknowledge themselves as a part of a common political community (Manyu) and also that this political community is headed by Chief Tabe-Tando, to whom they give their political allegiance. This, of course, is only a political strategy and in no way represents the true nature of the balance of power among the political leaders in Manyu Division who contest for its leadership. But it constitutes some sort of symbolic capital offered to Chief Tabe-Tando with which he can engage in this contest for political leadership with his peers. In return for this staged show of sup-port, Chief Tabe-Tando “pledged funding for development projects proposed by the youths” (Cameroon News, 2010: 5).

It can therefore be argued that Manyu students, much like other Manyu persons more generally, have become quite astute at inserting themselves within the political spaces that Cameroon’s patrimonial elite politics offers. This conclusion was strengthened fur-ther by my observations of the politics of the October 2011 presidential elections during which relations between Manyu political elites and Manyu students seemed to have been highly marked by displayed intimacy and dependency.

Manyu university students in the 2011 presidential campaigns

In the run-up to the October 2011 presidential elections which Biya won, some promi-nent Manyu political elites organized several popular or mass political fund-raising ral-lies across the country. These town-hall style meetings of Manyu diasporic communities in several towns and cities in Cameroon were led by three men in their 50s and 60s, all working at the PRC. Most prominent among them was Peter Agbor Tabi, who served and still serves as Minister and Deputy Secretary-General at the Presidency. The other two were Mr Victor Mengot Arrey-Nkongho and Professor George Etchu, Minister in Charge of Special Duties at the Presidency and Technical Adviser at the Presidency, respectively. Like Tabi, both still serve in those positions. But these three men relied heavily on the support of a coterie of other Manyu elites in their network who occupied important posi-tions with the state bureaucracy and public corporations.

Since they worked directly under the gaze of the Cameroonian Head of State, these three men were therefore under considerable pressure to appear to be galvanizing politi-cal support for him among their ethnic kinsmen and were anxious to be seen by the

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President to be doing just that. The pressure was accentuated because Justice Ayah Paul Abine, a Member of Parliament from Manyu Division, had recently resigned from the CPDM party. To make matters worse, Ayah was also running against President Biya on a new political platform during that presidential election. These pro-CPDM politicians were understandably anxious and sought to be seen mobilizing the Manyu people against Ayah, less they attract President Biya’s ire. By organizing these town-hall events to attract Manyu people in various urban centers in Cameroon, they hoped to directly boost the voter registration in Manyu Division and indirectly mobilize first-time voters in sup-port for their CPDM party. To achieve this, they often held “planning” and “evaluation” meetings at the residence of Minister Peter Agbor Tabi. Although none of these three elites is less than 50 years old and so none could be considered as a youth, their campaign sought to attract a large political following, including youthful supporters.

“We are available”: the “planning and evaluation” meetings at the minister’s residence

Most Manyu youths who often attended these “planning and evaluation” meetings con-vened by the powerful Manyu political elites were not formally invited to the meetings. They merely showed-up at the meetings once they heard about it from someone else. For instance, a young Manyu student at Cameroon’s elite school of international relations and diplomacy in Yaoundé was quite close to me during my stay in the capital city of Yaoundé. On both occasions that I attended these meetings, once he heard me saying I was invited by the PA to observe the proceedings, he quickly volunteered to come along.

The seating arrangement during these meetings also reflected the relative social mar-ginality of youths. The minister and his close entourage and other prominent Manyu elites sat inside the main living room, while less politically or financially important peo-ple and young students sat outside, in the doorway. Considering themselves to be on the paths to, potentially, becoming elites themselves (by virtue of their education), many of these young persons (mostly men) are drawn by the possibility of “connecting” with the influential elite. However, both the older and younger people could also be said to have been drawn to these meetings by the elaborate and sumptuous dinners offered in the evenings by the pool-side of the mansion, right after the meetings ended.

Despite their marginal physical locations which meant they were largely unheard dur-ing most of the deliberations, sometimes these Manyu youths, mainly students from the two public universities in the city (Universities of Yaoundé I and II), strove to be seen participating vigorously in the strategic discussions of the campaign against the opposi-tional candidacy of Honorable Ayah Paul. This was the case of the evaluation meeting of 16 April 2011. As deliberations unfolded on whether the voter-registration campaigns were going on successfully, the two presidents of MASU branches at these two universi-ties in Yaoundé struggled through the people sitting in the doorway. Standing in the center of the living room, right in front the ministers and other prominent elites, they explained how they had sensitized fellow Manyu students about the necessity to register to vote in the upcoming elections and brandished lists they had each compiled of students who were purportedly interested in registering to vote (Fieldnotes, 16 April 2011 in Yaoundé). This generated a thunderous round of applause for them. The hosting minister,

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Agbor Tabi, asserted how proud he was about the efforts that everyone seemed to be put-ting in the exercise, including the youths.

Even more impressive, however, at least from the point of view of a personal effort to be “visible,” was the appearance of two other young men at the center of the living room during the previous planning meeting of 13 March 2011. One of them, Ayuk George Abane, who was from Akriba village in Upper Bayang subdivision of Manyu Division and a student at the University of Yaoundé II in Soa, made a remarkable speech. Prior to their move to the center of the room, the discussions centered on how effective the fund-raising events had been so far as well as on how best the celebrations of the CPDM party anniversary in April 2011 could be used to create a strong impact on the party militants back “home” in the Manyu Division. There was a debate whether this should be achieved through a “caravan” of these elites going from one subdivision to the next on that day or simply giving each subdivision some financial resources to make their own celebrations. All this was motivated by the strategic intent of minimizing the impact of Ayah Paul’s oppositional candidacy in the division. After greeting the audience, one of the two young men who looked to be in his late 20s went on to declare that

I stand here this evening on behalf of the youths. Because all along we are discussing this issue of the caravan going from Yaounde to Fako, to Douala, and to Meme, and holding meetings and making proposals. But the youths, I just want to propose that we the youths are now ready to assist more than ever before. And on the issue of us panicking that there is a strong oppositional challenge in Mamfe town because of Ayah Paul’s candidacy … If the SCNC [a militant Anglophone nationalist movement advocating secession from French Cameroon] has used the youth successfully so far, we too could do the same and defeat these oppositional challengers [some applause] … In our students’ association at the university we have tried to see how we can mobilize fellow students to pay the expected 1000 Francs CFA, as our own little contributions [this is the levy that this campaign team had imposed for persons classified as “students”]. So I just propose that you should use us, because we the youths are available to you. Thank you. (The parentheses are mine)

At the end, he also received a thunderous applause. But such overtures of political support from the youth to these political elites had become so strong now “more than ever before” due to an added incentive. In February 2011, President Biya declared that he had ordered a special recruitment of 25,000 young university graduates into the public service solely on the basis of their university diplomas, so there was no need to go through the competitive entrance exams into the Grandes Écoles in this instance. This is why some of these Manyu students strove to be as visible as possible during these plan-ning and evaluation meetings. They hoped that this would make it easier to request the help of these elites toward securing some of these newly announced jobs by President Biya. Moreover, the leading minister, Professor Agbor Tabi, kept repeating at every one of these fund-raising events as well as during these smaller “planning and evaluation” meetings that they (the ministers) will make sure that “Manyu children get recruited in their numbers” during this exercise.

Understandably, many youths and parents came to these meetings with envelopes car-rying résumés and diplomas in search of opportunities to hand these over to these elites. For these youths, it made sense to strive to be so politically involved. This was even more

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compelling for young people who did not have parents with the right “connections” to these circles. They courted these networks on their own. During the dinners, some of these youth approached one or the other of those elites known to be close to the ministers and handed these envelopes to them in the hope that these would get to the ministers. But who succeeds to obtain such favors and who does not is a lot more murky or difficult to tell mainly because very often the interventions of these patrons on behalf of their youth-ful clients take long to materialize.

On a last follow-up field stay between September 2012 and January 2013, I enquired from the PA to the minister whether they had assisted any of these youths seeking employment during this 25,000 massive public service employment exercise. She said that as in all situations, some were fortunate enough to be employed but others not, but admitted that many among those selected could have also benefited from an “added push” from some elites within the minister’s powerful networks. While she could not say for sure how many were employed through such auspicious connections, she indicated one notable case of a young man fondly called Bobbys from her own village, Ossing, who was employed with the Ministry of Agriculture (conversation with PA on Saturday, 6 October 2012).

I also tried to find out about the fate of the young men who spoke vigorously at those “planning and evaluation” meetings in an effort to be visible, knowing that all three had applied for positions during this exercise. As it was now more than a year since these events occurred and I had lost track of the students, I could only rely on some of my other student friends in Yaoundé who seemed to know what transpired. I was told that while one of the two Manyu university student union presidents had been fortunate to be employed, the other had not. The forceful young man who also spoke about the need to “use” the youths to defeat Ayah’s candidacy in Manyu Division had also failed to secure a job during that time. All these failures to achieve the desired goals for the youths dis-cussed here do not mean that other youths who I did not know did not succeed in gaining entry into those state opportunities. But for many of the youths discussed here, such failures indicate the potential limits of the ingratiating rhetoric associated with the patri-monial politics of belonging as an inclusive form.

Conclusion

I have explored the patrimonial postcolonial state order in Cameroon as a dynamic and intimate social field of power. It is actively constructed by the political actors inserted within it even as it is quite constraining and allows for different degrees of social expres-sions according to their different subjective positions of power and influence. Taking the dynamic expression of youthful subjectivities in this patrimonial structure as my point of focus, I chose to follow the historical shift in Cameroon where oppositional tendencies to the Biya regime have become generally weakened and youthful opposition to elite domination is also markedly less oppositional than complicit. This historical shift has meant that the patrimonial character of state power as a style of domination has been further entrenched in Cameroon since the early years of Cameroon’s democratization in the 1990s. I have argued that a paradox between the drive toward political intimacy and the concomitant constraints that a patrimonial order entails are generative of anxieties

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and uncertainties that constitute the basis of the relationship of complicity and depend-ence between elites and nonelites.

The ethnographic case of educated Manyu youths explored here is interesting. It has served as an apt example of persons who tend to experience the social marginality associ-ated with the subjective experience of nonelites more generally and the floating subjectivi-ties of youth in particular within Cameroon’s politics of democracy. In examining the dynamics of this relation in terms of both discourse and practice through the case of edu-cated Manyu youths, I have identified ambiguity and ambivalence as the fundamental ele-ments of the subjective experience of marginality by nonelites in a patrimonial context.

On the one hand, their narratives convey complaints about the reluctance of middle-aged elites to foster their inclusion through recognition of belonging as a critical cultural credential for participation in Cameroon’s patrimonial politics. These complaints by young and educated Manyu persons (potential elites) about their middle-aged Manyu elites who are seen to have themselves only recently benefited from the patrimonial poli-tics of belonging by older elites reveals the limitations of such a redistributive system: the more persons it includes in its wheel of fortune on the basis of belonging, the lesser the opportunities for redistribution. This generates tensions and complaints about the unfairness of such sudden changes, although without necessarily generating any calls for a change of the patrimonial systems itself as such.

On the contrary, their strategies of engagement with Manyu political elites reveal a ready disposition to insert themselves within this field of patrimonial power by seeking to secure state jobs and related opportunities. To do so, they draw heavily from the poli-tics of belonging as one of the cultural registers of Cameroon’s patrimonial politics, even in the face of its diminishing efficacy. By examining the strategies adopted by these educated Manyu youths, it is evident that youthful subjectivities in Africa are not always defined in opposition to elites. Youths can also, potentially, be key political supporters or at least political beneficiaries of political elites. Their political actions depend on their social backgrounds (educated or not) and/or situational assessments of the strategic opportunities or constraints related to their political participation.

Acknowledgements

The doctoral research project on political elites in Cameroon from which this article is derived was generously funded between 2010 and 2013 by the Danish Council for Independent Research in the Humanities (FKK) and the Faculty of Arts at Aarhus University, Denmark. The author would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for this article and the editorial team for their very helpful comments and patience that helped to improve the tenor of the article, although he is fully respon-sible for any weaknesses that remain.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. In addition to my ethnographic observations, I conducted extended interviews (minimum of 50 minutes each) with over 10 key informants of different gender and professional backgrounds.

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These informants are from the South-West Region, but many live and work in the capital city of Yaoundé.

2. For purposes of anonymity, the real names of Oben and Taku have been substituted, but those of powerful politicians are not, mainly because the events I observed and for which they are cited were quite open to the public. While the topic is politically sensitive, I do think that these are public figures who organized events open to the public for which they claimed responsi-bility, besides the fact that my identity as a researcher was widely disclosed at all times during my observations.

3. See note 2.4. My use of the notion of a moral economy of belonging very much draws from E. P. Thompson’s

(1971) classic understanding of the term as reposing on a tacit understanding of what is fair in the relations of domination between powerful lords and their poorer servants (see also Scott, 1977, 1985). Here, it refers to the widespread sense among educated Manyu youths in Cameroon that since political elites from every part of Cameroon help their kinsmen (family, fellow villagers) or people from the same ethnic area as well as friends to secure state jobs and contracts in exchange for political support, it must be the fair thing for Manyu politicians to do as well.

5. The South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) is a political party and former national liberation movement in Namibia that has been in power since achieving independ-ence in 1990.

6. The metaphor of “motherhood” associated with the identity of Madam Rose Abunaw is an emic one. It is the way nonelites interpreted her mutual engagement with them in terms of care and concern. This is most evidently conveyed in the congratulatory message addressed to her when such care is metaphorically equated to “breast milk.” Much as this raises questions of gendered distortions of elite subjectivities that must be taken critically; I cannot change the language used here as it is the way actors spoke about her and not me imputing my views on them. But it must not be seen to be opposed to that of “king of Manyu youths” attributed to Chief Tabe-Tando because both metaphors are not used by the same actors.

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Author biography

Rogers Tabe E Orock is PhD Mobility Fellow at the Department of Culture and Society (discipline of Anthropology) at Aarhus University. He is currently working on a doctoral research project on culture, elite politics, and power in contemporary Cameroon that examines the relationship between political elites and their communities.