Francis B Nyamnjoh
Biographic Data
| ID | 106656 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francis B Nyamnjoh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francis B |
| FAMILY NAME | Nyamnjoh |
| SIGNATURE | NYAMNJOH F B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4702-8874 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 82 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1189 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
Reimagining Anthropology: Ferguson, Incompleteness, and Conviviality
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Being and becoming African in a nimble-footed world
This article explores African identity through the lens of incompleteness and motion. By challenging the traditional nation state-centric view of belonging, it offers a nuanced framework for analysing diasporic cultural production. This framework acknowledges the complex realities of individuals with multilayered identities shaped by interconnected geographies and hierarchies at both local and global levels. The discussion expands the concept of …
The digital Skull: Navigating contemporary romance and values in a reimagined The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Drawing on Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard , this article reimagines the character of the Skull in the context of digital culture. How would the Skull court in the digital age? It explores how the Skull might utilize social media and online platforms to gather information about a potential partner and adapt its persona. This analysis demonstrates how digital tools transform traditional notions of courtship, emphasizing the importance of ali…
Incompleteness Mobility and Conviviality: Ad. E. Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 Frobenius-Institut Goethe-University
Citizenship, incompleteness and mobility
This article advocates a framework of incompleteness for appreciating citizenship as a permanent work in progress. The idea of incompleteness is inspired by the late Nigerian writer and author Amos Tutuola, whose writings help us understand the making, unmaking and remaking of citizenship. An approach to citizenship that is informed by incompleteness points to the violence and violations that delusions around the idea of completeness have caused …
Dying by degree
Response by the author
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Xenophobia in South Africa: The Personal Account of a Sweet-footed African
Keynote Address: Mobility, Globalisation, and the Policing of Citizenship and Belonging in the Twenty-First Century
This keynote address1 on history, mobility, citizenship, and decoloniality draws on my 2016 book titled #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa.2 It explored the 2015 stu
Decolonising the Academy: A Case for Convivial Scholarship
Anglophone Secessionist Movements in Cameroon
Citizenship in Motion: South African and Japanese scholars in conversation
ICTs as Juju: African inspiration for understanding the compositeness of being human through digital technologies
In this article, I liken information and communication technologies (ICTs) or digital technologies to what we in West and Central Africa have the habit of referring to as Juju . I invite as scholars of the digital humanities to see in the region’s belief in incompleteness and the compositeness of being human, as well as in the capacity to be present everywhere at the same time an indication that we have much to learn from the past on how best to …
Religious Innovation and Competition in Contemporary African Christianity
This introductory essay lays out the main themes of a special issue of Journal of Contemporary African Studies which brings together six empirically grounded papers by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. These works touch on various aspects of the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day African Christianity. They represent the first fruits on the social science side of an interdisciplinary…
Incompleteness and Conviviality: A Reflection on International Research Collaboration from an African Perspective
Black Pain Matters: Down with Rhodes
Botswana at 50: Democratic deficit, elite corruption and poverty in the midst of plenty
Botswana, a much vaunted African success story, turned 50 on the 30th of September 2016, amidst much pomp and ceremony. The tagline for the occasion was Botswana50: United and Proud. So, are Batswa
L'incomplétude du sujet africain
Au cours de la crise ivoirienne, des îlots de paix quotidienne sont apparus, ont perduré et même grandi dans des espaces ruraux et urbains, et ce, même si elles ne pouvaient rivaliser avec l’arsenal supérieur des militaires. La formation de ces enclaves, qui se sont parfois reproduites en espaces sociaux distincts dans la Côte d’Ivoire post-conflit, est analysée à partir d’une perspective émique. Elles soulèvent des questions empiriques essentiel…
Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality
This paper makes a case for conviviality as a currency for frontier Africans. It argues that incompleteness is the normal order of things, and that conviviality invites us to celebrate and preserve incompleteness and mitigate the delusions of grandeur that come with ambitions and claims of completeness. Conviviality encourages frontier Africans to reach out, encounter and explore ways of enhancing or complementing themselves with the added possib…
RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa
Modernising Traditions and Traditionalising Modernity in Africa: Chieftaincy and Democracy in Cameroon and Botswana
Media and Belonging in Africa: Reflections on Exclusionary Articulation of Racial and Ethnic Identities in Cameroon and South Africa
Conviviality and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Urban Africa
C est l homme qui fait l homme: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Cote d Ivoire
Xenophobia at Odds with South Africa’s' Rhetoric of Inclusivity and Human Rights
Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging
Research Article| May 01 2000 Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging Peter Geschiere; Peter Geschiere Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Francis Nyamnjoh Francis Nyamnjoh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2000) 12 (2): 423-452. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-2-423 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site …
Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality
This paper makes a case for conviviality as a currency for frontier Africans. It argues that incompleteness is the normal order of things, and that conviviality invites us to celebrate and preserve incompleteness and mitigate the delusions of grandeur that come with ambitions and claims of completeness. Conviviality encourages frontier Africans to reach out, encounter and explore ways of enhancing or complementing themselves with the added possib…
Elite associations and the politics of belonging in Cameroon
The development of elite associations has been a consequence of the growth of multi-partyism and the weakening of authoritarian state control in Cameroon in the 1990s. The attachment of electoral votes and rights of citizenship to belonging to ethnicised regions has encouraged the formal distinction between 'natives' and 'strangers' in the creation of a politics of belonging. The article argues that this development has also led to the replacemen…
Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa
Using the metaphor of the elephant and the three blind men, this paper discusses some elements of the scholarly debate on the postcolonial turn in academia, in and of Africa, and in anthropology in particular. It is a part of the context in which anthropology remains unpopular among many African intellectuals. How do local knowledge practices take up existential issues and epistemological perspectives that may interrogate and enrich more global t…
Potted Plants in Greenhouses: A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa
This paper draws on Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally. The outcome is often a devaluation of African creativity,…
Autochtonie, démocratie et citoyenneté en Afrique
Le discours de l'autochtonie se généralise sur le continent africain et donne parfois lieu à des mises en actes tragiques (expulsions, pogroms et génocides). Cette évolution est curieusement liée à la démocratisation et aussi au retour de l'autoritarisme, l'autochtonie devenant alors un enjeu politique (Qui vote où ? Qui a le droit d'être candidat ?). Elle accompagne aussi un certain moment économique, celui de la mondialisation et du désastre éc…
Cameroonian bushfalling: Negotiation of identity and belonging in fiction and ethnography
Anthropology remains an unpopular discipline among many African intellectuals. I revisit debates on relations between fiction and ethnography to make a case for enriching African anthropology through a systematic reinterpretation of African fiction. I make my case through the ethnography of flexible identities among Cameroonian bushfallers-who seek their fortunes far from home-and support it by analysis of a novel,Married But Available. Through t…
"Witchcraft as an Issue in the "Politics of Belonging: Democratization and Urban Migrants' Involvement with the Home Village
In many parts of Africa, political liberalization seems to have given new impetus to the “politics of belonging,” leading to an obsession with “autochthony.” Thus the continuing relations of urban migrants with their home area tend to be reaffirmed. However, these relations, marked by an explosive mixture of intimacy and inequality, continue also to be a hotbed for witchcraft rumors. In this article we compare two different cases, from different …
The Anglophone Problem in Cameroon
THE political agenda in Cameroon has become increasingly dominated by what is known as the ‘anglophone problem’, which poses a major challenge to the efforts of the post-colonial state to forge national unity and integration, and has led to the reintroduction of forceful arguments and actions in favour of ‘federalism’ or even ‘secession’
Fishing in Troubled Waters: DisquettesandThiofsin Dakar
This discussion traces metaphors of consumerism, commoditized sex and sexified commodities that proliferate throughout urban Africa, signalling the intensified globalization of images of desire and opportunity, on the one hand, and chronic poverty and destitution, on the other. Focusing on sexual economies in Dakar as a case in point, the paper attempts an analysis of how, in situations of increasing scarcity and transurban articulations, languag…
Racism, Ethnicity and the Media in Africa: Reflections Inspired by Studies of Xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa
This paper demonstrates the extent to which the media and belonging in Africa are torn between competing and often conflicting claims of bounded and flexible ideas of culture and identity. It draws on studies of xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa, inspired by the resilience of the politicization of culture and identity, to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin political, economic and social citizenship in Africa and the worl…
Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa
We cannot imagine life now without a mobile phone' is a frequent comment when Africans are asked about mobile phones. They have become part and parcel of the communication landscape in many urban and rural areas of Africa and the growth of mobile telephony is amazing: from 1 in 50 people being users in 2000 to 1 in 3 in 2008. Such growth is impressive but it does not even begin to tell us about the many ways in which mobile phones are being appro…
Whiteman Kontri and the enduring allure of modernity among Cameroonian youth
This article gathers together representations of whiteness constructed by young black Cameroonians. It contributes to arguments about white identity by arguing that the meaning of whiteness is, in part, made by Africans. It assembles descriptions of white people and of the whiteman kontri (the West) that are often contradictory and that include both positive and negative judgements. In this respect these ideas reflect both Cameroonian politics an…
Cameroon: A Country United by Ethnic Ambition and Difference
This paper attempts an answer to the question: What keeps Cameroon together despite widespread instability in Africa, despite the turbulence of the subregional environment in which it finds itself, and despite its own internal contradictions? The main argument is that the politics of regional and ethnic balance, the chronic lack of vision as a country, the lack of real commitment to democracy, the propensity to vacillate on most issues of collect…
Local Attitudes towards Citizenship and Foreigners in Botswana: An Appraisal of Recent Press Stories
A major characteristic of Africa's second liberation struggles since the 1980s has been a growing obsession with belonging and the questioning of conventional assumptions about nationality and citizenship almost everywhere. In Botswana, identity politics are increasingly important, alongside more exclusionary ideas of nationality and citizenship, as minority claims for greater cultural recognition and plurality are countered by majoritarian effor…
From Bounded to Flexible Citizenship: Lessons from Africa
This paper draws on a recently published study on xenophobia in Southern Africa to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin citizenship. Paradoxically, national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and bounded belonging are facing their greatest challenge from their inherent contradictions and closures, and from an upsurge in rights claims and the politics of recognition and representation by small-scale comm…
Images of Nyongo amongst Bamenda Grassfielders in Whiteman Kontri
This paper discusses the experiences and discourses of transnational migrants from the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon. It uses Nyongo, a popular form of witchcraft that privileges zombification over instant gratification through instant and total death, to seek to illustrate how the tensions occasioned by everyday witchcraft offer migrants and their communities the opportunity to interrogate, adapt to, reject or appropriate new ideas of being ac…
Fiction and reality of mobility in Africa
This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and …
From Publish or Perish to Publish and Perish: What 'Africa's 100 Best Books' Tell Us About Publishing Africa
This article draws on the African publishing industry initiative to determine 'Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century', to discuss writing, scholarship and publishing in and on Africa. It highlights the challenge of promoting commitment to African humanity and creativity without producing a simplistic reductionism or the inflation of belonging in Africa. It also argues for the need to problematize what is published and read on Africa, and to…
Beyond an evangelising public anthropology: Science, Theory and Commitment
If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been too much of engaged or public anthropology and too little of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit animated by rigorous contemplation and practice on and around a set of shared curiosities. Distinguishing between academic anthropology and engaged or public anthropology requires a priori reflection on the scientific status of anthropology. This paper argues th…
Chieftaincy and the Negotiation of Might and Right in Botswana Democracy
Studies of agency are sorely needed if we are to avoid overemphasising structures and essentialist perceptions on chieftaincy and the cultural communities that claim and are claimed by it. Using Botswana as a case in point, this chapter argues that Africans are far from giving up chieftaincy or from making completely modern institutions of it. No one, it seems, is too “citizen” to be “subject” as well, not even in southern Africa where there have…
Entertaining repression: Music and politics in postcolonial Cameroon
Journal Article Entertaining repression: Music and politics in postcolonial Cameroon Get access Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. Nyamnjoh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jude Fokwang Jude Fokwang Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 104, Issue 415, April 2005, Pages 251–274, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adi007 Published: 01 April 2005
Botswana at 50: Democratic deficit, elite corruption and poverty in the midst of plenty
Botswana, a much vaunted African success story, turned 50 on the 30th of September 2016, amidst much pomp and ceremony. The tagline for the occasion was Botswana50: United and Proud. So, are Batswa
Construction and deconstruction: Anglophones or Francophones
Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon
Broadcasting in francophone Africa: Crusading for French culture
Ritual, Politics, and Power
How to 'Kill' an underdeveloped press: Lessons from Cameroon
Although technical, professional and financial problems are a common feature with the press, in Cameroon, like most of Africa and the Third World, such problems either result from or are compounded by rigid government control. Using regulatory statements and official declarations, as well as interviews with media practitioners, this article points to censorship as the core problem facing the press in Cameroon. It observes that while the private p…
The Anglophone Problem in Cameroon
THE political agenda in Cameroon has become increasingly dominated by what is known as the ‘anglophone problem’, which poses a major challenge to the efforts of the post-colonial state to forge national unity and integration, and has led to the reintroduction of forceful arguments and actions in favour of ‘federalism’ or even ‘secession’
"Witchcraft as an Issue in the "Politics of Belonging: Democratization and Urban Migrants' Involvement with the Home Village
In many parts of Africa, political liberalization seems to have given new impetus to the “politics of belonging,” leading to an obsession with “autochthony.” Thus the continuing relations of urban migrants with their home area tend to be reaffirmed. However, these relations, marked by an explosive mixture of intimacy and inequality, continue also to be a hotbed for witchcraft rumors. In this article we compare two different cases, from different …
Elite associations and the politics of belonging in Cameroon
The development of elite associations has been a consequence of the growth of multi-partyism and the weakening of authoritarian state control in Cameroon in the 1990s. The attachment of electoral votes and rights of citizenship to belonging to ethnicised regions has encouraged the formal distinction between 'natives' and 'strangers' in the creation of a politics of belonging. The article argues that this development has also led to the replacemen…
Africa and the information superhighway: The need for mitigated euphoria
(1999). Africa and the information superhighway: The need for mitigated euphoria. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 31-49
African cultural studies, cultural studies in Africa: How to make a useful difference
WHILE THE ANTHROPOLOGIST thinks of habits, customs and material technologies of a given community when notion of culture is evoked, ordinary person has in mind education and taste. S/he would consider as cultured someone who appreciates `finer things of life' such as literature, poetry and art. In cultural studies on other hand, culture is said to refer to concrete sets of signifying practices--modes of generating meaning--that create communicati…
Cameroon: A Country United by Ethnic Ambition and Difference
This paper attempts an answer to the question: What keeps Cameroon together despite widespread instability in Africa, despite the turbulence of the subregional environment in which it finds itself, and despite its own internal contradictions? The main argument is that the politics of regional and ethnic balance, the chronic lack of vision as a country, the lack of real commitment to democracy, the propensity to vacillate on most issues of collect…
"For Many are Called but Few are Chosen": Globalisation and Popular Disenchantment in Africa
Construction and deconstruction: Anglophones or Francophones
The African Economic Dilemma: The Case of Cameroon
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging
Research Article| May 01 2000 Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging Peter Geschiere; Peter Geschiere Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Francis Nyamnjoh Francis Nyamnjoh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2000) 12 (2): 423-452. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-2-423 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site …
Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging
Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging
Autochtonie, démocratie et citoyenneté en Afrique
Le discours de l'autochtonie se généralise sur le continent africain et donne parfois lieu à des mises en actes tragiques (expulsions, pogroms et génocides). Cette évolution est curieusement liée à la démocratisation et aussi au retour de l'autoritarisme, l'autochtonie devenant alors un enjeu politique (Qui vote où ? Qui a le droit d'être candidat ?). Elle accompagne aussi un certain moment économique, celui de la mondialisation et du désastre éc…
Whiteman Kontri and the enduring allure of modernity among Cameroonian youth
This article gathers together representations of whiteness constructed by young black Cameroonians. It contributes to arguments about white identity by arguing that the meaning of whiteness is, in part, made by Africans. It assembles descriptions of white people and of the whiteman kontri (the West) that are often contradictory and that include both positive and negative judgements. In this respect these ideas reflect both Cameroonian politics an…
Local Attitudes towards Citizenship and Foreigners in Botswana: An Appraisal of Recent Press Stories
A major characteristic of Africa's second liberation struggles since the 1980s has been a growing obsession with belonging and the questioning of conventional assumptions about nationality and citizenship almost everywhere. In Botswana, identity politics are increasingly important, alongside more exclusionary ideas of nationality and citizenship, as minority claims for greater cultural recognition and plurality are countered by majoritarian effor…
African Universities in Crisis and the Promotion of a Democratic Culture: The Political Economy of Violence in African Educational Systems
This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universities to suit new ways of being, seeing, d…
Scholarship Production in Cameroon: Interrogating a Recession
Cameroonians saw a positive correlation between the enactment of the Liberty Laws in the early 1990s, the increase in the number of tertiary institutions, and the contribution of its universities to worldwide intellectual endeavors. Nevertheless, as the history of the University of Buea shows, the university space, instead of becoming free, became instead a space of domination. Universities discourage critical scholarship and collaboration, haras…
Introduction to a Special Issue: African Universities in Crisis and the Promotion of a Democratic Culture: The Political Economy of Violence in African Educational Systems
Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon
This is a significant and timely book on the politics of belonging. It captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the current widespread disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. Until the liberation struggles of the 1990s, dictatorship only paid lip service to democracy with impunity, often by silencing those perceived to threaten national unity. Since then, indivi…
Globalization, Boundaries, and Livelihoods: Perspectives on Africa
This paper takes a closer look at the paradoxes of globalisation as a process of inclusion and exclusion, empowerment and enslavement, citizenship and subjection, hope and disappointment. It argues that the neo-liberal rhetoric and euphoria on globalisation must be countered with the reality of exclusion for all but an elite few. The basic split might be between the rich and the poor across national borders, but the fact remains that the investor…
Chieftaincy and the Negotiation of Might and Right in Botswana Democracy
Studies of agency are sorely needed if we are to avoid overemphasising structures and essentialist perceptions on chieftaincy and the cultural communities that claim and are claimed by it. Using Botswana as a case in point, this chapter argues that Africans are far from giving up chieftaincy or from making completely modern institutions of it. No one, it seems, is too “citizen” to be “subject” as well, not even in southern Africa where there have…
Global and Local Trends in Media Ownership and Control: Implications for Cultural Creativity in Africa
Political science (55 works) · Sociology (54 works) · Law (47 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · African history and culture studies (20 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Gender Studies (15 works)