10 - Youth Subjectivities and Associational Life in Bamenda, Cameroon

Abstract

Introductiondo young people at the margins of national citizenship make sense of their lives in local society? What mechanisms do they employ to negotiate transition to full adult status in contexts where national institutional support for them has become tenuous or disappeared completely? How do we analyse and account for the ways in which younger generations of Africans, experiencing blocked mobility, deal with their predicament on account of postcolonial elites’ continuous cling to power and resources? How, and in what contexts, are social categories (such as youth or adult) constructed, negotiated and experienced? These questions inevitably demand a critical discussion of the meanings of youth (understood in this study as a position of structural dependency), social adulthood, citizenship and social participation. This study answers the above questions by focusing on the subjectivities and activities of three associations of young men and women in Bamenda, Cameroon’s leading Anglophone city. The associations include the Chosen Sisters, the United Sisters and the Ntambag Brothers Association (NBA). Being an ethnographic study, context is essential for its appreciation. The study is set against a background of what is known popularly in Cameroon as la crise – crisis that conjures simply more than the spectres of economic and political uncertainty; indeed, understood by most as a deep moral crisis. Against this background, this study analyses the ways in which young Cameroonians create meaningful lives in local society. Clearly, youths embody the sharpening contradictions of the late capitalist era (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2005:23) and tend to be ‘positioned at the leading edge of many aspects of contemporary social change, and experience acutely the risks and opportunities that new social conditions entail’ (Hall, Coffey and Williamson 1999:501).