Images of Nyongo amongst Bamenda Grassfielders in Whiteman Kontri

Abstract

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 acquired through encounters with difference. The paper thus attempts to capture not only what it means to see oneself as a victim of Nyongo, but to detail the contradictions involved with inhabiting spaces that conjure images of Nyongo. While not primarily about potent witchcraft fears, violence and afflictions, the paper does point to how the metaphorical and sometimes joking self-image of zombiehood by Bamenda Grassfielders in the diaspora offers a discursive resource among others for ongoing negotiations of belonging, personal success and expectations. The paper argues that the collectivist notions of success from which migrants and their home communities draw are such as to warrant accusations, counter-accusations, and images of Nyongo as a way of seeking a healthy balance between marginalization and exploitation, social responsibility and personal success, home of origin and home of refuge. The accusatory language of victimhood employed by migrants to describe their subjection and ultra-exploitation by forces at home and in the host countries is evidence that, to them, home is neither simply to be found “at home” or “away from home”.