The Mortuary Sphere, Privilege and the Politics of Belonging in Contemporary Cameroon

Abstract

AbstractConcern with new modes of accountability has foregrounded the politics of belonging, giving prominence to the concepts of autochthony and allogeny. In Cameroon, this has provoked a shift in policy-making from an earlier distinction between the disciplined citizen and the subject. Despite this distinction, all Cameroonians were considered rights-bearing citizens in the early post- Independence era and as such could settle anywhere in the country and not be discriminated against. This has been rolled back as a result of overcoding and the assigning of a code to a people and a people to a territory is now in vogue. This has far-reaching policy implications. It problematizes the question of identity and has engendered the argument that this can be resolved only at death – identity should be determined by where one is buried. The centrality of overcoding, especially its extension into the mortuary realm, has enabled confusion, both legal and symbolic, which is instrumentalized and manipulated by the state, traditional authorities and relatives of the dead to serve varying and varied interests. Death, though a private affair, has now been thrust into the public space. Focusing on the burial of four ‘big men’, this paper shows how these interests are negotiated and fought over. Since space, power and tradition impact on this process, outcomes cannot be determined a priori. It is this impossibility that has given renewed relevance to the question: ‘Whose corpse it anyway?’