Francis Nyamnjoh

Book Review: From Conversations and Conviviality to Epistemologies of Converted Spaces

A review by Nicholas A. Jackson

Francis B. Nyamnjoh. 2016. #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa.

With his valuable book #RhodesMustFall, Francis Nyamnjoh mobilizes many years of work on identity, mobility and epistemological transformation in situating Rhodes as a makwerekwere (“stranger”) and subsequently seeking to understand the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement in the context of resilient colonialism as well as the long and enduring presence of amakwerekwere (“strangers”) such as Nyamnjoh himself who make up the contested space that is South Africa, where people respond to one another according to whether or not “the other belongs” (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000). When Nyamnjoh takes on the problematic of Rhodes’ defaced statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, he makes certain from the beginning that there is no doubt about what kind of colonizer Rhodes was. Rhodes and his associates “took over, ruled, developed and exploited for his personal profit and that of Britain the lands and bodies of those he conquered, turning them into amakwerekwere on their own native soil, their homeland” (p.28). These contests between “whitening-up” and “blackening-up”, inclusion and exclusion, have persisted to the present day not only with regard to European (Boer and British) residents but also Indians and black Africans such as himself from elsewhere in Africa.

Click here to read the rest of the review in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.

Just Published: #RhodesMustFall by Francis Nyamnjoh

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2016. #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at resilient colonialism in South Africa. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG. Available on Amazon.

This book on rights, entitlements and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa shows how the playing field has not been as levelled as presumed by some and how racism and its benefits persist. Through everyday interactions and experiences of university students and professors, it explores the question of race in a context still plagued by remnants of apartheid, inequality and perceptions of inferiority and inadequacy among the majority black population.

In education, black voices and concerns go largely unheard, as circles of privilege are continually regenerated and added onto a layered and deep history of cultivation of black pain. These issues are examined against the backdrop of organised student protests sweeping through the country's universities with a renewed clamour for transformation around a rallying cry of 'Black Lives Matter'. The nuanced complexity of this insightful analysis of the Rhodes Must Fall movement elicits compelling questions about the attractions and dangers of exclusionary articulations of belonging. What could a grand imperialist like the stripling Uitlander or foreigner of yesteryear, Sir Cecil John Rhodes, possibly have in common with the present-day nimble-footed makwerekwere from Africa north of the Limpopo? The answer, Nyamnjoh suggests, is to be found in how human mobility relentlessly tests the boundaries of citizenship.

A Tribute to Michael Sam-Nuvala Fonkem: One of Cameroon’s Foremost Incisive Journalists

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Michael Sam-Nuvala Fonkem was born 28 January 1953. He passed away on Thursday 8 October 2015. Fonkem was an accomplished journalist who had practiced uninterrupted since graduating in 1976 from the International School of Journalism, Yaoundé (Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Yaoundé – ESSIJY). His professional career which kicked off as a news anchor and commentator at the National Station of Radio Cameroon, Yaoundé brought him face to face with the grim reality of the consequences of refusing to play the role of ‘His Master’s Voice’. Interrogations with the ‘political police’, intimidations, arrests and a 5-month spell of incarceration at the Nkondengui maximum security prison, Yaoundé was the price he had to pay for being a free thinker. During his journey through the wilderness marked by a lay-off from the Cameroon Civil Service in 1998, Sam-Nuvala Fonkem wrote for a number of news publications until he joined the United Nations Operation in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) as Public Information Officer in 2010.

Ohio Global Report: An Interview with Francis Nyamnjoh

In this maiden edition, Dr. Nyamnjoh, Head of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who has written extensively on media, culture, identity and globalization sheds more light on his work and these topics with us. 

Click here to listen to the interview

[Just Published] C'est l'homme qui fait l'homme: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d'Ivoire by Francis Nyamnjoh

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2015. "C est l homme qui fait l homme" cul-de-sac Ubuntu-ism in Cote d'Ivoire. Mankon, Cameroon: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG. Available on Amazon.

The idea that human beings are inextricably bound to one another is at the heart of this book about African agency, especially drawing on the African philosophy Ubuntu, with its roots in human sociality and inclusivity. Ubuntu's precepts and workings are severely tested in these times of rapid change and multiple responsibilities. Africans negotiate their social existence between urban and rural life, their continental and transcontinental distances, and all the market forces that now impinge, with relationships and loyalties placed in question.

Between ideal and reality, dreams and schemes, how is Ubuntu actualized, misappropriated and endangered? The book unearths the intrigues and contradictions that go with inclusivity in Africa. Basing his argument on the ideals of trust, conviviality and support embodied in the concept of Ubuntu, Francis Nyamnjoh demonstrates how the pursuit of personal success and even self-aggrandizement challenges these ideals, thus leading to discord in social relationships. Nyamnjoh uses a popular Ivorian drama with the same title to substantiate life-world realities and more importantly to demonstrate that new forms of expression, from popular drama to fiction, thicken and enrich the ethnographic component in current anthropology.

Francis Nyamnjoh: Rhodes Fell Because of an Illusion

Francis Nyamnjoh's STIAS Lecture.

The toppling of the Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) – like its erection in the first instance –was driven by a winner-takes-all logic, and not a need to conduct real conversations about substantive issues, Prof Francis B Nyamnjoh, a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), argued on Tuesday (14 April 2015).

He was speaking in the Old Main Building on the Stellenbosch University (SU) campus as part of a series of STIAS public lectures. Nyamnjoh is Professor of Social Anthropology at UCT. The title of his talk was Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the currency of conviviality.

Prof Prof. Nyamnjoh: Xenophobia at odds with SA 'rhetoric of inclusivity and human rights'

Originally published by the University of Cape Town.

Everyone in South Africa – citizens and foreigners alike – should be worried by the recent spate of attacks on black foreigners that started in KwaZulu-Natal and have subsequently spread to other parts of the country, says social anthropologist Professor Francis B Nyamnjoh.

It is most unsettling that South African political leaders and policy makers are not doing enough to encourage South Africans to disabuse themselves of the illusion that their problems can be solved through the logic of exclusion and scapegoating of certain types of foreigners that has pervaded, paradoxically, since the dawn of democracy in 1994. What is happening in Durban and KwaZulu-Natal reawakens a monster that political leaders and policy makers should have sought a way to bury for good after the xenophobic violence of 2008.

"Politics na Njangi: You Scratch My Back, I Scratch Your Back”: Socio-Cultural Understandings of Politics in Cameroon

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh

This paper uses the Cameroonian institution of “njangi” and the tendency to compare politics to this institution and practice to illustrate the universality of politics as a game of interest, interdependence and domesticated agency. The paper argues that the narrow focus on the autonomous individual in liberal democracy takes attention away from the complex, nuanced and collective interest-driven reality of politics in countries that claim the status of model democracies. Scholars of African politics have tended to uncritically internalise the rhetoric of the autonomous individual and of all-powerful leaders in their studies of political institutions and processes on the continent. One of the outcomes has been a misrepresentation of politics on the continent as a game of group and individual interests in which there are neither permanent patrons nor permanent clients nor permanent winners and losers.

Download Nyamnjoh_Politics na Njangi_2013

The Book

 

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Behold The Book! I have come a long way with it. Did I say ‘it’? How can I misrepresent such a powerful agent with this unassuming pronoun? It is a force far more present and active, even in its absence, than any single-minded determined human. As a force of light and darkness, freedom and oppression, noun and verb, The Book has charmed the mighty and the lowly. It has spurred rulers to burn and ban, and inspired the sidestepped to ink down the sword. The only humans that come closest to matching The Book’s omnipotent omnipresence are those portrayed within its covers, who are denied – if ever that was what they desired – the conclusion of life that mortality confers. Those who write books and those booked and in books seem to have succeeded in eschewing death the last laugh and denying themselves closure.

Download Nyamnjoh_The Book_2014 

 

 

Prof. Francis Nyamnjoh Wins 2014 Eko Literature Prize

By Kimeng Hilton NDUKONG (Originally published in Cameroon Tribune)

It is for his lifetime contributions to creative writing and arts in Cameroon and beyond.

Prof. Francis Nyamnjoh has been selected as the 2014 winner of the Eko Prize for Literature, an Anglophone Cameroon competition. A release published on Tuesday, December 16, 2014 and signed by Dr Mbuh Tennu Mbuh, said, “The Judges based their decision on the laureate’s lifetime achievement as a prolific writer, critic, and promoter of the Arts in Cameroon, Africa, and the world at large.”

Winners of the 2014 Eko Prize for Emerging Anglophone Writers are Ekpe Inyang for his collection of poems entitled “Death of Hardship;” Joffi Ewusi in the prose category for her book, “Christmas Carols in June;” Job Fongho Tende for his drama piece, “Riding the Chariot of God,” and Charles Nfon in the non-fiction category for his work titled, “Ushered Out of One, Accepted at Another.”

Africans Consuming Hair, Africans Consumed by Hair

By Francis Nyamnjoh & Divine Fuh. Africa Insight Vol 44(1) – June 2014, pp. 52-68.

Abstract
In this article, we use the consumption of and perspectives on hair by Africans on the continent and in the diaspora to demonstrate the extent to which African identities as permanent works in progress refuse to be impoverished by dichotomies. If relationships forged and entertained with hair are anything to go by, Africans, it seems to us, are more amenable to flexible, composite and negotiated personal and collective identities than they are to fixities and purities. Perhaps schooled by repeated encounters with the violence of dominant others or simply enlightened by the wisdom of centuries of intimate conversations across myriad divides and chasms, Africans have cultivated a collective gaze that sees beyond appearances in their everyday understanding and articulation of reality. They have trained themselves to recognise and provide for the present absences and the absent presences of their lived and social worlds, bridging and providing for interdependence and conviviality between the apparently contradictory. They are just as keen on nature and the natural as they are on human interactions and relationships with nature. Beauty is as much a work of nature as it is the outcome of working on nature. Aware that beautiful hair can be both natural and cultivated, Africans are as enamoured with their hair of birth and nature in its gradations and complexities as they are with their artistic and creative investment in the social shaping of the hair they wear. Beautifying and transcending the thrills and trappings of birth and birthmarks has been and remains an African preoccupation. As a collective presence in simultaneous diversities, Africans are united by a determined freedom to consume hair – natural and artificial or enhanced, raw and cooked or domesticated, pure and hybrid, and authentic and transformed.

Click here to download/read full text.

• Francis Nyamnjoh (Professor and Head of Section for Anthropology, University of Cape Town, South Africa)
• Divine Fuh (Lecturer at the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics (AXL), University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Blinded by Sight: A Debate on Anthropology in Africa

In issue 2-3/2012, Africa Spectrum published an article by Francis Nyamnjoh titled “Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa” and later invited contributions to a debate on the topic. Here are the responses including a final response from Francis Nyamnjoh's.

The Responses

Andrew Hartnack

Jean-Pierre Warnier

Isak Niehaus

Sanya Osha

Robert J. Gordon

Annika Teppo

Rebecca Jones

Francis Nyamnjoh's Final Response

Francis Nyamnjoh's Response to Responses

'Potted Plants in Greenhouses': A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa

By Francis B Nyamnjoh (Journal of Asian and African Studies 2012 47: 129).

Abstract
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, agency and value systems, and an internalized sense of inadequacy. Education has become a compulsion for Africans to ‘lighten their darkness’ both physically and metaphorically in the interest of and for the gratification of colonizing and hegemonic others. The paper calls for paying more attention to popular systems of knowledge, in which reality is larger than logic. It calls for listening to ordinary men and women who, like p’Bitek’s Lawino, are challenging the prescriptive gaze and grip of emasculated elite.

Click here to download article.

Nyamnjoh is 2013's "African Hero"

Originally published by the University of Cape Town

Internationally-recognised anthropologist, UCT's Professor Francis Nyamnjoh was named African Hero of the Year for 2013 by the African Student Union of Ohio University, US, in March.

The student union's annual African Hero Day celebration honours one person from the continent that has made a significant contribution to improving the lives of its inhabitants.

Anthropologist Nyamnjoh follows a long line of distinguished African Heroes, the first of whom was former South African President Nelson Mandela in 1993. Nyamnjoh's honour recognises his "outstanding contribution to the advancement of Africa through your scholarship as well as teaching practice", as the winner's plaque reads.

Prof. Nyamnjoh: ASU Africa Hero 2013

University of Ohio African Student Union (ASU) Honors Prof. Nymanjoh

ASU's African Heros Night Presents: Professor Francis B. Nyamnjoh!

Sat Mar 16 2013 at 05:00 pm

Venue : Baker Ballroom, Athens, United States

Created By : Ohio University African Students Union

This year we are happy to welcome Professor Francis B. Nyamnjoh: Chair of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

We will be having food, a presentation and entertainment in his honor! Come share an entertaining and historic occasion with us!

Dr. Nyamnjoh is a highly sought-after and revered scholar-professor. He has served several national, Pan-African, and international research and development institutions in or working in Africa. He is an Africanist to the core and has turn down several invitations to take-up permanent teaching position in Europe and America, and has selflessly elected to visit Universities in the West just to present talks that advance the intellectual course of Africa, or as external examiner to M.A. and PhD theses and dissertations on Africa. That is to say, although Prof. Nyamnjoh is literally married to African scholarship, he is available to the global intellectual community so long as that is to advance the African epistemology.

’n Onsigbare olifant op safari deur die akademiese wêreld

Originally published in Die Burger

Die akademie, en spesifiek antropologie, is vol olifante, skryf Arrie de Beer. Maar één van hulle veroorsaak nou ’n beroering, al word hy selde by die naam genoem. 

Die professor wat doelgerig in die gang van die Universiteit van Kaapstad afstap, glimlag gemaklik vir die studente en kollegas om hom. As jy hom nie persoonlik ken nie en sy foto Google, is dit ook wat ’n mens sal sien: Die vriendelike gesig met die ruim glimlag.

Soos ander senior dosente aan Afrika se top-navorsingsuniversiteit is prof. Francis B. Nyamnjoh, hoogleraar en departementshoof van sosiale antropologie, volgens die Suid-Afrikaanse Nasionale Navorsingstigting ’n navorser wat aansienlike internasionale erkenning vir die hoë gehalte en impak van sy werk geniet.

Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa

Francis B. Nyamnjoh [ Originally published in Africa Spectrum Vol 47, No 2-3 (2012): 63-92]

Abstract: 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 transcultural debates and scholarly reflexivity? Many an anthropologist still resists opening his or her mind up to life-worlds unfolding themselves through the interplay between everyday practice and the manifold actions and messages of humans, ancestors and non-human agents in sites of emerging meaning-production and innovative world-making. African anthropologists seeking recognition find themselves contested or dismissed by fellow anthropologists for doing “native”, “self” or “insider” anthropology, and are sometimes accused of perpetuating colonial epistemologies and subservience by fellow African scholars who are committed to scholarship driven by the need to valorise ways of being and knowing endogenous to Africa. This essay calls on anthropologists studying Africa to reflect creative diversity and reflexivity in the conceptualisation and implementation of research projects, as well as in how they provide for co-production, collaboration and co-implication within anthropology across and beyond disciplines.

Click here to read or download complete article (PDF).

Francis Nyamnjoh, 'Fiction and Reality of Mobility in Africa'

Professor Francis Nyamnjoh speaks at the 2012 Stanford Forum for African Studies.

 

The Greenhouse Effect of Colonial Education in Africa

By Francis Nyamnjoh
(A revised version of this paper is published by the Journal of Asian and African Studies (15 February 2012, DOI: 10 1177/002190961141724) under the title: "Potted Plants in Greenhouses: A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa")

Abstract
This paper argues that education in Africa is victim of a colonial and colonising epistemology. Whatever appellation we give it, this epistemology takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. With rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally, the elite have modelled education in Africa after educational institutions in Europe and North America, with little attempt at domestication. This journey, endowed with the mission of annihilation or devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, leads to an internalised sense of inadequacy. It has compelled Africans to “lighten their darkness” both physically and metaphorically for the gratification of colonising and hegemonic others. The paper argues that the future of education in Africa can be hopeful through a meticulous and systematic creative process of cultural restoration and endogenisation, in tune with the negotiation and navigation of myriad possibilities in the lives of Africans small and big, poor and rich, rural and urban, and in between. If Africa is to be party in a global conversation on knowledge production and consumption, it is appropriate that it does so with the interests and concerns of Africans as guiding principle.

Click here to download or read the article.

Language, Mobility, African Writers and Pan-Africanism

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh & Katleho Shoro (Paper published in in: African Communication Research, Vol.4(1):35-62)

Abstract
This paper argues that pan-Africanism is best seen and articulated as a flexible, inclusive, dynamic and complex aspiration in identity making and belonging. The micro and macro level importance of pan-Africanism, makes writing it both abstract and grounded, local and global, just as the unity, solidarities and relevance it seeks and promotes. Pan-Africanism, far from promising a single identity, is about offering a mental space for disparate identities to co-exist in freedom and dignity. The paper explores how African writers have dealt with the issue of language and mobility central to pan-Africanism, and argued in favour of recognising the creative negotiation and navigation by Africans of various linguistic and identity margins in their flexibility and conviviality about what it means to be African.

Click here to read or download this paper.

(Podcast) Francis Nyamnjoh Talks to Herman Wasserman about Tabloid Journalism in South Africa

Click here to listen to Podcast.

Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa? (Book Review)

Originally published here

Bruijn, M. ., Nyamnjoh, F. B., & Brinkman, I. (2009). Mobile phones: The new talking drums of everyday Africa. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa.

I have been reading up on mobile phone use in developing countries recently for a couple of papers. One of the few books entirely devoted to the issue is “Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa”, edited by Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh and Inge Brinkman from the African Studies Centre in Leiden and published in 2009 in cooperation with Cameroon’s Langaa group. #The book takes an anthropological and historical perspective on the role of mobile telephony in a wide range of (sub-Saharan) African societies.

 

Profess Democracy but Implement Autocracy: Politics in Nyamnjoh's Married But Available

By George Esunge Fominyen

Is Francis Nyamnjoh’s *Married But Available simply an account of the experiences of Lily Loveless, a Muzugulander (western) researcher, who travels to Mimboland (Cameroon/Africa) to study the relationship between sexuality and power? Or is it about the telenovela-styled sneak peek into the lives of couples by Britney, Lily’s young research assistant? Isn’t it a, rather, witty stab at African leadership, democracy and the role of the media in society?

(Video) Talk by Prof. Nyamnjoh about CODESRIA

In his address, Francis Nyamnjoh introduces the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) as a model for open access development and implementation. CODESRIA is a multi-disciplinary, pan-African organization based in Senegal, “working towards bringing back the missing African voice” to the global publishing industry.

Francis Nyamnjoh – Scholarly Communication in Africa: Project Scoping Workshop from Creative R&D on Vimeo.

Africa’s Media: Between Professional Ethics and Cultural Belonging

Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2010). Africa's media: Between professional ethics and cultural belonging. Windhoek: Fesmedia Africa, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

In 2005 I published Africa’s Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging. One of the main findings of that study was that the media have assumed a partisan, highly politicised, militant role in Africa. They have done so by dividing citizens into the righteous and the wicked, depending on their party-political leanings, ideologies, regional, cultural or ethnic belonging. By considering the Cameroonian experience, the book sought to understand how scapegoatism, partisanship, and regional and ethnic tendencies in the media have affected their liberal democratic responsibility to act as honest, fair and neutral mediators – accessible to all and sundry. It did this by looking at polarisation in the press and at how the media have shaped and
been shaped by the politics of belonging since the early 1990s.

Re-thinking Communication Research and Development in Africa

Keynote address for 4th IDIA Conference 2010, UCT, Cape Town South Africa

Introduction

Development for Africa is fraught with a multiplicity of exogenously generated ideas, models and research paradigms, all with the purported goal of ‘alleviating’ or bringing about ‘the end of poverty … in our lifetime’ (cf. Sachs 2005). This discourse, which like fashion, goes round in circles, is carried on mainly by ‘development’ agents and ‘experts’ (mainly social and pseudo-social scientists moonlighting through consultancies) and who often limit the question of development to the problematic of achieving growth or ‘the end of poverty’ within the context of neo-liberal economic principles.

Racism, Ethnicity and the Media in Africa: Reflections Inspired by Studies of Xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa

Francis B. Nyamnjoh (Originally published in Africa Spectrum)

Abstract

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 world over, and the role of the media in the production, enforcement and contestation of these hierarchies and inequalities. In any country with liberal democratic aspirations or pretensions, the media are expected to promote national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and territorially bounded belonging, while turning a blind eye to those who fall through the cracks as a result of racism and/or ethnicity. Little wonder that such an exclusionary articulation of citizenship is facing formidable challenges from its inherent contradictions and closures, and from an upsurge in the politics of recognition and representation by small-scale communities claiming autochthony at a historical juncture where the rhetoric espouses flexible mobility, postmodern flux and discontinuity.

Click here to download the full text in PDF format.

Book Review: The social life of 'maids'

Originally published on Pambazuka News

Efua Prah reviews Francis Nyamnjoh's 'Intimate Strangers', a book in which 'we learn and unlearn a lot about human beings and the solidarities they forge and deny one another'.

Through Francis Nyamnjoh’s Immaculate of Mimboland, a foreigner in Botswana, we learn and unlearn a lot about human beings and the solidarities they forge and deny one another.

I think my sense of what was normal and accepted behaviour really got tested as I read the stories Immaculate transcribed for Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny. My surprised reaction really is exemplary of how easy it is to normalise certain ways of being (like what our expectations are and what we measure as acceptable) and categorise relationships according to these definitions.

A Review of Two Books by Francis Nyamnjoh

BARBARA HARLOW (Race & Class, Vol. 51, No. 3, 99-101, 2010)

The Travail of Dieudonné By FRANCIS B. NYAMNJOH (Nairobi, East African Educational Publishers,2008), 164 pp.

Mobile Phones: the new talking drums of everyday Africa By MIRJAM DE BRUIJN, FRANCIS NYAMNJOH and INGE BRINKMAN, eds (Leiden, African Studies Centre/Bamenda, Cameroon, Langaa Research and Publishing, 2009), 173 pp.

Chopngomna is the only one of the habitués gathered in the Grand Canari bar who has a mobile phone; in fact, he ‘owned two mobile phones – the latest cutest and most expensive Nokia and Samsung in town; phones endowed with the fanciest ring tones that made him a popular spectacle around Nyamandem’. The group assembled that day, a day that extended well into evening, however, was more intent on another kind of communication, Dieudonné’s rambling account of his ‘travail’ – travail in the sense of ordeal, but also in the French sense of work or job, since The Travail of Dieudonné, written in English, is set in Mimboland/Cameroon, ruled by President Longstay, where French is but one of the colonial languages, and Dieudonné’s storytelling is also inflected dramatically with local pidgin and indigenous aphorisms and proverbs, along with frequent Insha ‘Allah’s. Nor is Dieudonné interested in a mobile phone of his own, no matter how cute or sexy or even fancy the ringtone, although one of the local beer companies, his favourite, is sponsoring ‘winning caps’ that could, if he were lucky, land him such an otherwise prized possession.

The ethics of research on human subjects in Africa

Apollo Rwomire and Francis B. Nyamnjoh (2007) Challenges and Responsibilities of Social Research in Africa: Ethical Issues.Addis Ababa, The Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA), 212 pages, and paperback, P120, ISBN 99912-572-9-2 (has an index of key names, but not a subject index). Available at BooksBotswana and Exclusive Books.

Reviewed by SHERIDAN GRISWOLD (Originally published in Mmegi Online)

Challenges and Responsibilities of Social Research in Africa: Ethical Issues is a collection of 21 essays that should be of interest to a variety of people, including researchers and consumers of research.

Its editors are well known in Botswana. Apollo Rwomire, a Ugandan, has taught in the Department of Social Work at the University of Botswana (UB) since 1993. His recent books include Social Problems in Africa (2001) and Human Impact on Environment and Sustainable Development in Africa (2003).

Francis B Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian, is an anthropologist and sociologist who has written five works of fiction including The Disillusioned African (1995) and The Travails of Dieudonne (2008). His academic books span topics as diverse as sexuality, xenophobia, democracy, the media and Magical Interpretations, Material Realities (2001).

Review of Francis Nyamnjoh's 'Married but Available'

Vicensia Shule gives an appreciative review of Francis Nyamnjoh's 'Married but Available'.

The title of Francis Nyamnjoh’s 'Married but Available' (MBA) is both inviting and intriguing. Being MBA as opposed to having an MBA! Reading the cover page, it was evident to me that the author had set out to refute, or at least interrogate, the existing practice of people being simultaneously married and available for relationships with persons other their married partners. This is a practice that can be traced to almost all societies of the world. Nyamnjoh sheds light on this phenomenon not only in relation to the traditions of the fictional Mimboland in which the novel is set, but more on the global motives behind the possibility of marriage and availability. The most fascinating aspect of Mimboland is its unique ‘products’, such as Mimbo Wonder beer, Air Mimbo and the University of Mimbo, which surface throughout the novel. 

Book Review: Francis B. Nyamnjoh, (2008). Souls Forgotten.

By Tanja Estella Bosch (Originally published on TEBlog)

This satirical portrayal of the fictional West African 'Mimboland’ begins with the anguished reflections of a rather stereotypical Emmanuel, experiencing an emotional breakdown of sorts after failing university exams. Acutely aware of the unrealistic expectations of his family and the rural villagers who pin all their hopes on his return, Emmanuel simultaneously navigates his way through a shaky relationship and the dirty, dangerous yet glamorous streets of the fast city.

Chose promise, chose dûe : Note de Lecture Souls Forgotten de Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Par Nathalie Gabiam

D’abord je tiens à vous remercier pour l’honneur que vous m’avez fait par la dédicace de ce premier volume de SOULS FORGOTTEN. Comme je vous l’ai dit dans notre discussion, à mon avis, l’histoire de ce roman ne ressemble pas du tout à la trame de vos autres romans que j’ai pu lire. Il me paraît plus profond car le thème étudié porte à réfléchir sur le monde visible et le monde invisible. Sur la relation entre nos pères et nos ancêtres défunts et les préoccupations des villageois par rapport aux préoccupations des citadins. Le cadre est tellement bien décrit que parfois on se retrouve là-dedans ; les quartiers pauvres des villes avec leur misère et le manque d’infrastructures le plus élémentaire (pas d’eau courante, pas de toilettes), l’insalubrité et les gens qui se battent pour survivre.

Note de lecture sur "Marrried But Available" de Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Par Ngo Nlend Nadeige Laure

C’est une image véritablement scabreuse que celle du Mimboland, ou peut être devrait on dire : Libidoland – Bacchus conduisant fatalement à Vénus - que celle projetée dans ce qui tient plus d’un traité sur la sociologie sexuelle que d’une oeuvre de fiction, et dont l’intitulé seule en dit long sur la nature épicée du contenu. Married But Available, pour citer cette dernière sortie littéraire de Francis B. Nyamnjoh, n’a pas failli à la tradition du tragi- comique qui caractérise l’univers de l’auteur. Un univers où l’humour décapant et le dramatique s’allient et se combinent avec une régularité et une aisance difficilement égalables, pour servir à un public chaque fois plus conquis, le divertissant menu que constitue ce qui désormais est connu comme la spécialité du chef, à savoir, les tribulations du Mimboland.

A journey into dejection or the denunciation of resignation: A review of Francis Nyamnjoh’s Souls Forgotten

Souls Forgotten (355 pages; Langaa research and Publishing CIG, 2008)

 Reviewed by George Esunge Fominyen

It took Emmanuel Kwanga four years after dropping out of university to take control of his life and decide to set up an NGO to assist his community reeling in neglect, instead of griping about the fate of the rich and poor, the corrupt and the defenceless in his country Mimboland. Francis Nyamnjoh in Souls Forgotten (2008) used the subtlety of prose to tell Cameroonians in 355 pages what the U.S Ambassdor Janet Garvey said to them via a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Douala in June 2009 : it is time to take ownership of their destiny, their government, their community.

Review of Francis Nyamnjoh’s "A Nose for Money" and "The Travail of Dieudonne"

 by Corinne Knowles, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

Francis Nyamnjoh is a versatile author, switching with apparent ease between scholarly and fictional writing. Having been entertained by his insightful teaching, I anticipated being taught by the entertaining Nose for Money. The novel traces the life journey of Prospere, a guileless Mimbolander who engages the reader from the start with the innocence of his internal life in the face of poverty, adversity and the seduction of money. The novel depicts the schizophrenia of an Africa aspiring to be rich, pretending to care about its people, corruptible by power and socialised into binary roles for men and women.

The Woes of a People Enslaved by Alcohol: A Review of Francis Nyamnjoh’s "The Travail of Dieudonné"

By George Esunge Fominyen

When a social science researcher takes to fictional literature, it is hard to draw the line between reality and imagination. It is the case with Cameroon’s Francis Nyamnjoh; a sound academic  who knows how to tell a story simply and vividly. Apart from deliberate exaggerations by the author, any Cameroonian who has lived in the country for the past quarter of a century reading The Travail of Dieudonné, could easily find their space or that of a person they know in the colourful characters in the novel’s setting of Mimboland.

What’s in a name? Mimbo in Cameroonian pidgin means a drink (from palm wine to champagne). So doped of this potent nectar, are the characters of The Travail of Dieudonné that, they readily accept their unfortunate fate. Theirs is a world of misery in which insultingly rich and corrupt officials reap of an undemocratic government in which poor governance thrives, while the masses abandon themselves to sexual perversity and self-pity with the help of alcohol. In many ways, it is Cameroon seen through a glass of beer and Cameroonians locked inside a bottle of lager.

THE TRAVAIL OF DIEUDONNE - Note de lecture Marie Ndiaye

The Travail of Dieudonné pourrait passer pour le procès de Muzunguland et des Muzungulanders. La vie de Dieudonné sert de trame à cette histoire qui couvre plus d’une soixantaine d’années dans un coin d’Afrique (Warzone) riche de son sol mais appauvri par les choix économiques du colonisateur et par la convoitise des chefs de guerre et des puissances étrangères qui financent la guerre qui le ravage.

Muzunguland a tout pris à Dieudonné : sa terre natale, son père, sa mère et ses sœurs, sa religion, son identité, son nom, sa fierté, sa masculinité, et enfin son épouse, Tsanga. Il se décrit lui-même comme suit : «  je ne suis rien », « nous sommes ce qu’ils veulent que nous soyons ».