Francis Nyamnjoh

"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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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)