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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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.

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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.

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