In 1998, when Geschiere and Gugler addressed the politics of primary patriotism and belonging, multi-partyism and structural adjustment were still rather recent phenomena in Cameroon. Rural hometowns were then described as a resource, giving legitimacy to urban male elites in their endeavour to share the national pie. Identification with the hometown was (and is) institutionalized in hometown associations. De-emphasized in 1998 was the liability that hometown identification could pose to rural–urban migrants in a climate of ‘increasing obsession with autochthony’ (Geschiere and Gugler Reference Geschiere and J.1998: 309). That hometowns were highlighted only as resources in subsequent work on the political implications of hometown associations may be due to the neglect of both non-elite and women's hometown associations. To understand how local conceptions of the units of belonging emerge from lived experience, we need to attend to variation by status and by gender. This approach fits well with the ethnographic field in Cameroon, since many hometown associations are sex-segregated, as well as differentiated by elite and non-elite designations.
This article reveals several ways in which we can reconceptualize hometown associations and belonging. First, it differentiates among actors and associations by gender and status. Second, it addresses the great variety and situationally specific ways Bamiléké women use and interpret the units of belonging (or what constitutes ‘home’). Third, it addresses the autochthony debate from the perspective of allogènes (ethnic strangers), in contrast to a more common focus on autochtones (born from the soil) defending their rights and boundaries. Fourth, the emotions of marginalization and recognition constitute an important aspect of belonging, understandings of home, and involvement in hometown associations. Finally, it suggests that differences in associations’ network structure affect both orientations and actions toward the home place.
Even before democracy and multi-party movements sharpened the politics of belonging in the 1990s, hometown ties were changing and variable, based upon a shared identity contingent on larger political, economic and social contexts (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1969, 1987; Schildkrout Reference Schildkrout1978; Shack and Skinner Reference Shack and Skinner1979; Trager Reference Trager1998, 2001). Among Bamiléké living in Cameroon's capital, Yaoundé, hometown associations are an essential part of urban social organization. At least since 1923, a combination of colonial segregationist urban planning decrees (Dongmo Reference Dongmo1981b) and ‘homegrown’ hometown associations have helped Bamiléké to form ‘urban villages’ (Gans Reference Gans1962), while remaining connected to their communities of origin.Footnote 1 Even while new forms of affiliation cross-cutting ethnic boundaries emerged – especially in the areas of religion, politics and occupation – common ethnic or regional origin replaced or supplemented kinship as an important basis for trust, mutual aid and access to housing and employment. These ties were institutionalized in hometown associations (Barkan et al. 1991; Englund Reference Englund, Tostensen, Tvedten and Vaa2001; Little Reference Little1965; Woods Reference Woods1994).
The organizational forms of Bamiléké hometown associations have endured in Cameroon from the colonial era through two regimes of an independent one-party state to the present. Throughout this period Bamiléké have experienced difficult relations with autochtones, those indigenous to migrants’ receiving communities such as Douala, Nkongsamba and – our focus – Yaoundé.Footnote 2 Nonetheless, the policy of regional balance and the political liberalization of the 1990s dramatically transformed the meanings of Bamiléké hometowns and urban residences (Jenkins Reference Jenkins and J.2002; Fardon Reference Fardon, Fowler and Zeitlyn1996; Nkwi and Socpa 1997). In factional states the party in power distributes scarce state-controlled resources, favouring its affiliated ethnic group or region (Weinreb Reference Weinreb2000). With political competition, ethnic attachment has become ever more important; not only numbers matter, but also attempts to ‘distinguish between citizens who “belong” and others who belong less’ (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2009: 17). Current conditions lend new valency to the Bamiléké collective sense of marginalization and identification with home. This politics of belonging is felt not only in debates and decrees in national (male) party politics, but also in (female) marketplaces, in forms of social interaction in health clinics, and in degrees of cooperation among neighbours. A focus on male elites’ associations as emblematic of the hometown association's influence in the politics of belonging gives a partial view of the important role hometown associations play in the multi-party context and debates about citizenship since the 1990s.
In this contribution, we examine ways that Bamiléké women are negotiating new boundaries in the political and cultural units of belonging. We differentiate between self-defined educated, economically ‘elite’ women (generally those with post-secondary educational degrees and with prominent positions in the civil service, the liberal professions, education and business), and women of lesser (and more varied) educational attainment and economic fortunes, designated here as ‘non-elite’ women. Elite and non-elite women have separate hometown associations; elite women's associations are organized city-wide, while non-elite women's associations are neighbourhood-based. We focus on Bamiléké women's hometown associations because they promote the politically charged ethnic attachments described in the politics of belonging literature. These attachments are not only to the women's village or chiefdom of origin (the hometown), but also to the more encompassing social categories of ‘Bamiléké’ (over 100 interrelated but independent chiefdoms), ‘Westerners’ (from the Western Province), and ‘Grassfielders’ (from the highland Grassfields region that encompasses most of the Western and North-Western provinces). In accordion-like fashion, women draw upon this semantic network of place-based identity to expand and contract the reach of the ‘hometown’ to which they belong.
Most particularly, we investigate malleable concepts of ‘home’ in six Bamiléké women's hometown associations in Yaoundé, Cameroon, hailing from two different ‘villages’ or ‘chiefdoms’ in Ndé Division. For each of these ‘villages’ of origin, we studied one elite and two neighbourhood-based associations. In 2001 and 2002 we undertook a two-round social network and reproductive health survey among the 189 members of two elite and four non-elite Bamiléké women's hometown associations in the capital, Yaoundé.Footnote 3 In 2002, along with a team of Bamiléké women anthropology students, we conducted fifty in-depth follow-up interviews as well as participant observation in urban neighbourhoods and women's meetings to better understand the experience and management of reproductive events within the context of the social networks formed by women's hometown associations. These interviews also addressed women's experiences of living as ethnic strangers in Yaoundé, the pathways to their current residence in Yaoundé, and their personalized knowledge of specific events in twentieth-century Bamiléké history. The aim of this research was to explore how Bamiléké women constructed a relationship between political insecurity and reproductive insecurity. Hometown associations were the arena of this exploration, providing an opportunity to explore the current topic of concepts of home, hometown and exile.
In their talk, their festivals, their fundraising for ‘development’ and their mutual aid during reproductive crises, the women in these associations shift back and forth among concepts of home based in the ‘village’, ‘chiefdom’, ‘people’ (Bamiléké ethnicity) and region. They express their changing senses of ‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘exile’ by linking present-day insecurities to collective memories of past trauma. Women thus create novel discourses on citizenship, grounded in everyday reproductive concerns, history and sociality. Consensus regarding these matters, however, varies according to the social network features of different hometown associations.
We compare concepts of home, belonging and exile between members of elite and non-elite women's hometown associations for several reasons. By focusing on women's networks within their hometown associations, we turn the lens toward relationships, toward the formation rather than the boundaries of group identification, and toward the fluid ways in which interests interact with memories and emotions. The activities through which concepts of ‘home’ are enacted and negotiated hold embodied memories of the mundane activities that are the basis of kin, household and chiefdom-based allegiances. If ‘home’ is what one ‘belongs’ to, it is important to understand this belonging from the perspective of all social actors emanating from these hometowns; we focus on women because the dimension of gender has been egregiously neglected. Nonetheless, merely turning the lens on women's hometown associations is insufficient; after all, the ‘add women and stir’ corrective of the 1970s is now three decades old. By distinguishing among concepts of home in elite and non-elite hometown associations, we reveal ways that bread and butter issues inflect local politics. By differentiating among women on the basis of wealth and education, we note the importance of commensality and reproduction without relegating all women to the hearth.
BAMILÉKÉ ASSOCIATIONAL LIFE AND THE PRODUCTION OF IDENTITY
Bamiléké hometown associations are an important arena in which a sense of Bamiléké-ness is cultivated. Bamiléké ethnic identity combines primordial (genealogical), performative (acting on shared customs and symbols), strategic (choices based on contingencies) and reactive (responding to stereotypes) elements. Originating in the mountainous plateau of the Grassfields, the Bamiléké are one of the most populous groups in Cameroon, comprising around 25 per cent of the country's population. Fact and stereotype combine to lend Bamiléké a reputation for their entrepreneurial drive (Dongmo Reference Dongmo1981a), their history of political opposition to the central state (Bayart Reference Bayart1993; Joseph Reference Joseph1977; Kago Lele Reference Kago Lele1995; Nkwi and Socpa Reference Nkwi, Nkwi and Nyamnjoh1997; Terretta Reference Terretta2000), and their high birth rates (Wakam Reference Wakam1994). Because the Bamiléké were closely involved with the Union des Populations Camerounaises (UPC), which led an armed conflict against the state (1956–73), and because of their predominance among rural–urban migrants, Bamiléké have been the objects of resentment and exclusionary practices. In addition, Bamiléké reproduction draws the interest of demographers (who seek to explain the paradox of a ‘modernity-seeking’ group maintaining high fertility), of competing ethnic groups (who fear future Bamiléké hegemony), and of Bamiléké themselves (who fear threats to their reproductive health) (Feldman-Savelsberg Reference Feldman-Savelsberg1999). Bamiléké reproduction, including aid at vital conjunctures (birth, death) and cultural survival, is a major focus of women's hometown associations.
Bamiléké women's urban hometown associations build on a rich field of associational life originating in rural areas. All of these associations create additional networks of ties to the political and religiously important matrilineal and patrilineal relations of dual-descent kinship groups in Bangangté (Feldman-Savelsberg 1999), and of patrilineal kinship in other parts of Ndé Division (Pradelles de Latour Reference Pradelles de Latour1994). Bamiléké in rural hometowns meet in royal title associations, work groups and chiefdom-based youth associations. During the pre-colonial era parallel title and youth associations existed for women (Tardits Reference Tardits1960; Hurault Reference Hurault1962). Work groups providing mutual aid in agricultural tasks are still common among women (Njiké-Bergeret Reference Njiké-Bergeret2000). Perhaps most important in rural Bamiléké women's extra-kinship associational life is the tontine (ncüa in Bangangté), or rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) (Ardener and Burman Reference Ardener and S.1995; Niger-Thomas Reference Niger-Thomas, Burman and Ardener1995; Rowlands 1995). Rural Bamiléké women's tontines meet regularly, most often based on the traditional eight-day week. Weekly contributions are often as small as 100 FCFA, depending upon individual women's means. Each week one tontine member receives the ‘pot’, and serves bottled drinks to her tontine's co-members. While she may wish to invest her savings in a small business venture, most often a woman's household responsibilities obligate her to spend the pot on school fees, healthcare, food and clothing. Rowlands (1995) observes that this pattern of spending reflects a consistent contrast between men's and women's use of ROSCAs in both the eastern and western Grassfields; his call for ethnographies of different ‘capitalisms’ is analogous to our own reminder of a need for ethnographies of different hometown associations, likewise with attention to gender and economic stratification.
Since their early migration to Yaoundé, urban Bamiléké have built upon rural organizational forms to provide self-help and maintain ethnic identity through the elaborate development of hometown associations.Footnote 4 In Yaoundé, the first Bamiléké immigrants arrived in 1918; segregationist measures by the French colonial government led to their forcible removal from the city centre to the neighbourhoods of Nlongkak, La Briqueterie and – especially – Mokolo in 1923 (Dongmo Reference Dongmo1981b: 87). Facing discrimination by colonial banks, early immigrants soon organized mutual aid associations (loung) based upon the tontines of their hometowns. As the Bamiléké population in Yaoundé increased over time, the loung became more differentiated and related to each other in a hierarchical scheme based upon the territorial units from which they drew membership. These included a ‘general’ association, based on the entire Bamiléké region, as well as associations organized by division, by chiefdom, and then – within chiefdoms – by neighbourhood (Dongmo Reference Dongmo1981b: 247). Only those chiefdoms with the greatest numbers of immigrants, such as Bangangté, could support associations at the neighbourhood level. Then, as now, the structure and functioning of individual mutual aid associations is nearly identical at each of these levels of hierarchy. At least by 1957, three years before independence, the sex ratio for Bamiléké originating in Ndé Division (including Bangangté and Bazou, the two hometowns investigated here) was 100 males to 120 females (Dongmo Reference Dongmo1981b: 93), allowing enough population for sex-segregated associations at each level. Relations and contrasts between current men's and women's hometown associations will be addressed in the next section.
Hometown associations are an outgrowth of mobility and a changing political field, representing diasporic transformations of homegrown organizations. Hometown associations and their tontines do more than help urban dwellers ‘get by’ (se debrouiller) economically; they reinforce and even produce place-based identities. With their organizational potential in an ‘ethnicized’ political field, they have been promoted as the seeds of civil society for purposes ranging from party politics through development to public health (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and J.1999; Mercer et al. 2008; Tostensen et al. 2000; Valente et al. 1997).Footnote 5
For Bamiléké, place-based identity is linked to a long history of political marginalization. Thus, women's hometown associations play a role in managing the vulnerabilities of strangerhood. For urban Bamiléké women who face daily the constraints that ethnic stereotypes place on their social interactions in Yaoundé, self-identity often mirrors back ethnic reputations in public culture, including a knack for organization and loyalty to hometown associations. Hometown associations, in turn, build upon this reputation to produce a positive emotional identification with ‘home’. Meetings of hometown associations are occasions in which key morals are reinforced (through proverbs and sayings antiphonally recited to open the meetings, for example); trust is established through mutual participation in ROSCAs; village news is exchanged; and identification is fostered with the village, its history and its needs (for ‘development’, for example). The women we worked with identified proudly with their ethnicity, even while they associated it with victimization. As we shall see, dual sentiments of pride and exclusion weave like a thread through women's deeply contextualized vocabularies of home.
Nonetheless, belonging or primary patriotism, as sentiments, cannot be directly inferred from women's hometown association membership. First, while membership in at least one hometown association is nearly universal among urban Bamiléké women, a married woman may belong to the hometown association of her own or her husband's chiefdom. Owing to rules of exogamy, many Bamiléké are descended from parents of different hometowns; both women and men may strategically shift their hometown identity in response to situational contexts. Clearly, though, hometown associations both organize and promote sentiments of belonging as well as the material exchanges that undergird these sentiments.
Bamiléké women's hometown associations facilitate the maintenance of ties between urban residents and their home villages. Rural foodstuffs, foster children (who attend school while performing domestic duties) and new migrants (including brides) flow from the countryside to the city. Cash remittances, gifts of consumer goods, visits home for ceremonies (ritual healing, weddings, funerals, and enstoolment of chiefs), and retirees returning to the land of their ancestors flow from urban to rural areas. Many urban dwellers build houses ‘in the land of their ancestors’ (den Ouden Reference den Ouden1987), although not all actually retire to their hometowns. Urban Bamiléké women consider themselves citizens not only of Cameroon but also of their chiefdoms, owing fealty to their paramount chief, who in turn is responsible for the political, physical and spiritual well-being of his subjects. We witnessed numerous visits by the late Mfen Njiké Pokam François of Bangangté to male hometown associations in 1986; visits to women's hometown associations by Bamiléké fons, however, are rare. Hometown associations facilitate ties among members of various urban communities of Bamiléké ‘in exile’ (especially Douala, Nkongsamba and Edea). They provide a point of entry and welcome for visiting kin, trading partners and colleagues in other parts of Cameroon. For many of the women we interviewed, hometown associations had played a helpful role for their parents fleeing les troubles during the 1950s and 1960s, and had facilitated their own education, courtship and migrant itineraries toward Yaoundé.
Ghislaine's story illustrates the way Bamiléké women, including new arrivals, drew upon their hometown associations for help in three main concerns: economic survival, reproductive health and funerals.
Ghislainevi grew up in the Bamiléké diaspora in the Moungo Valley, near Nkongsamba. Her move to Yaoundé as an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl is a case of hopes dashed by reproductive tragedy, and of loneliness mitigated by the support of her hometown association. Living with her cousin to attend school in the capital, Ghislaine met her future husband and within a year became pregnant. She returned to her parents’ home to give birth, completed customary marriage rites, and then settled with her husband in the Bamiléké-dominated, economically impoverished Yaoundé neighbourhood of Mokolo. There she joined the Femmes Bangangté de Mokolo, the longest-standing association in our sample. Newly married and with no friends in the neighbourhood, Ghislaine suffered two devastating losses – her infant son died of malaria, and soon thereafter Ghislaine miscarried her next pregnancy. Remembering these events a decade later, Ghislaine recounted, ‘in any case, the meeting [association] helped me … morally and even financially’. (GM 2002: 31)
In times of particular need or expense, such as Ghislaine's, hometown associations serve as safety nets, allowing women to exchange places in the association's tontine or to draw on special savings funds to get access to immediate cash. The routine rotating savings and credit activities of the tontine help to finance repatriation of deceased family members, licences for market stalls, children's school fees, and reproductive healthcare costs ranging from obstetrics to contraception. Social networks formed within urban Bamiléké women's hometown associations serve as information conduits and provide emotional support. Association members discuss particular health practices, make referrals, and provide personal links to practitioners. They pay a formal visit to mothers recuperating from childbirth, which individuals may supplement with informal visits providing housekeeping services and frequently cited ‘moral support’ (Feldman-Savelsberg et al. 2006). Thus, the social ties in urban Bamiléké women's hometown associations are ‘banks’ of informational, material and affective resources that can be drawn upon when need arises.
The reproductive insecurity Ghislaine experienced is a central part of women's talk surrounding hometown association meetings, and contributes to the production of Bamiléké identity. During association weekly or bimonthly meetings, and even more so during chats surrounding formal meetings, talk about pregnancy, birth and contraception is interwoven with talk about Bamiléké cultural survival. Rumour, collective memories of cultural trauma, and reiteration of the ‘Bamiléké problem’ are interwoven with discussions of childbearing, vaccines, children's education, and the threats of infertility, miscarriage and AIDS (Feldman-Savelsberg et al. 2005b). Women expressively interpret reproductive successes and challenges not only as personal triumphs and tragedies, but also as contributions and disruptions to the reproduction of Bamiléké families, lineages, chiefdoms and a way of life glossed as ‘country fashion’. Thus, while hometown associations provide social capital to help women cope with reproductive events and economic stress, they also socialize individual experience, reconstructing biographies congruent with Bamiléké identity.
SIX HOMETOWN ASSOCIATIONS
Our study of six Bamiléké women's hometown associations reveals that hometown associations contribute to the production of a Bamiléké identity based on common allegiance to a homeplace, to its traditional leader (fon), to values and practices (such as hard work), and to a common experience of marginalization. By the early twenty-first century, women in these associations insisted that their groups were associations based on hometown loyalties and cultural preservation ‘in exile’, rather than economically motivated tontines. All six hometown associations share a common organizational structure. Like men's hometown associations, women's home associations share a hierarchical structure of city-wide and neighbourhood-based units, with separate elite-only associations. Elite and non-elite women's associations differ, however, in terms of motivation for joining, the amount and use to which funds are put, and their degree of autonomy from men's hometown associations.
The six hometown associations we studied had ties to two chiefdoms in Ndé Division, the source of the earliest Bamiléké migration to Yaoundé and one of two divisions (the other was Mifi) with the highest migrant populations in Yaoundé. The two chiefdoms of origin are Bangangté (the site of previous in-depth ethnographic research and a source of prior connections to rural communities) and Bazou. Our research design paired hometown associations from each of these chiefdoms, including two associations from economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods or quartiers populaires (Carrière and Mokolo), two from an economically diverse neighbourhood or quartier mixte (Biyem Assi), and two city-wide associations of femmes élites (also called femmes cadres). These six hometown associations were moderately sized, averaging 27 members. The smallest hometown associations were the elite women's associations.
We distinguish between elite and non-elite women according to their membership in self-labelled hometown associations. While the entire sample is relatively well-educated (two thirds received either a secondary or post-secondary education), the women themselves readily distinguish between those who are femmes élites and those who are not. With only one exception, the femmes élites have at least a university and in most cases graduate-level education, often from overseas universities. On a nine-point economic scale based on household items ranging from running water to a car, the femmes élites consistently score nine. Through their self-understanding as intellectuals, the organizational boundaries of their associations, and their cosmopolitan experiences, elite women clearly distinguish themselves from others. Urban Bamiléké women organized in neighbourhood-based hometown associations likewise distinguished between the femmes élites and nous les pauvres (we the poor).
Some commonalities exist in all six hometown associations, regardless of the elite/non-elite distinction. Meetings are long (over two hours) and well-attended, with 80 per cent or more attending at least monthly. Meetings consist of public oral accounting of contributions to various association accounts (from ‘solidarity’ through ‘death’ to ‘Christmas’), announcements, organization of festivals, and occasional speakers. Responsorial proverbial chants open and close each meeting. With the exception of one association that was founded through a schism in 1998, these associations are all of long duration (Femmes Bangangté de Mokolo has existed since the beginning of the 1960s). Nearly all women participate in their association's tontine, and contribute to the savings fund for cases of death (the most common fund after the obligatory ‘solidarity’ fund). Each association has a president and secretary, and keeps account of contributions in carefully guarded exercise books.
All of the non-elite women's associations that we studied were linked to male associations in their formal constitutions and in practical terms. Once a year, male hometown association members audit the books of women's associations; husbands also exert control by granting or not granting permission for particular women's hometown association activities (such as participating in this anthropological research project!). The relationship between male and female associations betrays non-elite women's struggle to overcome a conflict between autonomy and legitimacy. Their link to male hometown associations lends legitimacy to their activities and decreases husbands’ suspicion that the women are ‘up to something’. While the men may have considered women's associations mere branches of men's home associations, women described their relation to men's groups as one of alliance and respect. At the same time, women's hometown association activities also allow them some independence from marital duties and control. By contrast, elite women did not express struggles for legitimacy and control in their own, autonomous hometown associations. Both elite and non-elite Bamiléké women's hometown associations appear to be less involved than men's in either establishing alliances with the regime or in supporting the opposition. Several elite women testified that party politics was strictly avoided in association meetings.
One dimension along which elite and non-elite women's hometown associations differ is joining behaviour. Elite women most often report being encouraged to join by friends, while non-elite women join groups with kin and affines ‘on their own initiative’. Non-elite women join for company, to support ethnic identity, and for savings and credit. Company is also an explicit motivation for members of elite associations, but savings is not. Members of elite associations consistently claim that they join in order to ‘learn something’, but members of only one of the elite associations joined to support ethnic identity or be part of a community. Reasons women exchange places in the tontine rotation reveal a pattern of differences in economic need. Members of elite associations trade places when they face unspecified ‘problems’, or to help others. Likewise, elite women and association officers are the only ones able to save toward private and advanced education, an important strategy of upward mobility and maintenance of elite status. Women in non-elite hometown associations trade places to pay for school fees or healthcare, basic items that may be part of daily budgets for more fortunate women. The uses to which non-elite women put the savings and credit received from their hometown associations echo Rowlands's observation (1995) that women are concerned with financing domestic needs rather than investing in business.Footnote 7
Urban Bamiléké women, while responsible for hearth and home, are by no means relegated to it. Women's involvement in a rich variety of associations reflects their felt responsibility to people and causes beyond the domestic sphere. Symbolic associations of the hearth with fertility and social reproduction deeply tie women to the foyer, but also heighten their awareness of the existential issues that so affect democratization efforts, as revealed in recent cost-of-living protests (Ruben Reference Ruben2008).
The similarities and contrasts among the six associations we studied frame the ways they contribute to the maintenance of ties between hometowns and urban communities. As explored below, women in elite and non-elite hometown associations differ in the ways they define (and indeed experience) their hometowns, urban communities and multiple belongings.
CONTEXTUALIZED GEOGRAPHICAL VOCABULARIES OF HOME AND EXILE
Urban Bamiléké women generate vocabularies of home and hometown at varying levels of specificity responding to concerns emerging from broader contexts (cf. Trager Reference Trager1998). These levels of specificity constitute the units of belonging, according to place,Footnote 8 politico-administrative unit, geographical region or genealogical/affective culture. Bamiléké women from elite as well as non-elite associations adjusted their vocabularies and geographies of home according to the perceived audience and to the current conversational theme. We first explore non-elite women's concepts of home, followed by those held by members of elite hometown associations.
‘Chez nous les Bamiléké’: allogène economics among the non-elite
Members of non-elite Bamiléké hometown associations elided their place of origin and their ethnic identity. When describing customs or comparing themselves to locals (autochtones), they used general expressions such as chez nous les Bamiléké, equating ‘Bamiléké’ with ‘tribe’ (tribu). Non-elite women used ‘tribe’ most often to decry the ‘tribalism’ that accompanied ‘multi-partyism’.Footnote 9 ‘Tribe’ became a complaint about job discrimination, such as the statement that ‘tribal affiliation is important, but then it's just discrimination when one looks for work’ (TP 2002: 48). Several women practising petty commerce, in the Bamiléké-dominated Mokolo market and in the more ethnically mixed market of La Carrière, attributed anti-Bamiléké prejudice to competition for market stalls and licences. In non-elite Bamiléké women's perception, identity as Bamiléké complicated making a living in the (Bamiléké-dominated) niche of urban market commerce. Poor Bamiléké women's struggles against official discrimination to fulfil their familial provider role reveal the public dimension of ‘domestic affairs’. The February/March 2008 unrest over fuel, cost of living and President Biya's longevity in office (Ruben Reference Ruben2008) exemplifies the importance of these bread and butter issues for the political sphere. Consistent with Barth's early work on ethnic boundaries (1969), identifying with ‘home’ happens most where boundaries are defined, and in Cameroon's capital these boundaries are painful ones indeed.
‘Chefferie de …’: non-elite allogène emotions and administrative categories
Women in non-elite associations actively relate the pain of discrimination to memories of past flight from their homeland. Often, their migration histories started as young children when their families fled the violence of les troubles (1956–73). Spanning seventeen years surrounding Cameroon's independence, this civil war pitted the UPC anti-colonial, ‘radical nationalist’ armed movement against the harsh counterinsurgency measures of the French trusteeship administration and its heirs (Joseph Reference Joseph1977; Feldman-Savelsberg et al. 2005a). ‘Home’ is no longer a general chez nous les Bamiléké, but rather is localized in particular chiefdoms. ‘The maquisards destroyed chez nous, at Bazou. [The fon] had built a two-storey palace there. The maquisards, they burned down the two-storey building chez nous. It was the chefferie [palace grounds]’ (TJ 2002: 41). Perhaps it is not surprising that specific stories of a push-factor event in individual women's migration histories are associated with a more geographically (and administratively) circumscribed referencing of the ‘hometown’.x When drawing conclusions about the long-term effects of this ‘original flight’, women's shift from family stories to master narratives of Bamiléké collective memory is paralleled by a shift of ‘home’ back from chiefdom to tribe: ‘Bamiléké are always chased away; they are strangers everywhere’ (NR 2002: 69).
Communities of strangers are arenas where emotions of exile intersect with the jural realm of administrative categories, illustrating the deeply contextualized nature of the cognitive geography of home. Several women recounted growing up in Nkongsamba, a town constructed at the end of the railway during the colonial period, and the surrounding Moungo Valley, areas settled with Bamiléké labour migrants and their families (they formed almost 95 per cent of the population). Women who grew up there described neighbourhoods defined by families originating in the Ndé, Mifi or Menoua (districts), internally distinguished by ‘chiefdoms’ or ‘villages’. ‘I grew up in Nkongsamba, in the Moungo. There were a lot of Bamiléké in our neighbourhood … it was mixed, Ndé, Mifi [districts], my neighbour was even from Batoufam … there were the Bangwa, the people of Baham, Bayangam [chiefdoms]. Many were our own, from the Ndé [district]’ (NG 2002: 68). Reminiscent of classic understandings of segmentary opposition (see, for example, Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1940), urban Bamiléké women eschew genealogizing to invoke administrative categories – of colonial origin – as a way to create ever-finer distinctions of hometown allegiance within a larger conglomeration of Bamiléké united by their common experience as ‘strangers’ and migrants.
‘Ethnie’ and ‘village’: emotions of recognition among the elite
Members of elite women's hometown associations shared this contextualized notion of home. Many of them had been raised in Yaoundé, and referred to a multi-layered sense of ‘home’ in reference to wider public discourse. When talking about foreigners’ knowledge of Cameroon, one woman declared, ‘If people know about Cameroon, they know about the West, and the West is the Bamiléké’ (ND 2002: 54). They also spoke more about what they considered to be core Bamiléké values: ‘Being Bamiléké means to be part of an ethnic group (ethnie) that has force morally, in terms of work, and in terms of culture, and we are proud of it … . Bamiléké need to have dignity, and in terms of politics now Bamiléké are in the process of taking it’ (ND 2002: 54). Their pride stems more from belonging to an ethnic group than to a particular place.
In contrast to members of economically mixed or struggling neighbourhood-based hometown associations, elite women rarely referred to a particular village. Only in one case, when a prominent physician described the high achievement of professional women from her hometown, was that hometown described on the village level; the five female doctors she mentioned all came from her village, a sub-chiefdom within the chiefdom that had organized her hometown association (NJ 2002: 77). As we shall see below, she describes this same village as in need of ‘development’. According to busy elite women, the point of hometown associations is to pool resources to organize ‘development’ in the form of infrastructural projects for the hometown, furthering the value of recognition.
This self-confident rendering of identity among elite women should not lead us to think that elite women are insulated from perceived anti-Bamiléké discrimination. Quite the contrary – they are quite articulate about their own and their parents’ experiences during les troubles, using flight during the UPC war as a metaphor for exclusion in current-day Cameroon: ‘you go right, you go left to flee the guns; you go right, you go left, and you sense that you are discriminated against’ (NJ 2002: 76). One elite woman describes a positively evaluated trait, the Bamiléké penchant for intense involvement in hometown associations, as a source of negative perceptions by others:
People meet according to their tribes. The Bamiléké go to make their réunion … which makes things stay within the tribes, and like that, bon généralement, the Bamiléké are always and always badly seen. ‘This person is more Cameroonian than me.’ There are always those who are more integrated than others. [It's] a hierarchy among the tribes. (KG 2002: 1–2; see also TJ 2002: 40)
Echoing the hesitancy of Bamiléké ministers to be seen together, lest they be suspected of conspiracy against the regime (Kago Lele 1995: 87–8), elite women's statements reveal the emotionally charged perspective of the excluded (where ‘home’ is less important than ‘ethnie’) in the politics of belonging.
Urban communities: citizenship, quartier, and exil for elites and non-elites
Where one most needs to be integrated, and is most likely to feel the ‘hierarchy among the tribes’, is not ‘at home’ but in the cosmopolitan urban setting in which hometown associations emerge. Bamiléké women living in Yaoundé at the turn of the twenty-first century poignantly express their feelings of not being perceived as full citizens in their urban residences. We have seen that their hometown associations have contradictory effects with regard to the emotions and politics of belonging and citizenship. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh's (2000) discussion of citizenship raises a series of questions regarding what constitutes ‘at home’. State actors seek to deny likely opponents the right to vote by capitalizing on ambiguities surrounding such qualifications as ethnic hometown, urban residence, place of birth, and anticipated place of burial. For the urban Bamiléké women we spoke to, the ‘politics of belonging’ encompasses the emotions of loyalty and recognition as much as the rights and duties of anthropologists’ jural sphere. Often part of families resident in the capital for multiple generations, Bamiléké women born in Yaoundé express the trauma of rejection in being labelled as strangers (allogène). Such emotions are at the core of a concept of cultural citizenship, in which migrants ‘claim rights to belong’ Rosaldo (1994: 57) on the basis of shared cultural identity that may not be recognized by hosts (Ong Reference Ong1995, Reference Ong2003).Footnote 11
Those who are considered allogène – that is, Bamiléké in Yaoundé – are often identified as strangers by the name on their identity card. Despite their stranger label, non-elite urban Bamiléké women identify strongly with their neighbourhoods (quartiers) in Yaoundé, and organize their hometown associations on a neighbourhood basis. Of the three neighbourhoods we studied, Mokolo is the oldest and has had a strong Bamiléké presence since it was founded by displaced indigènes following a French segregationist decree (Dongmo Reference Dongmo1981b: 87; Socpa forthcoming 2010). A Bamiléké ritual obligation to build a house as a precondition for marriage and its resultant building boom contributed to the creation of new neighbourhoods to the north of Mokolo, illustrated by Rosalie's account in which she contrasts her own unusual situation with the more typical path followed by her fellow association members. Married to a Beti, this mother of four ‘still’ lived in rental housing. ‘Among the Bami,xii there are a lot of kids who don't get married to live in rental housing. Instead they build their own house before going to find a wife’ (NR 2002: 68). In La Carrière, founded in the early 1970s (Dongmo Reference Dongmo1981b: 90), Bamiléké took advantage of opportunities for land ownership created by government urban planning through the Mission d'Aménagement et d'Equipement des Terrains Urbains et Ruraux (MAETUR). The third neighbourhood we studied, Biyem-Assi, was formed in a similar way a decade later.
Many of the elite women we studied spent their childhood in the older Yaoundé neighbourhoods now populated by non-elites. They describe neighbourhoods formed through word of mouth (informational networks), as Bamiléké of various chiefdoms heard about and bought plots of land near to their co-ethnics. ‘Perhaps someone among their brothers came to buy something and returned to say “Good, I've taken something here, come too, there's land.” It goes from mouth to mouth’ (KG 2002: 1). Elite women referenced state administrative (district) units to explain ways hometown ties organized a quartier defined by an overarching ethnie: ‘We were part of a Bamiléké majority in the neighbourhood; there were clusters of houses there from the Ndé, and over there from the Mifi, and further down from the Menoua’ (KG 2002: 1).
For both elites and non-elites, the state-run urban planning (MAETUR) so essential to new neighbourhood formation resulted in the expropriation of land from the local Ewondo. Two decades later the autochthony debate gave voice to Ewondo resentment of the Bamiléké ‘invasion’, and organized bands of youths sought to chase away the allogènes (Socpa forthcoming 2010).
Thus, while for many women their neighbourhoods constitute ethnic enclaves, the quartier is constantly threatened by the risk of anti-Bamiléké vandalism and being thrown out of one's home by locals claiming the land as theirs. Disputes over land titles and land speculation were central in women's description of their urban communities.
The problem is also that the autochtones, when they come they sell the land and don't manage to construct nice houses … and they see that those who bought the land constructed nice houses. Before [in the 1990s] they said the Bamiléké must return home. When they saw the big houses there they told themselves that perhaps they could get [recupérer] that nice house there. (KG 2002: 3)
Many women referred to a 1999 arson attack at the Bamiléké-dominated Marché Mokolo, that helped define the ‘neighbourhood’ as a risky residence rather than a place of refuge. Neighbourhoods were not only physically but also culturally risky; non-elite Bamiléké women spoke of urban temptations and cosmopolitan values facing their children, and their fear that the next generation would ‘forget’ who they are. One non-elite woman worried that urban children would grow up not being able to speak their ‘native’ languages or appreciate ‘home’ dishes (MT 2002: 25).Footnote 13
Many of the elite women we interviewed with the money to pay for new land and to build large villas have moved from the older working-class ethnic enclaves of their childhoods to recently founded developments, such as Awaï Rivière and Ekié. Elite women describe their moves not in terms of status seeking, but of flight from land disputes in old neighbourhoods: ‘Bamiléké are chased away from land that they've bought, because others are jealous that Bamiléké look ahead’ (ND 2002: 57). These women refer directly to the autochtone/allogène controversy: ‘Allogène is a word of hate’ (ND 2002: 57). ‘Tribalism is a way to control/manage [gérer] people’ (NJ 2002: 74).
Given the circumstances of risk for urban, allogène Bamiléké when ‘home’ elides with ‘ethnie’, elite Bamiléké women's unique usage of ‘exile’ may be unsurprising. Fully conversant with international human rights discourse, in which exile refers to involuntary international migration, Bamiléké women use exil to describe their experiences with voluntary, domestic migration. Exile is for those who are not ‘at home’ (chez soi) and cannot hope to be at home in their new residence; exile for elite Bamiléké women is a state of cultural citizenship denied, even while the formal rights and duties of jural citizenship may apply.xiv Elite Bamiléké women's use of exil captures their sense of the injustice of a stranger label applied to families that may have resided in Yaoundé for several generations: ‘les Bamiléké qui sont en exil c'est ça’ (ND 2002: 58). One mother of teens described the perpetuation of the feeling of internal exile through the treatment her children received from other youth; her children had been called by the epithet ‘Bosniak’, equating them with impoverished, homeless refugees seen on the evening news (NJ 2002: 75).
Women's pain at being perpetual strangers reveals a contrast between hometown association ‘belonging’ and women's affective ‘belonging’ in the charged context of the quartier. Hometown associations are formal organizations, organized on the chiefdom level; in their vocabulary of ‘home’, women referred to this common organizational denominator as their ‘village’. In contrast, women's discourse about risk in their neighbourhoods emphasized the increasingly politically relevant category ‘Bamiléké’. The public sphere of multi-party politics, where ever more-encompassing ethnies and regions gain relevance, intrudes into the ‘structure of feeling’ of women's neighbourhood lives and relationships (James Reference James1997). Urban communities where professional women make their fortunes and raise their families are not ‘home’; neither is the hometown, although hometowns are perceived as potential sites of refuge and future retirement homes. Hometown associations link these two not-quite-homes together.
CONTRASTING TIES BETWEEN HOMETOWNS AND URBAN COMMUNITIES
Two vignettes capture differences among elite and non-elite women in the ways that they construct ties between their hometowns and their urban communities. Indicative of the ways that hometown associations have been transformed from rotating savings and credit associations to organizations fostering a distinctive identity in ‘exile’, non-elite hometown associations organize festivals to bring village culture to the quartier. In these instances, village culture is embodied in songs, proverbs, distinguished guests and foodstuffs. In July 2001, we attended the ‘Day of the Bazou Girl’ (Journée de la Jeune Fille Bazou). As in the weekly meetings of the sponsoring neighbourhood-based hometown association, the Femmes Bazou de Biyem Assi, the festival opened with a call and response in local language. This ritualized opening emphasized a theme of solidarity and cooperation among co-ethnics and was led by the association officers, rendered visible through their finery. Indeed, one of these officers, the aunt of a research assistant, had invited us to the festival. Earlier, during our participant observation in association meetings, we had witnessed the ways that women's hometown association members had involved others in the organization of this event, especially the mixed-gender Association of Bazou Youth. At the festival, the ‘girls’ (mostly high school and some undergraduate students) dressed in identical clothing made of blue and white cotton reminiscent of Grassfields blue and white royal display cloth. They gave speeches about Bazou values of hard work, modesty and fidelity, while the ‘boys’ struggled with the sound system.
The ‘Day of the Bazou Girl’ included the auctioning of a ‘traditional Bazou meal’ replete with culinary symbols of fertility. These included a pudding made of koki beans and palm oil. Bamiléké explain that cooked beans swell like a pregnant belly, while palm oil is red as the blood of childbirth. Upon investiture into office, a new fon distributes exactly this mixture of beans and palm oil to his subjects (Feldman-Savelsberg Reference Feldman-Savelsberg1999). The urban Bazou food auction implied that the buyer supports the promotion of ethnic identification at the same time that she ingests the potential to fill up her stomach and her womb. These symbolic linkages among food, feeding and fertility provide a language of pride as well as an antidote to the reproductive insecurity that has been central to Bamiléké identity over at least the past half-century (Feldman-Savelsberg et al. 2005a).
The Journée de la Jeune Fille Bazou is a clear example of a hometown association actively promoting ‘primary patriotism’ to the hometown. While the six women's hometown associations we studied all promote connection to rural areas of origin based on practical, affective and moral concerns, the content of these concerns varies among the associations. If we examine merely the moral or normative side of hometown patriotism, the festival described above emphasizes maintenance of rural hometown values and symbols. Non-elite efforts to bring the culture, food and fertility of the village to the city contrast with elite women's accounts of their hometown associations’ work and their sense of moral obligation to the hometown. Secure enough to de-emphasize mutual aid for their members, elite women's hometown associations organize development aid for the ‘village back home’.
While elite hometown associations may often start their meeting with call and response proverbial ‘passwords’ in local language, as do their neighbourhood-based non-elite counterparts, they quickly get down to other business, using the refined French language of their extensive education. Quite a few members ‘attend’ the meetings on their mobile phones, calling in suggestions or being called about tasks assigned to them. These women make clear that they are members not only of the financial elite of their chiefdom's urban dwellers, but most importantly members of the educated, professional elite. Outside the meeting setting, in individual interviews, they often describe their personal attempts to raise the intellectual ‘level’ of the hometown association meetings (LL 2002: 35). This self-confident, elite point of view is expressed in their attitudes toward their hometowns (chiefdoms or ‘villages’ where they have often spent little time in residence). This hometown is ‘au village’, and a village, after all, is in need of development (see, for example, NJ 2002: 77). It lacks the infrastructure and amenities of the urban community; that its ‘obvious’ need for development is perceived as due to Bamiléké marginalization on the political scene rather than inherent ‘backwardness’ does not make the hometown any less needy for ‘development’. This development does not come easily.
Several years, at least a decade ago, our association went to the village to assess their development needs. We decided to build a bridge over a certain creek to help the villagers get their wares to market. We were to supply the materials, and the villagers were to supply the labour. Oh, it dragged on so long. This person had to wait for this other person who knew about concrete. Then someone had to attend a funeral. Another organized a death celebration. It took years, and actually paying some key players for their labour, but finally the bridge was built. Last year we started organizing for our next project to bring development to our village. Quite a few of us work in medicine or public health. So we decided that providing potable water was one of the most important things we could do. Certainly this was important to the mothers in the village. We determined that the fountain should be placed in a certain quartier in the village, near the chefferie [palace]. It was a long story. Who would transport the materials we donated? Who would build it? Who would maintain it once it was built? No one wanted to do so without pay. I tell you, Pamé, after a while we just gave up. The fountain is still not built. (NJ 2001: PFS's fieldnotes)
In this account, the ‘hometown’ is a site of obligation and ‘development’, and also one of frustration.
URBANITES AND URBAN VILLAGERS: EXPLAINING SOME OF THE CONTRASTS IN CONCEPTS OF HOME
To better grasp the implications of the politics of belonging, we need to know what people belong to. Thus it is crucial to delineate actors’ ideas about what a hometown is, how current residences are experienced, and what organizations, activities and sentiments tie urban dwellers to their hometowns. In this contribution we focus on a differentiated set of female allogène actors, the members of six Bamiléké hometown associations in Yaoundé. We thus not only add a gender dimension to discussions of the politics of belonging, but also distinguish between views held by elites and non-elites. For both groups the spatial and temporal referents of the hometown expand and contract in response to thematic, interactional and political contexts. In addition, sentiment appears central to belonging and to ironic domestic struggles for cultural citizenship. This sentiment is historically rooted,xv and history is experienced in distinctive ways by elite and non-elite Bamiléké women.
For the women we studied, the past frames the present. Bamiléké have a long history of both mobility and marginalization in Cameroon. They are the allogènes that other home associations attempt to exclude. At various points in the twentieth century Bamiléké women have linked labour recruitment, armed conflict and public health campaigns to their personal struggles with health and fertility. In their shifting senses of ‘home’, women express ways that political and corporeal insecurities of the past are an interpretive frame to make sense of the present. Their hometown associations are loci of Bamiléké women's communication, negotiation and performance regarding the past and its relevance for the present. They help to transform personal and family recollections into collective memories. But not all hometown associations process the past in the same way. Patterns in the ways that elite and non-elite women's hometown associations negotiate memories of their traumatic history seem to correspond with different definitions of ‘home’ and relations to the hometown. It is not only that the insecurities of the past and present are experienced differently by elites and non-elites. Elites and non-elites also differ in the shape of the relationships they form in their hometown associations. The social network structures of women's hometown associations, whether emphasizing bonding or bridging social capital, lead to greater or lesser consensus regarding the shape of Bamiléké history. Strikingly, members of neighbourhood-based non-elite associations exhibit greater consensus in these matters than do members of city-wide elite hometown associations.
Several of the non-elite hometown associations exhibit features of ‘urban villages’: they are tightly bounded, densely knit networks with broadly based, multiplex ties, geographically concentrated in ethnic enclaves (Gans Reference Gans1962). Their members not only meet on association days, but also walk with each other to meetings, sit next to each other in the market place, and buy necessities and phone cards at the same neighbourhood boutiques. These features are reflected in the network structures of their hometown associations, especially low distance and low centrality measures (in other words, lack of sociometric hierarchy) (Freeman Reference Freeman1979). This network structure – in which status within the association is evenly spread, and everyone communicates rather densely with all members of the association – contributes to consensus regarding the past. Women in non-elite hometown associations tended to define les troubles as the most important event affecting the Bamiléké over the past century. The UPC insurgency of 1956–73, concentrated in the hometowns of the Bamiléké highlands, becomes a master frame through which women interpret the struggles and slights of the present. Non-elite women agree that their home, made vulnerable during the conflict, should be carefully preserved even in urban ‘exile’. These same women seek to maintain the cultural values and customs of ‘home’ in hometown association meetings through their opening and closing call-and-response, their use of local language and proverbs, and their organization of festivals that celebrate (and even auction) markers of home.
Members of elite hometown associations develop social networks consisting of more diverse and specialized ties. Except for a very few pairs of women who work in the same ministries, members of elite hometown associations tend to meet each other only during formal association meetings. They maintain ties not only with each other, but also with colleagues and with neighbours of a variety of ethnic origins. Their assessments of Bamiléké history are more varied than those of non-elite women; they more actively relate les troubles, and other more distant events during the colonial era, to specific recent events in Cameroonian and Yaoundé municipal politics. Their varied concepts of ‘home’ and of ‘exile’ reflect the diversity of their social ties, reaching far beyond the neighbourhood confines of an ‘urban village’. Likewise, rather than bringing ‘home’ to their urban communities, elite women maintain their ties to their villages of origin by bringing the more universalistic standards of ‘development’ to their specific hometowns.
Why do these differences matter? The role of hometown associations in the politics of belonging is perhaps more variegated than debates between the poles of ‘divisiveness’ and ‘civic engagement’, or of ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’, would lead us to think. First, gender matters. A focus on party politics, economic development, and the hometown associations of male elites may contribute to an understanding of hometown associations in terms of factional politics of ethnoterritorialism; looking from a different perspective, Bamiléké female participants of these institutions in Yaoundé understand their hometown associations in terms of one element in an existential struggle for health, livelihood and cultural survival in a community of exile. Second, status matters. For non-elite women, the hometown association is the centrepiece of a system of mutual support and a means to (re)create hometown identities within urban ethnic enclave communities. For elite women it is a site of obligation, and only one of many institutions competing for their loyalty.xvi
Third, perspective in local hierarchies of belonging matters. The Bamiléké women we worked with bring their perspectives as perpetual outsiders. The narratives from which their vocabularies of ‘home’ emerge are emotionally charged, lamenting exclusion and yearning for recognition. Fourth, the structure of relationships matters. Bamiléké organize separate hometown associations along the dimensions of gender and status. In women's associations, elites and non-elites differ in their degree of encapsulation. These structures create differing opportunities for communication and negotiation in which the sentiments of being allogène are processed. Finally, contrasting network structures of bonding versus bridging ties do not map perfectly onto concepts of a divisive ‘politics of belonging’ versus a positive politics of place emphasizing ‘moral conviviality’ (Mercer et al. 2008: 25). Neither the elite nor the non-elite women's associations that we studied exploited affinity for elite political ends, largely because their relations to the state were (purposefully) much weaker than parallel men's associations. But it was exactly among the non-elites, more inclusive in terms of educational and economic status but highly encapsulated, that moral conviviality was most dramatically enacted through speeches regarding right and wrong ways to live together and commensality to cement these ties.
Gender, status, network structure and sentiment may vary across hometown associations, but all hometown associations are based on a ‘home’. Our contribution reveals that it is not only the actors and their associations, but also the hometowns themselves that must be conceptualized in highly differentiated ways. Bamiléké women's context-specific uses and interpretations of ‘home’, ‘hometown’, ‘neighbourhood’, ‘belonging’ and ‘exile’ reveal the not-so-stable units of political and cultural allegiance. If the ‘politics of belonging’ approach – the most recently established paradigm in the political anthropology of Cameroon – identified ‘a trend towards what one might call the “villagization” of national politics’ (Geschiere and Gugler Reference Geschiere and J.1998: 309), ten years later it behooves us to understand how the participants themselves understand au village. Through women's eyes, we witness situations of an ‘ethnicization’ of ‘home’. Women, ever the guardians of country fashion, play a unique role in defining the many meanings of ‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘exile’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the collaboration on this project over many years of Dr Song Yang (specialist in social network analysis); our Cameroonian interviewers and data managers (Nkwidjan Henriette, Wouetie Fandio Sidovie, Nguepne Duplexine, Kamga Hortense, Nyatcha Nathalie, Nkonguin Nsifa Nelly, Chingwe Evelyn, Mireille, Ariane, Wata Mireille, and Tamen Yvonne); and Jen Lasley, Drew Riley, Lauren Simpson and Rachel Popielarz for working with the interview and survey data. We thank the members of the six women's associations, as well as Dr Tantchou Justine, for their cooperation. We have benefited greatly from the comments of panel organizers, members and audiences who participated in the African Studies Association session on Hometowns, Associations and Concepts of Home in Africa and the African Diaspora, and the American Anthropological Association session on Reconstituting Political and Legal Anthropology in Africa, both in 2007; we would like especially to recognize Elisha Renne, Knut Myhre, Todd Sanders, Martin Evans and Ben Page. This work could not have been completed without the generous collegial, practical and emotional support of Joachim Savelsberg. The research for this contribution has been supported by awards to Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg of a Fulbright Dissertation Research Award, the Wenner- Gren Foundation, the Sigma Xi Foundation, an NSF Graduate Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Anthropological Demography, a National Science Foundation Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education award (Grant No. SES-0074789), and a Bush sabbatical grant from Carleton College. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or other granting agencies.
