Humanities & Social Sciences

Books

Landscaping Postcoloniality
2009, author(s)-editor(s) Joyce Ashuntantang
The Dissemination of Cameroon Anglophone Literature This is a foundational text on the production and dissemination of Anglophone Cameroon literature. The Republic of Cameroon is a bilingual country with English and French as the official languages. Ashuntantang shows that the pattern of production and dissemination of Anglophone Cameroon literature is not only framed by the minority status of English and English-speaking Cameroonians within the Republic of Cameroon, but is also a (...)
Mobile Phones
2009, author(s)-editor(s) Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Mirjam de Bruijn
The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa ’We cannot imagine life now without a mobile phone’ is a frequent comment when Africans are asked about mobile phones. They have become part and parcel of the communication landscape in many urban and rural areas of Africa and the growth of mobile telephony is amazing: from 1 in 50 people being users in 2000 to 1 in 3 in 2008. Such growth is impressive but it does not even begin to tell us about the many ways in which mobile phones are being (...)
Mediating Legitimacy
2009, author(s)-editor(s) Jude Fokwang
Chieftaincy and Democratisation in Two African Chiefdoms This study analyses the effects of democratic transition in two African countries - Cameroon and South Africa – on chiefs and the institution of chieftainship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the monograph explores the cultural and socio-political conditions that enabled chiefs to reinvent themselves in the new era of democratic politics despite their status as ‘old political actors’. It explores the kinds of legitimacies claimed by (...)
Cameroon’s Social Democratic Front
2008, author(s)-editor(s) Milton Krieger
Its History and Prospects as an Opposition Political Party (1990-2011) Cameroon’s Social Democratic Front (SDF) was among the watershed challenges in 1990 by sub-Saharan Africa’s democratization forces against autocratic regimes, but it crested in 1992 and has subsided since. Yet the party survives, participates in the National Assembly, maintains a grassroots structure, and prepares for a presidential ballot in 2011 that will probably determine its fate. The author conducted research four (...)
The Cameroon GCE Crisis
2008, author(s)-editor(s) Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Richard Fonteh Akum
A Test of Anglophone Solidarity This book richly documents the battles fought by the Anglophone community in Cameroon to safeguard the General Certificate of Education (GCE), a symbol of their cherished colonial heritage from Britain, from attempts by agents of the Ministry of National Education to subvert it. These battles opposed a mobilised and determined Anglophone civil society against numerous machinations by successive Francophone- dominated governments to destroy their much prided (...)
Building Capacity
2008, author(s)-editor(s) Ngessimo M. Mutaka
Using TEFL and African Languages as Development-oriented Literacy Tools Building Capacity promotes the vision that the teaching of African languages can best achieve its aim of boosting the economic and cultural development of the Africans, if they are made to work in synergy with a revamping of the course contents of international languages that will be taught within the frame of a development-oriented literacy curriculum. Great emphasis is put on the oral skills in the use of African (...)
Imperialistic Politics in Cameroun
2008, author(s)-editor(s) Carlson Anyangwe
Resistance & the Inception of the Restoration of the Statehood of Southern Cameroons It always comes as a surprise to many that the British-administered UN Trust Territory of the Southern Cameroons was not granted independence like other colonial territories but was allowed to fall prey to the territorial expansionism of the contiguous state of Cameroun Republic, a former French-administered UN Trust Territory granted independence on 1 January 1960. This book focuses on the unresolved (...)
Urban Appropriation and Transformation
2008, author(s)-editor(s) Ignasio Malizani Jimu
Bicycle Taxi and Handcart Operators This book is about emerging informal responses to unemployment in Malawi. To the bicycle taxi and handcart operators who are at the centre of the book, informality is a means for negotiating newer experiences and challenges associated with urbanisation. Jimu richly documents how informal economy activities continue to represent grassroots responses to widespread poverty, unavailability of meaningful employment opportunities and the failure of the state (...)
Under The Broken Scale of Justice
2008, author(s)-editor(s) Nyo’ Wakai
The Law and My Times This book explores the latent and sometimes overt undercurrents that have shaped the judicial history of Cameroon since the United Nations Trusteeship period. It is an insightful account by a critical observer privileged to serve as Director of Public Prosecutions and a judge in a post-independence context characterized by dual and often conflictual legal systems inspired by French and English colonialism. Justice Nyo’Wakai demonstrates how the conflict of judicial (...)
The 1961 Cameroon Plebiscite
2008, author(s)-editor(s) John Percival
Choice or Betrayal The United Nations-organised plebiscite on 11 February 1961 was one of the most significant events in the history of the southern and northern parts of the British-administered trust territory in Cameroon. John Percival was sent by the then Colonial Office as part of the team to oversee the process. This book captures the story of the plebiscite in all its dimensions and intricacies and celebrates the author’s admiration for things African through a series of (...)