Langaa Editorial Board

The editorial board draws on a community of scholars and writers, from the continent and abroad, who engage Cameroon’s and Africa’s experience in all domains. Its collaborative responsibility includes policy advice for the publications list, the solicitation of manuscripts designed to promote that policy, and the rigorous peer review of those manuscripts prior to publication.

Professor Aloysius Ajab AMIN is the Chair of Economics Department, College of Social Sciences, KIMEP, Kazakhstan in Central Asia. He served as Director; Deputy Director and Head of Training at the UN Institute for Economic Development and Planning (UN IDEP, Dakar) for ten years. He has taught economics at Boston University, Pennsylvania State University, Buea University, the University of Yaoundé and Yaoundé II where he also held several administrative positions. He has also taught at School of Public Works – Yaoundé, AERC (JFE) – Nairobi, Kenya, and MEFMI-Harare, Zimbabwe. Professor AMIN has carried out consultancies with UN agencies and international organisations including WB, EU, ADB, IMF, and Program Consultant of the TrustAfrica Investment Climate and Business Environment (ICBE), Dakar. To his credit, he has published many books, journal articles, book chapters and written many reports in the areas of economic growth, human development, health, education planning, child labour, poverty and development.

Beban Sammy Chumbow is Emeritus Professor, University of Yaounde 1 and Vice President of the Cameroon Academy of Sciences. He has served as Rector/Vice Chancellor for the Universities of University of Yaounde 1,Ngaoundere, and Dschang in Cameroon. He has also served as Member of the CODESRIA Scientific Committee, and is currently Member of the African Academy of Languages (African Union). Professor Chumbow is a leading linguist and has published extensively on various aspects of language development and nation-building in Africa.

Mirjam de Bruijn is a senior researcher at the African Studies Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, where she is head of the research group ‘Connections and Transformations’. She is Professor of African Studies (Contemporary History and Anthropology of West and Central Africa) at Leiden University and director of the research masters ‘African Studies’ based in Leiden University and coordinated by the ASC. Her research fields developed around the theme mobility. She conducted research in various countries in West and Central Africa (in the period from 1986 to present): She completed (interdisciplinary) projects on nomadism, climate change, migration, conflict and poverty. Currently she coordinates the research programme ‘Consortium for Development Partnership’ in collaboration with CODESRIA. She is partner in a research programme on Mobilty and resources that was granted by the Volkswagen stiftung in 2008. She was awarded a research grant for a 5 years research programme on Marginality, communication and mobility in Africa that started in 2008 in narrow collaboration with University of Cape Town. Recently she got a small grant to do research on new mobilities among pastoralists in urbanized regions in Niger and Nigeria (Oxfam-Novib). She has a wide variety of publications and edited volumes.

Rosemary Ekosso was born and grew up in Buea. After her secondary education in QRC Okoyong and Baptist High School, Great Soppo, she moved to the University of Yaounde, where she earned a degree in English and French. She returned to her home town for postgraduate studies at the University of Buea, qualifying as a translator and interpreter. From 1996,she worked for Cameroon government bodies until 2003, when she joined the international civil service as a translator/interpreter. The House of Falling Women is her first novel.

Harri Englund is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is also Research Associate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and Docent of African Studies at the University of Helsinki. He has carried out research among Chichewa/Nyanja speakers in South-Central Africa for over two decades. He has written and edited several books on rights discourses, Christianity, war and displacement, mass media and democratisation. His book Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (University of California Press, 2006) was awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His most recent books are Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio (Indiana University Press, 2011) and the edited volume Christianity and Public Culture in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2011). His current research explores arguments about freedom and belonging in Africa’s vernacular media in both colonial and contemporary contexts.

Emmanuel Fru Doh received a Ph.D from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. With over twenty years’ experience on different university and college campuses, while also being scholarly active, Doh has a passion for learning and teaching invigorated by the conviction that a good educator never stops trying to learn so as to successfully wade the ever mounting and equally challenging trends in the life of a professor. He is currently in the Department of English at Century College in Minnesota, USA.

Dr Roselyne M. Jua teaches English and American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Buea, where she is Dean of the Faculty of Arts. She has published articles in peer reviewed journals and edited the plays of Victor E. Musinga among which The Barn and The Tragedy of Mr. No-Balance. She is co-author with Bate Besong, of To the Budding Creative Writer: A Handbook.

Dr Piet Konings is a sociologist of development who has worked at the African Studies Centre in Leiden (The Netherlands) for more than 30 years. After his retirement in 2008 he has remained attached to this institute as an honorary fellow. He has carried out extensive research on the political economy and civil society in West Africa, notably in Ghana and Cameroon, and has published widely in these fields’. His most recent publications include: Neoliberal Bandwagonism: Civil Society and Politics of Belonging in Anglophone Cameroon and Crisis; Neoliberal Reforms in Africa: Civil Society and Agro-Industry in Anglophone Cameroon’s Plantation Economy; The Politics of Neoliberal Reforms in Africa: State and Civil Society in Cameroon; and Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon.

Milton Krieger taught in the general education Africa and “global South” curriculum at Western Washington University, 1970-2003. Study elsewhere in Africa and writings on Nigeria preceded research four times in Cameroon, 1989-1999, with short publications in policy areas of education, language and culture (focused on Maurice Tadadjeu and the periodical Abbia) and two books on recent and contemporary politics, African State and Society in the 1990s: Cameroon’s Political Crossroads (co-authored, 1998) and Cameroon’s Social Democratic Front (2008).Retirement activity includes political asylum advocacy for Cameroonians in the U.S.A.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 as Professor of Social Anthropology from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where he served as Head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009. He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana, where he was awarded the “Senior Arts Researcher of the Year” prize for 2003. He is a 2010 B2 rated Professor and Researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF), and a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science since August 2011. Dr Nyamnjoh has published widely on globalisation, citizenship, media and the politics of identity in Africa. He has also published seven ethnographic novels. His books include: Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (Zed Books, 2005) and Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (CODESRIA/ZED Books, 2006).

Michael Rowlands is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His research interests include the theorisation and conceptualisation of cultural heritage and material culture studies in relation to issues of cultural transmission. His most recent research in Cameroon and China has been concerned with how ideas of heritage have been built into development discourses and how these are used to transform ideas of locality and community. He has conducted field research in West Africa (Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia) and S.W. China and currently he coordinates a cultural heritage research project between China and Europe co-funded by the British Academy and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 

Dibussi Tande was born in Buea, Cameroon in 1968. A poet, journalist, essayist and blogger, he holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Law and a post-graduate diploma in Political Science from the University of Yaounde, and Masters degrees in Political Science and Instructional Technology from Northeastern Illinois University (Chicago) and Northern Illinois University (DeKalb) respectively. He is author of No Turning Back (2007) and Scribbles from the Den: Essays on Politics and Collective Memory in Cameroon (2009). He has established himself as Cameroon’s preeminent blogger, and his award-winning blog, Scribbles from the Den, is ranked among the top 100 African blogs.

Kathryn Toure studied political science, history and humanities at the Universities of Kansas and of Iowa (USA), the University of Grenoble (France), and the University of Cocody (Cote d’Ivoire). At the Kenyan company Africa Online she with others helped get African newspapers online for the first time in the 1990s. From Bamako in Mali she coordinated the Educational Research Network for West and Central Africa and boosted field and publishing opportunities for young researchers. She co-edited ICT and Changing Mindsets in Education and is co-author of book chapter “Communiquer pour enrichir les politiques d’intégration?” to be published by Springer in 2012. Toure is currently working with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), in its West and Central Africa office in Dakar.