Across Borders: Innovative Perspectives in Cameroon Scholarship

 

Elizabeth Beloe
Social and Cultural Anthropologist, Expert Group of the European Commission (Germany)

 

Title: Cameroonian Women in Hometown Associations in Berlin

Abstract: Hometown associations play an important role in the lives of Cameroonian migrants in Berlin by bringing together people with shared connections to towns, villages, and regions in Cameroon. Beyond maintaining cultural ties, these associations provide spaces for belonging, mutual support, and connections between Berlin and communities of origin. This presentation focuses on women’s participation in these associations and the different roles they play in sustaining community life. Women organize social and cultural activities, provide emotional and practical support, mobilize resources, and contribute to transnational initiatives and community projects in Cameroon. Their participation also provides insights into gender roles, leadership, and decision-making within migrant communities.

By focusing on women’s experiences, the presentation explores how gender, migration, community, and transnational connections intersect, highlighting hometown associations as important spaces where Cameroonian women build solidarity, negotiate belonging and identity, and maintain relationships across borders.

Biography: Dr. Elizabeth Beloe is a social and cultural anthropologist and Chairperson of the Federal Association of Networks of Migrant Organizations (BV NeMO e.V.). Her work focuses on migration, asylum, diversity, participation, and conflict management. She is committed to promoting a diverse, fair, and inclusive society and to strengthening the role of migrant organizations in Germany.

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Rose Ndengue
Associate Professor of History, York University, Glendon (Canada)

 

Title: Intersectional and decolonial feminist discourse and praxis in Cameroonian women’s nationalism in the 1950s.

Abstract: This presentation is an invitation to enrich the production of knowledge on Cameroon/African studies and Black feminisms by documenting the mobilizations of the Cameroonian nationalist activists of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women (UDEFEC) during the 1950s. I will explore the contributions of its militants to the framework of emancipation as a political thought as well as a praxis. To this end, I will consider the emancipatory speeches and practices they’ve elaborated to dismantle the coloniality of gender and envision and alternative order based on popular democracy.

Biography: Cameroonian scholar-activist, Rose Ndengue is a historian socio-politician who defines herself as a black feminist from the transatlantic space, straddling Africa, Europe and the Americas. She is currently associate Professor in the Department of Global and Social Studies at Glendon, York University, where she is developing a teaching program in African Studies and black feminisms from postcolonial and decolonial standpoints. Her research focuses on gender and politics in Africa and the black diasporas, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, with a particular emphasis on African and Afrodescendant women’s mobilizations in Cameroonian and French contexts.

Her work disseminated in academic journals, the media and blogs, contributes to the mainstreaming of Black Feminist Studies, from a pluridisciplinary and transnational perspective. As an activist, Rose has co-founded afrofeminists and African feminists organizations, bridging black feminists from diaspora and African feminists in Africa: like Sawtche afrofeminist collective, Coordination feministe Camerounaise, Collectif 1931, Femmes Actantes & Jabanè.

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Kevin Baskouda
Assistant Professor of History, University of Maroua (Cameroon)

 

Title: I’m Angry Because I Don’t have a Husband”: Popular Songs by Women in Northern Cameroon

Abstract: This paper focuses on the study of song as a popular mode of political action in northern Cameroon during the 1990s. Women in the mountainous town of Tokombéré have developed an ambivalent discourse towards multipartyism, provoked by the political changes of the early 1990s. This paper draws from archival material and ethnographic data collected during oral interviews. I adopt a multidisciplinary approach—history, anthropology, and gender studies—to examine two phenomena. First, I scrutinize the historicity of song as a means of free expression for women in marital relations. Second, I examine popular songs from the early 1990s to determine how they are situated between procedures of affection and registration of indignation towards the dominant male-led political parties, the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, and the National Union for Democracy and Progress. For example, the songs cast the president as the “nation’s husband” and frame the political process as a means of seeking a “good marriage” between a leader and the people.

Biography: Kevin Baskouda is an Assistant Professor of African Political History in the Department of History, Higher Teachers’ Training College, University of Maroua – Cameroon. His research concerns the politology of subalterns, catholic educational institutions and toponymic inscriptions in Northern Cameroon. His works have appeared in major journals including Journal of Asian and African Studies, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Africa Spectrum, Journal of African Cultural Studies and Exchange.

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Monique Kwachou
Writer, Youth Worker, and Scholar of Gender Studies and Education for Development (Cameroon)

 

Title: Charting Waves of Cameroonian Feminisms

 

Abstract: Feminist resistance in Africa is often misrepresented as either a Western import or a recent phenomenon, largely due to the lack of documented histories of popular struggles against sexism. Formal feminist studies reinforce this misconception by relying on Western frameworks, such as the ‘waves’ metaphor, to periodize feminist movements. While this metaphor has been critiqued, it remains a useful tool for mapping shifts in feminist expression. This paper applies the ‘waves’ framework to Cameroon, categorizing feminist sentiments and activism across five distinct historical phases before, during, and after Western imperialism. By documenting these waves, we challenge the notion that feminism is foreign to Africa and demonstrate that Cameroonian women have consistently resisted sexism in evolving forms. This study contributes to decolonizing feminist scholarship by asserting that African feminism has always existed, adapting to sociopolitical contexts while shaping and being shaped by global feminist currents.

Biography: Monique Kwachou is a Cameroonian writer, youth worker, and scholar of gender studies and education for development. She holds a dual honors BSc. in Gender Studies and Sociology from the University of Buea, an M.A in Education, Gender and International Development from UCL Institute of Education, London, and a PhD in Development Studies from the University of the Free State, South Africa. Monique moves between the roles of creative, academic, development practitioner, and activist, yet her work (research and practice) generally centers on the theory and application of African-feminist thought, education to address social injustices, and sustainable development.

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Alma J Gottlieb
Professor Emerita of Anthropology, African Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)

 

Title: Globalizing Cameroon: Thoughts from a Non-Cameroonianist

Abstract: Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg knows a great deal about Cameroon. She also knows a great deal about many other places in the world. Ever since the earliest moments of her publishing career, the genius of her work has been to simultaneously zoom in and out of Cameroon. By that, I mean zoom in and out not only geographically and physically, but also intellectually and theoretically. Pamela’s world travels and multilingual skills have given her at once the sorts of narrow and broad perspectives that the best ethnographers crave. In this talk, I will offer an appreciation of Pamela’s deep fieldwork engagements and published oeuvre as I admire them from the perspective of someone who has never set foot in Cameroon — but someone who has come to know much about both the country and its diaspora from Pamela’s rich writings.

Biography: Alma Gottlieb is a cultural anthropologist. Among other works, she is the author of A World of Babies: Imagined Guides for Eight Societies (2016), The Afterlife Is Where We Come from: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (2004), and Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought (1992). From 1983-2016, Gottlieb taught anthropology, women’s studies, and African studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is now Professor Emerita; she has also been a visiting professor and researcher at Princeton University, Brown University, the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas (Lisbon), the National University of Côte d’Ivoire (Abidjan), Lewis and Clark College (Portland), and elsewhere. A past president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, she has received funding for her research from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and other agencies.

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Meredith Terretta
Professor of History, University of Ottawa (Canada)

 

Title: Comrade Eduardo, Revolutionary Border Crossing, and Life Story as Decolonization History

Abstract: Job Ngoule Njapa, aka Eduardo Castillo, was born in Cameroon under French administration in 1945, joined a revolutionary nationalist movement as a boy in 1955, and went into exile in 1959 to train as a liberationist freedom fighter in independent Ghana, Algeria, and Congo-Brazzaville. There, he served in the Second Front contingent of the Kamerunian National Liberation Army (ALNK) fighting the independent Cameroonian regime that revolutionaries viewed as neocolonial. The story of Comrade Eduardo offers a new vantage point for understanding the 1960s shift from an imperial world order to an international order of unequally sovereign states and challenges the authority of the colonial archive. Njapa’s revolutionary border crossing reframes structural and geopolitical processes of African decolonization.

Biography: Meredith Terretta is professor of history at the University of Ottawa where she teaches courses and directs student research in African and legal and human rights history. She directs Frontiers of Belonging: Refuge Seeking and Hospitality in West and Central Africa, an International Research and Doctoral Training Group in partnership with universities in Ghana and Cameroon. She is also working on a SSHRC-funded research project (2016-2020) entitled Between the Bench, the Bar, and the Academy: The Socio-Historical Construction of Law in Africa from the Imperial to the Global Age.

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Erdmute Alber
Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth (Germany)

 

Title: Caring for the future of one’s children: Changing widowhood in Northern Benin

 

Abstract: Pamela Feldmann-Savelsberg’s work has consistently focused on changing notions, narrations, and practices of motherhood. My paper relates to that scholarship by examining widows in northern Benin. Previously free to leave or to remarry, they recently started to remain in their deceased husbands’ compounds to secure, as they argue, their children’s futures. My paper traces these decisions by arguing that changing patterns of land ownership and the profound process of land privatization are the main reasons for this shift. It highlights that these transformations are connected to big changes in mothers’ subjectivities regarding their biological children, whom they now claim for themselves, and allows us to speak about their individual children’s futures.

Biography: Erdmute Alber is a German ethnologist whose research focuses on political and kinship anthropology. Since 2010, she has held the chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. Alber carried out her first field research in Peru in 1988 and 1989. Since 1991, she has followed this with regular research stays in Benin and Togo (since 2006). Since 2013, she has also been involved in the sub-project “African Middle Classes on the Move” at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies with field research in Kenya. She has authored numerous books, including Transfers of Belonging. A Social History of Child Fostering in West Africa (2018)

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Peter Geschiere
Professor Emeritus of the Anthropology of Africa, University of Amsterdam / Leiden University (the Netherlands)

Title: Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg: Between the Intimate and the Global

 

Abstract: In my presentation, I hope to address Pamela’s striking talent of moving to and fro between the intimate and the global. For me, a somewhat unsettling discovery in my work on “witchcraft” and politics was how easily what people call “the witchcraft of the house” can become global. Pamela shows the same in a different field: motherhood belongs, in many respects, to the intimate sphere of life, but in her earlier studies of Bangangté motherhood, she showed how, even locally, this intimacy is deeply shaped by global changes. In her later work, the intimate becomes a challenging entry point for understanding how women live the global. How do such unexpected articulations of the intimate and the global relate to Francis Nyamnjoh’s emphasis on the person as “incomplete”?

Biography: Peter Lein Geschiere is a Dutch anthropologist, Africanist, and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. Geschiere conducted fieldwork in Tunisia, the DRC, French- and English-speaking Cameroon, and Senegal (1968-2001). Geschiere specialized in Cameroon and the comparative study of processes of change in Africa. In 2002 he won the Distinguished Africanist Award from the US-based African Studies Association. Geschiere has published many scholarly books, including Village Communities and the State, Changing Relations among the Maka of Southeastern Cameroun since the Colonial Conquest (1982), The Modernity of Witchcraft (1997), The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009), and Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust – Africa in Comparison (2013).

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Elizabeth Durham
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Carleton College (USA)

Title: “A Revolution That We’ll Make Together Here”: Rethinking Medical Resistance in Cameroon

 

 

Abstract: Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg’s study of vaccine resistance is a masterstroke in showing how public health rhetoric around “misinformation” conceals minoritized histories; and how medical technology shapes and is shaped by politics. In this talk, I trace the influence of this study in my own work on psychopharmaceuticals. Unlike Feldman-Savelsberg’s interlocutors, many psychiatric patients embraced this medication. But closer ethnographic attention reveals another form of resistance at play—not the spectacular resistance of schoolgirls jumping from windows, or of burning villages, but of the quotidian use of psychopharmaceuticals to “be at ease,” against state psychiatry’s expectations of “good citizens.”

Biography: Elizabeth Durham is a medical and political anthropologist. Her research interests include health justice (secular and religious), Global Mental Health, the politics of responsibility and of time, and the ethics of social science research and collaboration in clinical and humanitarian settings, with a particular focus on public psychiatry in the Republic of Cameroon. Durham earned her PhD in anthropology from Princeton in May 2022. At Carleton, Durham is an assistant professor of anthropology.

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Bridget A Teboh
Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (USA)

 

Title: African Women, Reproduction, and Belonging Across Borders: The Interdisciplinary Scholarship of Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

 

Abstract: Professor Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg’s scholarship offers an important model of intellectual work conducted across disciplinary, geographic, cultural, and epistemological borders. As the Broom Professor of Social Demography and Anthropology at Carleton College, she developed a distinguished body of research at the intersections of social anthropology, African studies, gender studies, medical anthropology, migration, law, reproduction, identity, and belonging. I argue that her work demonstrates how scholarship grounded in Cameroon can illuminate broader questions concerning women’s lives, reproductive health, cultural memory, transnational migration, legal consciousness, and the formation of social identities.

The concept of “Across Borders” is especially appropriate for understanding Feldman-Savelsberg’s scholarly contribution. Her research moves beyond conventional disciplinary divisions by bringing together anthropology, demography, history, public health, gender studies, migration studies, and legal anthropology. It also crosses geographic boundaries by connecting communities in Cameroon with African diasporic experiences in Europe, particularly through her research on Cameroonian migrant mothers in Germany. Her work reveals that borders do not merely separate places and populations; they also create spaces of interaction in which identities, institutions, memories, family relationships, and systems of knowledge are negotiated and transformed. Two of her works and my favorites, Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs (1999), and Mothers on the Move (2016) reveal a remarkable intellectual continuity.

Biography: Bridget A. Teboh is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, USA, where she has worked since 2005. She is also an affiliate faculty of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and Black Studies. Prof. Teboh specializes in African History, African American Women’s History, Women’s and Gender studies, and oral history. Her research interests are colonialism, post-coloniality, historical biography, women’s power [ikah-meyi], Politics, historical ethnography, Migration, and African Diaspora. She has won prestigious awards including Ford Foundation, ISOP, and is a three-time Carnegie ADFP award winner. She is Co-Editor: Berghahn Books, Ltd., Oxford, UK, Cameroon Studies Series; Board Member, Pan African University Press (PAUP); and since 2020, a Member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of Spears Books’ new series, Spears Studies in African and African Diaspora History.

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Flavien Ndonko
Independent Anthropologist (Togo)

 

Title: Genealogies of Vaccine Rumor: From the Sterilization Scare of 1990 to COVID-19 in Cameroon

 

Abstract: In 1990, a rumor that public health workers were secretly sterilizing girls and women swept through Cameroon, halting a national immunization campaign. Thirty years later, rumors about COVID-19 vaccines followed strikingly similar patterns of distrust, memory, and resistance. Drawing on collaborative research with Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg spanning three decades, including our 2000 study of the sterilization scare, this talk traces the genealogy of vaccine rumor in Cameroon. It asks what these two moments, separated by a generation, reveal about the durability of medical mistrust and the social work that rumor performs in moments of biomedical uncertainty.

Biography: Flavien Tiokou Ndonko is a Cameroonian anthropologist, researcher, and public health specialist known for his work on cultural anthropology, health programs, and social research in Cameroon. He has written on the social context of traditions like breast ironing and urban-rural migration in Cameroon, as well as the anthropological examination of body waste and cultural representations among coastal and savannah populations

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David Zeitlyn
Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford (UK)

 

Title: On Fieldwork, Close Reading and the Limits of Photographic History Research

 

Abstract: My question is how far can ethnographically informed close reading of photographs can take us? Egerton’s photos contrast with Jacques Toussele’s but in many cases there is next to no contextual information apart from what can be gleaned from the surviving images. We are left with questions such as: What should we do in the absence of further information? Should we consign images to silence. Are there different forms of silence? Different paths of consignment?

Biography: David Zeitlyn is a British anthropologist. He is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. His research has focused on the Mambila people of Cameroon, endangered languages, and Cameroonian photographers such as Samuel Finlak, Joseph Chila, and the late Jacques Toussele. His work with anthropological archives has led him to write on the ethics of archiving fieldwork data, and he has helped revise the Association of Social Anthropologists ethical guidelines for anthropology. He has worked extensively on divination, especially the form known as spider divination or nggam.

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