Editor’s note
At times vaunted for its political stability, epitomised by a President of the Republic in office since 1982, Cameroon has however been rocked by serious political, social and security crises. This book is an attempt to understand both the tenacity of this political order and its flaws, by reassessing what was the template of now considered conventional concepts of political sociology: “the neopatrimonial State”, “the politics of the belly” and “postcolony”. Based on the notion of loyalty, as put forward in the works of Albert Hirschman, this study documents the common practices of – sometimes forced – engagement in institutions of authority.
Voting, parading, working in state institutions, claiming to be a patriot: motivated by interests of various kinds, these practices demonstrating loyalty are claimed by the institutions as marks of their authority’s legitimacy. Yet they are also vectors for delivering change in these institutions, and potentially of generating criticism. On the basis of many interviews and observations, this book reports on the constraints and opportunities available to those who “remain” in a political space even when they do not approve of it, and the political indeterminacy of social practices which can tip them quite quickly towards defection or open criticism. It draws on tools forged by the comparative political sociologies of domination, institutions and mobilisations to give a renewed vision of the State in Cameroon.
The author brings to it a unique, site-specific contribution, extending the “post-colonial” debate on Cameroon. Not exclusively concerned with Central Africa, the book aims to shed light on the social issues of authoritarian situations, which we can now see are not the remnants of a distant past but tend rather to become normal in the contemporary political arena.
