A New Politics of Belonging: Ethnic Solidarity Clubs in Cameroonian Universities

Clare Ignatowski

This study examines the formation of ethnic solidarity clubs by university students in Cameroon, Central Africa, in order to learn about changing notions of ethnicity and culture during an era of structural readjustment. The focus will be on extracurricular clubs (“Djak Kao Clubs”) created by young adults of the Tupuri ethnic group. These clubs are significant because they strategically reproduce aspects of a ritual complex commonly practiced in Tupuri villages called the gurna society. The gurna dance society, the subject of my earlier research, represents a potent cultural idiom for the Tupuri people of Northern Cameroon, valorizing collective solidarity and a distinct ethnic identity. Djak Kao Clubs in universities are significant not only because they provide a network of belonging for students, but also because they represent a nexus around which urban young elites re-negotiate their relations with their home villages in rural Tupuriland. At times, the Clubs become sites for the development of community improvement projects, as well as for re-visioning of cultural practices that contemporary youth believe are archaic or repressive. Finally, these Clubs may potentially serve as a platform from which students articulate to a rising political elite that attempts to influence national politics by procuring a greater piece of the proverbial “national pie” for the North. The research methodology for this project is ethnographic, drawing on interpretive anthropology and discourse analysis. The perspectives, discourses, and practices of university students will be documented though open-ended, informal interviews and participant-observation at student club meetings, informal peer gatherings, and village visits to youths’ home communities. Conducted in French and Tupuri, the research will be carried out primarily at the University of Yaounde, and may include student cultural associations created by students of other ethnic groups for comparative purposes. This study seeks to insert the domain of education into the broader field of African studies, which—with the notable exceptions of work by Comaroff and Comaroff, Bledsoe, and Stambach—has tended to ignore education as a site of inquiry. In particular, this study speaks to recent reformulations of classic Africanist interest in urban-rural interaction, as a more flexible “politics of belonging” in the ethnically-charged terrain of African politics after the early-1990’s democracy movement. University students’ reexamination of their inherited models of ethnic identity will be considered as part of this broader inquiry into postcolonial cultural change. For the field of education, this study enables us to consider issues of multiculturalism in higher education outside of North America, Europe, and South Africa where they have been most intensively studied. Moving beyond facile dichotomies of “school versus community,” and of “subversive” youth cultures versus “official” school administration, this study recognizes that peer groups and the university context are imbricate in complex ways. Djak Kao Clubs represent sites of experimentation and imagination where Tupuri young people seek to bring newer perspectives of global ideologies, such as universal human rights and political liberalism, to bear upon their cultural heritage that may operate under different cultural logics and prestige systems. In their clubs, students work out what it means to be “modern” and Tupuri simultaneously, and in the process, create new forms of Tupuri solidarity and new ethnically validated models of an educated identity.

About Clare Ignatowski

Clare Ignatowski received her Master’s degree in “Education, Culture and Society” from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. She recently received her doctorate (December 2001) from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the valuation of schooling in African societies by examining the public arenas of ritual, song, and ethnic solidarity associations in Cameroon (Central Africa). Her book manuscript, provisionally titled, Journey of Names: Cultural Politics, Morality and the Circulation of Song in Cameroon, is currently under review at the University of California Press. At the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the American Educational Research Association, she has presented papers on dance and the denigration of the educated elite in Northern Cameroon. Before entering the academy, she served as a program officer at Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia, designing programs for disadvantaged youth nationally. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and currently teaches at Temple University.