ISBN 9781957296012
Pages 228
Dimensions 229 x 152mm
Published 2023
Publisher Spears Media Press, Cameroon
Format Paperback

Cultivating Moral Citizenship

An Ethnography of Young People’s Associations, Gender, and Social Adulthood in the Cameroon Grasslands

by Jude Fokwang

In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults. Faced with the decline of old predictabilities, the diminishing capacity of the postcolonial state to control its destiny and the precarity of waithood, young people instrumentalise the opportunities and resources afforded by associations to build reciprocal relationships that advance their individual and collective pursuits in a community that has increasingly become transnational. In positioning themselves as moral actors, the young people in this ethnography invest in high profile social and communal projects, including the enforcement of moral orthodoxies that enable readers to appreciate the ways in which moral citizenship is engendered, expanded and eroded simultaneously.

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About the Author

Jude Fokwang

Dr Jude Fokwang received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and his MA from the University of Pretoria. In the spring of 2006, he was a visiting lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Rhodes University. Currently, he is a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Dr Fokwang has published widely on youth activism and identities as well as on popular culture and citizenship issues in Africa.