Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon PDF Download

Author: Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.

Author: Emmanuel Yenshu Vubo
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956727474
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This book examines some facets of gender relations in Cameroon - symmetry in male-female relationships, women's access to land in traditional society, socialization into gender roles through language textbooks in schools, the association life of women, widowhood and inheritance, social capital and entrepreneurship, husband-wife relations in early German colonial encounters - as socially and historically constructed realities from a multidisciplinary perspective, bringing together some social sciences and humanities. The studies point to the fact that these relations are as much rooted in traditions and customs fashioned in several benchmark epochs in African history - arming women with formidable social and cultural capitals or making of them victims of social structures over which they have little control - as they are constantly evolving in contemporary times and transforming women into agents in their own affairs as well as those of the new societies in the making.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309180090
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In sub-Saharan Africa, older people make up a relatively small fraction of the total population and are supported primarily by family and other kinship networks. They have traditionally been viewed as repositories of information and wisdom, and are critical pillars of the community but as the HIV/AIDS pandemic destroys family systems, the elderly increasingly have to deal with the loss of their own support while absorbing the additional responsibilities of caring for their orphaned grandchildren. Aging in Sub-Saharan Africa explores ways to promote U.S. research interests and to augment the sub-Saharan governments' capacity to address the many challenges posed by population aging. Five major themes are explored in the book such as the need for a basic definition of "older person," the need for national governments to invest more in basic research and the coordination of data collection across countries, and the need for improved dialogue between local researchers and policy makers. This book makes three major recommendations: 1) the development of a research agenda 2) enhancing research opportunity and implementation and 3) the translation of research findings.

Author: Yenshu Vubo
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956728276
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This book examines some facets of gender relations in Cameroon symmetry in male-female relationships, womens access to land in traditional society, socialization into gender roles through language textbooks in schools, the association life of women, widowhood and inheritance, social capital and entrepreneurship, husband-wife relations in early German colonial encounters as socially and historically constructed realities from a multidisciplinary perspective, bringing together some social sciences and humanities. The studies point to the fact that these relations are as much rooted in traditions and customs fashioned in several benchmark epochs in African history arming women with formidable social and cultural capitals or making of them victims of social structures over which they have little control as they are constantly evolving in contemporary times and transforming women into agents in their own affairs as well as those of the new societies in the making.

Author: Miriam Goheen
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299146740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Based on a decade of fieldwork, this work tracks the negotiations between chiefs and subchiefs and women and men over ritual power, economic power, and administrative power. Though Nso' men obviously dominate their society at both the local level and nationally, women have had power of their own by virtue of their status as women. Men may own the land, for example, but women control the crops through their labor. Goheen explains clearly the place of gender in very complex historical processes, such as land tenure systems, title societies, chieftancy, marriage systems, changing ideas of symbolic capital, and internal and external politics.

Author: Gabriele Wilde
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
ISBN: 3847408747
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Is civil society’s influence favorable to the evolvement of democratic structures and democratic gender relations? While traditional approaches would answer in the affirmative, the authors highlight the ambivalences. Focusing on women’s organizations in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, they cover the full spectrum of civil society’s possible performance: from its important role in the overcoming of power relations to its reinforcement as backers of government structures or the distribution of antifeminist ideas.

Author: Piet Konings
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 995672730X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book explores the relationship between plantation labour and gender in Africa, particularly Cameroon. It demonstrates that the introduction of plantation labour during colonial rule has had significant consequences for gender roles and relations within and beyond the capitalist labour process. These effects have been quite ambivalent, being marked by both profound changes and remarkable continuities. The book focuses on two tea estates established in anglophone Cameroon in the 1950s, the Tole Estate and the Ndu Estate, the first employing mainly female pluckers, the second mainly male pluckers. This allows for an examination of the variations in male and female workers' modes of resistance to the control and exploitation they meet in the labour process. [ASC Leiden abstract]

Author: Lotsmart N. Fonjong
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956726834
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This book explores the customary, social, economic political and rights issues surrounding access, ownership and control over land from a gender perspective. It combines theory and practice from researchers, lawyers and judges, each with track records of working on women and rights concerns. The nexus between the reluctance to recognize and materialize women's right to land, and the increasing feminization of poverty is undeniable. The problem assumes special acuity in an essentially agrarian context like Cameroon, where the problem is not so much the law as its manner of application. That this book delves into investigating the principal sources and reasons for this prevalent injustice is particularly welcome. As some of the analyses reveal, denying women their right to land acquisition or inheritance is sometimes contrary to established judicial precedents and even in total dissonance with the country's constitution. Traditional and cultural shibboleths associated with land acquisition and ownership that tend to stymie women's development and fulfilment, must be quickly shirked, for such retrograde excuses can no longer find comfort in the law, morality nor in "modern" traditional thinking. The trend, albeit timid, of appointing women to Land Consultative Boards and even as traditional authorities, can only be salutary. These are some positive practical steps that can translate the notion of equal rights into "equal power" over land for both sexes; otherwise "equality" in this context will remain an unattractive slogan.

Author: Mariane C. Ferme
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520925717
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In this erudite and gracefully written ethnography, Mariane Ferme explores the links between a violent historical and political legacy, and the production of secrecy in everyday material culture. The focus is on Mende-speaking southeastern Sierra Leone and the surrounding region. Since 1990, this area has been ravaged by a civil war that produced population displacements and regional instability. The Underneath of Things documents the rural impact of the progressive collapse of the Sierra Leonean state in the past several decades, and seeks to understand how an even earlier history is reinscribed in the present.

Author: Lilian Lem Atanga
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956615463
Category : Cameroon
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book investigates gender and power relations in the Cameroonian parliament using a critical discourse analytical approach, which focuses on social issues and seeks to expose unequal relations within institutions. The study identifies different gendered discourses within the speeches of Members of Parliament and government ministers. Consciously or unconsciously, these participants within parliamentary debates draw on topics that construct women and men in specific ways, sometimes sustaining gender stereotypes or challenging existing conditions. The way men and women are constructed using language also is indicative of gender and power relations within this particular community. The study also looks at the way men and women are constructed using traditional discourses of gender differentiation and how some of these discourses get challenged, appropriated or subverted using progressive gendered discourses that advocate equal opportunities, gender equality and gender partnership in development.