Through the prism of a local tragedy: political liberalisation, regionalism and elite struggles for power in Cameroon

Abstract

A prominent feature of political liberalisation in Cameroon (as elsewhere in Africa) is the increasing resort by elites to idioms of community (regional, religious and ethnic) and neo-traditional institutions like chieftaincy as a means of mobilising political support and reasserting control of local populations. Focusing on the anglophone part of Cameroon this study examines the historical roots of the salience of these phenomena in current struggles for power. It uses the circumstances surrounding the death of a chief in the South West Province to explain the ways in which elite reliance on these phenomena facilitates the linkage of locally specific, culturally encoded political conflict with competition for power at the national level, and provokes local populations into resisting state power, often through the reinvention of traditions of their own. The study concludes that popular scepticism about whether current political struggles will lead to fundamental changes in state–society relations is rooted in the ways in which elite politics are played out in local and regional spaces.