African postcolonial rulers have made of the public sphere a space where through the production of violence and coercion they attempt to bring their subjects' bodies under an endless process of tight discipline, subordination and servitude.Moreover, they havemanaged to set up a politically structured sphere that not only restricts citizens' freedom of movement, speech and assembly, but also rationalizes their way of standing, speaking and walking. But the governmental claim to exercise full control over the public sphere is incessantly challenged by popular practices of insubordination and impoliteness. This paper which focuses on the carrefour de la joie (‘space for pleasure’) in Cameroon demonstrates how through ‘immoral’ and ‘indecent’ behaviour such as drunkenness, debauchery and indiscipline, Cameroonian subjects have been striving not only to evade the suffocating restrictions that the ferocious Cameroon People's Democractic Movement (CPDM) regime imposes on their rights, but also to formulate a sharp critique of this postcolonial power.

This discussion traces metaphors of consumerism, commoditized sex and sexified commodities that proliferate throughout urban Africa, signalling the intensified globalization of images of desire and opportunity, on the one hand, and chronic poverty and destitution, on the other. Focusing on sexual economies in Dakar as a case in point, the paper attempts an analysis of how, in situations of increasing scarcity and transurban articulations, language, sex, possession, loss, self-construction and self-corruption mutually shape each other. The paper seeks to represent the textures and intricacies that arise as the interdependencies among status, pleasure, appropriation, seduction and livelihood are worked out. It examines how these operations themselves elaborate a landscape of possibilities always on the verge of overflowing established sense and sentiments, yet somehow reined in, held, albeit in a highly tenuous relationship, to what is known and valued. The city makes itself urban, despite the nearly impossible economic and political conditions it faces, through a capacity to narrate these tales of fishing (as well as fishy stories), but also always trying to chase, to catch up with its capacity to proliferate words. Written against the background of the threat posed by HIV/AIDS in Africa, the paper also draws attention to the need for further scholarly research on the lethal cocktail of the twin globalization of consumerism and poverty in marginal sites of accumulation pregnant with contradictions and uncertainties such as Africa.

Concern with new modes of accountability has foregrounded the politics of belonging, giving prominence to the concepts of autochthony and allogeny. In Cameroon, this has provoked a shift in policy-making from an earlier distinction between the disciplined citizen and the subject. Despite this distinction, all Cameroonians were considered rights-bearing citizens in the early post- Independence era and as such could settle anywhere in the country and not be discriminated against. This has been rolled back as a result of overcoding and the assigning of a code to a people and a people to a territory is now in vogue. This has far-reaching policy implications. It problematizes the question of identity and has engendered the argument that this can be resolved only at death – identity should be determined by where one is buried. The centrality of overcoding, especially its extension into the mortuary realm, has enabled confusion, both legal and symbolic, which is instrumentalized and manipulated by the state, traditional authorities and relatives of the dead to serve varying and varied interests. Death, though a private affair, has now been thrust into the public space. Focusing on the burial of four ‘big men’, this paper shows how these interests are negotiated and fought over. Since space, power and tradition impact on this process, outcomes cannot be determined a priori. It is this impossibility that has given renewed relevance to the question: ‘Whose corpse it anyway?’

During the twentieth century, the ‘death celebration’ became arguably the most important cultural event throughout much of the Western Grassfields of Cameroon. The growth of this ritual festival occurred in the context of major political, economic and religious changes in the Grassfields. This article will focus on how religious changes, particularly the growth of Christianity, contributed to the rise of this event and how it has prompted significant changes in notions and practices concerning the pollution of death, personhood, burial rites and the ancestors. In the traditional hierarchical structure of Grassfields society, only certain titled individuals and chiefs were believed to live on after death and become ancestors. This was reflected in burial rituals. Individuals who became ancestors were buried in family compounds while ‘unimportant’ people were frequently disposed of in the ‘bush’, streams or hurriedly given unmarked burials. Christianity, because of its stress on individual personhood and its message of an afterlife for everyone, became an attractive alternative to established beliefs and practices, especially for young adults, women and those without titles, who were the most disenfranchised in the traditional system. With Christianity, burial rites became standardized and were extended to virtually everyone. Christianity also caused declines in notions of death ‘pollution’ and in beliefs about ‘bad deaths’. Because of continued beliefs in the power of ancestors, the egalitarian notions of personhood stimulated by Christianity have ironically created a ‘proliferation’ of ancestors for whom delayed mortuary rites such as ‘death celebrations’ are owed.

This article concerns the effects of globalization on Islam in the Bamum kingdom, Cameroon. Since its introduction into the kingdom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Islam has been closely intertwined with ethnicity and the local political system has been consensual. Politically, Bamum royalty – as the secular arm of central power – has had the unconditional support of Islam. For a long period, ‘Bamum Islam’, with its origins in the Tijaniya tariqa, withdrew in on itself, unlike other parts of Africa where sufism is dominant. But since the start of the 1990s, both political liberalization and Isalmic modernity have had their effects in Bamum through what is called in Foumban the ‘Wahhabite’ infiltration, namely, all those who have studied in Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The politico-religious foundation on which were based both the legitimacy of the royal household and the unity of the Bamum people has been undermined and disabled, provoking a crisis of identity. This crisis is evidenced, on the one hand, by the politicization of the Tijaniya on behalf of one opposition party, reforms and the destabilization of the dominant position of the Tijaniya, and, on the other hand, by a Tijaniya insurrection, open defiance and the weakening of the position of the Sultan-King of Bamum.