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Title:Welcoming the 'Fon of Fons': anglophone elites and the politics of hosting Cameroon's Head of State
Author:Orock, Rogers Tabe EgbeISNI
Year:2014
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute (ISSN 0001-9720)
Volume:84
Issue:2
Pages:226-245
Language:English
Geographic term:Cameroon
Subjects:political elite
heads of State
rituals
External link:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972013000776
Abstract:This article draws on a political ethnography of the hosting of State ceremonies to engage with erstwhile theoretical accounts of African politics as highly patrimonial and built on a social complicity between African rulers and their citizens. The article examines the patrimonial relationship between Cameroon's Head of State, Paul Biya, and political elites of local ethno-regional communities who support the president within the framework of the Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) in Anglophone Cameroon. It approaches such elite politics of hosting as part of the vast cultural repertoire of patrimonial domination that emphasizes a spectacularization of proximity and intimacy between the Head of State and his coterie of supporting elites as the latter seek development resources for their local and regional communities in exchange for their political support. To account for hosting as a practice of patrimonial elite politics, the article demonstrates the complex logics and pragmatics of ethnic and regional competition as well as the deployment of symbolic idioms of hierarchical relations, mutuality and interdependence in the cultural performance and legitimation of Biya's patrimonial domination of Cameroon. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
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