Drawn from multisited fieldwork conducted among Cameroonians in Germany and Cameroon, the article reveals that the liveness of mobile phone communication influences expectations and narratives of remittances in Cameroonian transnational social relationships. These expectations are meaningful within a cultural context where economic resources are expected to flow from migrants to nonmigrants. As this case demonstrates, the general belief in nonmigrants' entitlement to the achievements of those who migrate regardless of their status abroad, also means migrant students are involved in remittances practices. The students are expected to remit and at the same time, they are conscious of their obligation to support people who stay back in the home country. As such, the mobile phone ideally provides an infrastructure through which monetary resources could be coordinated and channeled to Cameroon. While exploring this possibility of remittances transfer, I argue that instant communication contradictorily generates and fuels conflicts mainly as a result of unmet expectations of deploying the phone to directly request money from abroad.
Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Cameroonians in Switzerland, Germany, and Cameroon, this article demonstrates transformations induced by the new communication media − particularly the mobile phone – in Cameroonian transnational social relationships. Many narratives revolve around ambivalences, tensions and non-communication that arise from different and often, contradictory expectations as well as dissimilar life-world experiences of the actors. We employ the notion of an ideal ‘African sociality’ to serve as guideline for the valuations of the mediated ties, which is reflected in, and opposed to the notion of migrant or ‘bushfaller disease’ – migrants’ attributive tendency to detach from these ideals when abroad. In these narratives, technological means for communication and related users’ agency serve as catalyst through which changing sociality is observed and articulated by migrants abroad and non-migrants in Cameroon.
Instant healing, performance of miracles, public exorcism, supply of blessed objects for protection, and prophetic abilities are major religious practices that account for the popularity of certain Pentecostal leaders in contemporary Africa. Prophet T.B. Joshua, a renowned Nigerian televangelist, is one of them. Through his Emmanuel tv channel, he informs ‘viewers all over the world’ that invisible but influential evil forces are responsible for their daily challenges and that people can enjoy prosperity when they are purged of malevolent spirits. This article describes the practices and narratives of liberation from unknown bondage by Cameroonians who draw inspiration from T.B. Joshua’s prophetic messages and displays. The aspects covered include the desire to embark on a pilgrimage to T.B. Joshua’s church in Nigeria and actors’ use of his blessed religious objects to neutralise, destroy, or fight off invisible evil forces suspected of halting their socioeconomic progress.
Thanks to the mass media, specifically television, Pentecostal discourses involving polluted human spirits and defective human agency are captured and disseminated in audio-visual form in Cameroon. These representations are about evil spirits residing in, as well as corrupting, the personality of innocent individuals. Victims of evil spirits are portrayed as colonized vessels incapable of exercising agency without the intervention of an all-powerful pastor. In this article, I expose the ways in which these representations of malevolent forces – that are strongly connected to aspects of African non-church religious beliefs – influence conversations between viewers, particularly to the extent that they express doubt about whether these forces really do affect people’s agency. The narratives doubting human agency as described in this article draw from Emmanuel TV representations of causality. This is further grounded in Cameroonians’ desire to align their spirits with benevolent forces through the intervention of pastor TB Joshua.
Research on the significance of the mobile phone and internet in transnational family relationships shows that these media provide direct platforms for negotiating remittances. My interest in this article is not so much in how they are used to coordinate and channel money home as in their appropriation to meet expectations of reciprocity. The article draws from field narratives collected among Cameroonians in Germany and in Cameroon to reveal contestations over what can be described as legitimate consumption within the Cameroonian transnational social sphere. Underlying the arguments in this article is my observation that direct communication within the Cameroonian transnational sphere is beset by so much mistrust, discontent and uncertainty that remitters must specify what they are remitting money for. Healthcare in Cameroon is considered an expenditure that is worthy of migrants' financial support.
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