Francis Nyamnjoh

Francis B. Nyamnjoh (born 1961) is a Cameroonian Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He was recipient of the annual "ASU African Hero 2013" award from the African Students Union at Ohio University, the 2014 Eko Prize for African Literature, and his book #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa won the 2018 ASAUK Fage & Oliver Prize for the best monograph. Quotes It is late into the night. Bobinga Iroko is unable to sleep. He is working on the editorial for the next issue of The Talking Drum. He has deliberately refused to carry the story on homosexuality. His priority remains the strike at the University of Mimbo, which, curiously, hasn’t attracted much coverage from the rest of the national press concentrated in Nyamandem and Sawang. He and The Talking Drum, the formidable odds against them notwithstanding, are determined to crusade along like a lone ranger, until victory day. They believe the sun must not be allowed to set on a good idea. it is difficult to advise a leader who is always right.An excerpt from Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s I was raised in a region where you had these different kingdoms, and then you also had this region of Cameroon which was administered by Britain as part of a UN arrangement following Germany losing its colonies after World War One and Two. And, it also meant that this part of the Cameroon, reuniting with the already independent part of French territory meant having to navigate different borders and different geographies and different cultural traditions and legacies. It meant also that it was an exciting moment for crossing borders, for example, that I had my secondary school education in Bamenda and then at the end of the secondary school you had to go to the university. If one looks at how identities are made and relate through various forms of mobility and encounters at a very local level you come up with the same set of indicators in the making of cosmopolitan identities that you would if it was a question of crossing borders or much more globally and therefore the argument is that you could talk in terms of endogenous forms of cosmopolitanism. If you make the mistake of not factoring mobility amongst the various local groups that we encounter simply because of a much more macro understanding of the world you’ll miss out on the fact that cosmopolitanism is associated with every form of mobility and encounter and human activities even purely at the local level between local communities. The idea of creating Langaa was to prove that there are lots of stories in Africa, and the stories need to be shared, and that you can do that without huge resources. Basically, our resources are volunteers who just like the idea of these sort of initiatives, and that you can make a difference in the world without being a billionaire or a millionaire. We are happy with what we have done. Scholars who may not have competed not because of the shoddiness of their scholarship, but because established publishers preponderantly in the global North have their own ideas of what requires to be ventilated as publications. My aspiration has been to, to share my thinking on issues, my sense of the world with a wider public, wider readership over and above academia. So, I have sought to be able to ventilate my research beyond the narrow confines of academic channels of dissemination. In that regard, I would say I have succeeded in having things out there in a language and style that can be accessible to people who may not necessarily share their academy with the rest of us. In an interview I wouldn’t necessarily say that because even in my academic writing I try to disabuse myself of unnecessary sophistication by jargon-like style that might not even be accessible to my fellow academics. So even there I’m already purging my writings of unnecessary affectations. And I believe that the ultimate aim in any writing—whether one is writing for fellow academics or for people outside of the academy—is to have a clear sense of your message, in such a manner that you could even explain to a little child who is not fully initiated into the trappings of academic discourse. I seek the cultivation of the wider society. And I think that, that reaches out into both audiences, and I don’t see any tension. In an interview I’m very interested in controversial historical figures, for one thing. And I think that the first book that I did on somebody was a book inspired by the #RhodesMustFall movement here in South Africa, and that started from my own university, University of Cape Town. And as I delved into Rhodes—the character that was larger than life in many ways, a character of humble beginnings, larger than live ambitions, and who has continued to shape history not only in Southern Africa, but globally—I began to see similarities between Cecil Rhodes and Donald Trump. And of course, just as a lot has been written about Rhodes, a lot has also been written about Trump. In an interview External links Francis B. Nyamnjoh Category:Academics from Cameroon Category:Authors from Cameroon Category:Living people Category:1961 births