Les Mbengis - Migration, Gender, and Fam

The moral economy of transnational Cameroonian migrants� remittances

Christina Atekmangoh

• Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9789956762934
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9789956762583
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about transnational migration (familiarly called bushfalling) and remittance flows to Cameroon. With the current dire economic state, Cameroonians increasingly aspire to go abroad to make a living. Migrants achieve this through a collective (family) strategy and with the help of migration brokers. Relations between migrants and the family that stays in Cameroon can be characterized as follows: Families raise and educate their children to become adults. In return to giving their children the gift of life, families expect reciprocity, best secured through economic success abroad and the sending of remittances by migrants. As families in Cameroon heavily contribute to the funding of migration trajectories, often by selling properties such as land or houses or borrowing money, they also expect a return on their investments. All that constitutes this study explores under the notion of the moral economy of transnational remittances. In this study, remittances are understood to be a composite of financial, material, and cultural flowsmaintaining and transforming social and kinship ties. The book proposes also a large exploration of themes in relation to transnational migration: why and how Cameroonians migrate (the role of the operational family in terms of decision and funding; the role of migration brokers through the identification of lines and the provision of the necessary papers); the moral justification for migration; the ways social relations and customs are changed by status gained through migration; the ways people explain the failure of migration projects, the difficulties to stay abroad; the matrimonial strategies to go and stay abroad. This is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study that takes thinking on transnational migration informed by African strategies and experiences a step further.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Summary
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Chapter 2 - Migration and remittances: An overview
• Chapter 3 - Cameroonian transnational migration and remittances: A pluri-local research agenda
• Chapter 4 - Contextual background: The socio-cultural, historical, geographical, and political features of Cameroon and Cameroonian migration
• Chapter 5 - Why Cameroonians migrate: The socio-cultural, moral, and economic aspects of transnational Cameroonian migration
• Chapter 6 - How Cameroonians migrate
• Chapter 7 - Understanding marriage, birth and death practices in the context of Cameroonian Migration and remittances
• Chapter 8 - “I am not a money-making machine”: on the moral economy of remittances
• Chapter 9 - Sorcery threats in migration and remittance flows
• Chapter 10 - Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix
• Back cover