Nous sommes ensemble. Uncertain contingencies and hope in urban Ngaoundéré

Abstract

Uncertainty is becoming a fundamental new conceptual tool for anthropologists in order to understand the complex ways in which the vulnerable people living at the margins of African fast- growing cities create meaning out of a routinized sense of crisis. Many studies (Cooper & Pratten 2015; Whyte 2009; McGovern 2012; Waage 2015; 2018; etc.) have highlighted the importance of hope and social contingency in navigating through one person’s unresponsive environment; and patron-client relations have been recognised everywhere in Africa and the Global South as common relational strategies to cope. Though, to make the concept useful at an epistemological level it needs a variety of situated and thick descriptions. In Ngaoundéré, a city of northern Cameroon, everyone is connected to others in a network of solidarity and mutual recognition, and patrons are fundamental figures to disempowered individuals. During my fieldwork of 3 months, I have investigated over this issue: in which ways do individual experiences of uncertainty determine the practice of building up patron-client relations? Following the life story of the immigrant Jean Louis, his Cameroonian patron Dji Dji and the foreigner who went to learn from them, myself, I argue that doing fieldwork and building our representations with a critical and reflexive approach can also be a way to understand the experiences of our subjects, by entering at the same time productive and reciprocal collaborations.