This book is a call to reform the framework of civil society and assess its components and roles in shaping the future of Africa.

Recent developments have witnessed the emergence of civil society as a major development actor whose potentials and capacity, especially in Africa, are often taken for granted and treated as limitless. A critical assessment of some of these structures (NGOs, religious organisations, trade unions, home-based associations and the youth) and the legal and political context of the operation of civil society in Cameroon shows a popular effervescence that is visible in social development initiatives. Although this would complement the state and free enterprise, it is however often frustrated by the states suspicion in a context of rising social awareness and protest that is assimilated with political opposition or attempts at manipulation along partisan lines. This book is a call to reform the framework of civil society and assess its components and roles in shaping the future of Africa. Emmanuel Yenshu Vubo is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology. He obtained his Doctorate from the University of Yaounde in 1991 and has served in several capacities at the University of Buea.

Neoliberalism has become the dominant development agenda in Africa. Faced with a deep economic and political crisis, African governments have been compelled by powerful external agencies, in particular the Bretton Woods institutions and western states, to pursue this agenda as a necessary precondition for the receipt of development aid. What is particularly striking in Africa, however, is that neoliberal experiments there have displayed such remarkable diversity. This may be due not only to substantial differences in historical, economic and political trajectories on the African continent but also, and maybe more importantly, in the degree of resistance internal actors have demonstrated to the neoliberal reforms imposed on them. This book focuses on Cameroon which has had a complex economic and political history and is currently witnessing resistance to the neoliberal experiment by the authoritarian and neopatrimonial state elite and various civil-society groups. It is the culmination of over twenty years of fine and refined research by one of the leading scholars of Cameroon today.

Civil society and empowerment have become buzz words in neoliberal development discourse. Yet many unanswered questions remain on the actual nature and configuration assumed by civil society in specific contexts. Typically, while neoliberals perceive civil-society organisations as vital intermediary channels for the successful implementation of desired economic and political reforms, they are inclined to blame the current resurgence of the politics of belonging for the poor record of these reforms in Africa and elsewhere. This book rejects such notions and argues that the relationship between civil society and the politics of belonging is more complex in Africa than western donors and scholars are willing to admit. Konings argues that ethno-regional associations and movements are even more significant constituents of civil society in Africa than the conventional civil-society organisations that are often uncritically imposed or endorsed. He convincingly shows how the politics of belonging, so pervasive in Cameroon, and indeed much of Africa, during the current neoliberal economic and political reforms, has tended to penetrate the entire range of associational life. This calls for a critical re-appraisal of prevalent notions and assumptions about civil society in the interest of African reality. Hence the importance of this book!

This book discusses the social and political consequences of the economic and financial crisis that befell African economies since the 1980s, using as case study the plantation economy of the Anglophone region of Cameroon. The focus is thus on recent efforts to liberalize and privatize an agro-industrial enterprise where overseas capital and its domestic partners have converged, the consequent modes of production and labour, and the alternatives proposed and resistance generated. The study details how the unprecedented crisis caused great commotion in the region, and presented a serious challenge to existing theories on plantation production and capital accumulation. The crisis resulted in the introduction of a number of neoliberal economic reforms, including the withdrawal of state intervention and the restructuring, liquidation and privatisation of the major agro-industrial enterprises. These reforms in turn had severe consequences for several civil-society groups and their organisations that had a direct stake in the regional plantation economy, notably the regional elite, chiefs, plantation workers and contract farmers. On the basis of extensive research in the Anglophone Cameroon region, Konings shows that these civil-society groups have never resigned themselves to their fate but have been actively involved in a variety of formal and informal modes of resistance.

The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed debates over the role of citizens in societal transformation in Cameroon in particular and Africa in general after the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany and the failure of African totalitarian states to provide minimum social, eco- nomic and political resources to their citizens. [...] Civil society generally is pegged on a number of themes: to foster the spirit of democracy (Ceesay 1998), to mediate relations between the state and society, to set the rules and ethos of public conduct and to ensure that the state reflects the social reality and is committed to the pursuance of the public good (Osaghae 1998). [...] The pith and kernel of this paper is to examine the roots of civil society in Cameroon and its impact on the Cameroon body politic and to chart a new way forward for civil society in Cameroon. [...] The Roots of Civil Society in Cameroon in the 1990s The roots of civil society in Cameroon in the 1990s are many and can be appreciated under economic, social and political rubrics. [...] Nkwi.pmd 97 09/04/2008, 11:46 98 AJIA 9: 1&2, 2006 The Ramifications of Civil Society on the Body Politic of Cameroon The relationship between civil society and democracy is a complex one, and the emergence of a civil society does not guarantee the develop- ment of democracy.