Cultivating Moral Citizenship

This ethnography describes and analyses the lives of dozens of young men and women in the community of Old Town, the cradle of the sprawling city of Bamenda, Cameroon. It details how young people, previously positioned as "youth" despite their attainment of biological maturity have sought to re-position themselves as social adults against a backdrop of diminishing state resources, prolonged economic crisis and more recently, raging armed conflict. Although the processes of becoming social adults are fraught with ambivalence, the ethnographer contends that their analyses enable readers to appreciate the specific ways in which gendered identities and subjectivities are created and social transformation brought about in local society. Becoming social adults entails labour-intensive processes that could easily be ignored and indeed, often ignored in the literature. The ethnography demonstrates that in their quest for social adulthood, an aspect of personhood in the Cameroon Grasslands, young people embark upon individual and collective practices of self-care which entail cultivating virtuous character aimed not only at their own moral transformation but also their community - deep practices that encapsulate what the ethnographer describes as moral citizenship"