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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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In the name of local development: Ethnicity, Autochthony and private sector promotion in northern Cameroon
| Panel |
61. Autochtony, citizenship and exclusion - struggles over resources and belonging
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| Paper ID | 125 |
| Author(s) |
Muñoz, José María |
| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | The Chad-Cameroon petroleum development and pipeline project is one of the larger infrastructural projects undertaken in recent years in West Africa. This multibillion project has developed oil wells in southern Chad and constructed a pipeline to offshore oil-shipment facilities on Cameroon’s coast. Funding for this project, although primarily provided by a consortium of oil companies led by Exxon-Mobil, also included a World Bank loan. As a result, the consortium committed itself to conduct the project in ways that maximized its developmental impact in both African countries. It was agreed that such development goals included, among other things, the active promotion by the project of both Chad’s and Cameroon’s private sectors.
In this paper, I focus in how the pipeline consortium has substantiated its commitment to create business opportunities in northern Cameroon, one of the areas that has experienced the project’s direct effects during the construction phase. Today ethnicity and autochthony have a considerable bearing on the political and economic processes taking place in the region. In many instances, who is local has become a question ridden with conflict. Yet, autochthony figures in the project’s documentation as the presence of an absence, relegated to the level of a sub-text that remains inaccessible to the uninitiated reader. By contrast, I place decisions over which Cameroonians firms the consortium worked with in fulfilment of its goal of promoting local business in northern Cameroon within a longer political and economic history in which autochthony plays a key role. While the consortium’s discourse on local business development conveys an image of the local as identical to itself, freed from the weight of the past and the indeterminacy of the future, its choices in terms of contract allocation have reinforced lines of instituted social division that result from historical processes of domination and negotiation.
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