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Intimacies and distances: Mobility, belonging and the use of information and communication technologies by young Cameroonians in Cape Town Town Kate Jackson, JCKCAT003 Cape A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillmentof of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Social Science Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town University 2014 COMPULSORY DECLARATION This work has not been previously submitted in whole, or in part, for the award of any degree. It is my own work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of other people has been attributed, and has been cited and referenced. Date: 2014, January 6 Signature: The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University PLAGIARISM DECLARATION 1. I know that plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is using another’s work and to pretend that it is one’s own. 2. I have used the UCT Harvard System as the convention for citation and referencing. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this Thesis from the work, or works of other people has been attributed and has cited and referenced. 3. This Thesis is my own work. 4. I have not allowed, and will not allow, anyone to copy my work with the intention of passing it off as his or her own work. 5. I acknowledge that copying someone else's work, or part of it, is wrong, and declare that this is my own work. Kate Jackson 2014, January 6 Signature: .................................................... 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the young Cameroonians who gave so generously of their time and energy to help me with my work. I wish you all the best as you step into your future. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Professor Francis Nyamnjoh for his advice and patience throughout the process of researching and writing this dissertation. Thanks to my mother, Liz, for her unwavering positivity, encouragement and emotional and practical support. Also to Dr Richard Harding for additional advice and encouragement. Thanks to my fellow students for solidarity throughout, especially Noizee, Paula, and Nikiwe. A special thank-you to Alicia Ernstzen for helping me to navigate logistics and administration at the University of Cape Town while I was on the wrong side of the world. 3 INTIMACIES AND DISTANCES: MOBILITY, BELONGING AND ICT USE BY CAMEROONIAN STUDENTS IN CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Abstract Advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are making it increasingly easy to build and maintain social links across distance, by effecting a compression of space and time, and allowing friends and family members to remain in ever-closer contact, even though they may live geographically far apart. These distanced relationships facilitated by ICT represent an important site of anthropological inquiry, even as they present methodological challenges to the accepted conceptions of fieldwork and the field. In this thesis I present the results of an ethnography of the use of ICT by Cameroonian students living in Cape Town, South Africa between June 2011 and June 2013. The research question guiding my work reads as follows: “Do (and if so, how do) Cameroonian students in Cape Town transcend geographical and social boundaries through their use of information and communication technology?” I argue that the Cameroonian students who I met during my fieldwork in Cape Town used ICTs to build and maintain relationships within their community (or multiple communities), and to draw upon their social networks to (re)negotiate and transcend geographical and social boundaries. I also argue that while they do this they simultaneously contest and reinforce hierarchies of various forms, be they politico-geographical, social or economic. In the course of my fieldwork, it became increasingly evident that the young people who helped me in my inquiries used these technologies to intimately entangle, as well as distance, themselves from others in their communicative environment and relationships. I draw on my fieldwork to illustrate the ways in which they do this. I argue that these people negotiated relationships of marginality, belonging, obligation and responsibility through the ways in which they used ICTs, and that they drew on the functions of ICTs, particularly the social networking site, Facebook, to actively construct their identities. I conducted the main body of my fieldwork between June 2011, and June 2012. However, at the time of submitting the draft of my thesis in July 2013, I was still in contact with the people who helped me in my research, and therefore was engaged in fieldwork throughout the course of the research and writing process. This study forms part of a larger project entitled: “Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), mobility and the reconfiguration of marginality in South(ern) Africa”. I hope to contribute to this larger project with this ethnographic study of the use of ICTs by Cameroonian students in Cape Town in the context of their mobility, varying levels of 4 marginality, and their social networks and community relations, by seeking to answer the research question. 5 Contents Intimacies and distances: Mobility, belonging and ICT use by Cameroonian students in Cape Town, South Africa ............................................................................................................................................. i Abstract ............................................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter One ............................................................................................................................................ 8 Nimbleness and immobility: Mobility, ICT and forced inertia .............................................................. 8 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 8 Moving to South Africa from Cameroon ............................................................................................ 9 Research question ............................................................................................................................. 10 Flows and closures ............................................................................................................................ 11 Hostility and conviviality .................................................................................................................. 13 Bushfalling: In search of success ...................................................................................................... 14 Leaving home .................................................................................................................................... 15 Cameroonian frontierspeople in Cape Town .................................................................................... 16 Cameroon-South African Communication ecology .......................................................................... 17 Plan of discussion chapters ............................................................................................................... 18 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 18 Chapter two ........................................................................................................................................... 20 The journey through the research .......................................................................................................... 20 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 20 Arriving at the topic .......................................................................................................................... 20 My companions on the journey ......................................................................................................... 21 Discovering the field ......................................................................................................................... 23 Methods used: Fieldwork in an unconventional field ....................................................................... 24 A visit to Buea, Cameroon ................................................................................................................ 26 Challenges, mistakes and mishaps .................................................................................................... 27 Me and my research .......................................................................................................................... 28 Inside and outside .......................................................................................................................... 30 Familiarity of Space - Degrees of ‘going native’ .......................................................................... 31 Ethical Considerations ...................................................................................................................... 32 Conclusion

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