In Anglophone Southwest and Northwest Cameroon, the latest incarnation of a desire to become mobile is expressed through the notion of bushfalling (Nyamnjoh 2011), a Pidgin English term that originally referred to the desire to go out into the wilderness, i.e. the bush, away from home, to hunt for meat and bring it back home. The term bush no longer refers to the wilderness, but instead to the waytman kontri, the “white” world, or “The West”, a place where money can be earned and sent back home. Many young Cameroonians see migrating to the waytman kontri, i.e. the “white” world or “The West”, as the ultimate solution. Bushfalling as migration to the Global North is the latest reaction of young people to the economic downturn and increasing unemployment in the country since the early 1990s.
One of the avenues for migration that has gained considerable visibility over the last two decades is the international market of football players, as teams and clubs worldwide have been increasingly recruiting players from West Africa (Darby et al. 2007). Sports academies have been mushrooming in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Cameroon since the 1990s, many with the specific focus of identifying talented young players and preparing them for the transnational market. In addition, images of superstar athletes have proliferated all over the world in the past two decades, fueling young men’s hopes of global recognition and stardom. Driven by a passion for the beautiful game and by economic and social anxieties, many young Cameroonian men dream of opportunities abroad and enroll in academies and clubs in the hope of landing a coveted career in professional sports.
Like athletes everywhere, aspiring Cameroonian footballers are focused on training and maintenance of their athletic bodies. Aspiring athletes are perfect examples of people using their bodily capital as a source of action – a way to fulfill life ambitions, find a way out of poverty, or overcome increasingly high obstacles to transnational mobility. But before athletic bodies can be used, they need to become “docile” (Foucault 1979), subject to manipulation, training, and disciplining regimes.
For aspiring Cameroonian footballers this is most clearly articulated in their anxieties over sexual practices. A common knowledge among footballers and their coaches, a complex combination of scientific discourse and indigenous knowledge, is that excessive sexual activity results in diminished athletic performance. The young footballers are concerned with the physical outcomes of ejaculation, including involuntary nightly discharges, and the effect it has on losing physical strength, causing injuries, and preventing them from performing in the field.
Pentecostal Christian spirituality emerges as one way of controlling virility and articulating fears over the loss of bodily capital. Increasingly, young footballers seek romantic partners in Pentecostal churches, join Pentecostal denominations that are concerned with “responsible” sexual practices, and consult Pentecostal “Men of God” in order to deal with evil spirits. Two key Pentecostal practices stand out for the footballers: the anointing of their newly acquired passports which are being prepared for visa applications; and the exorcism of female spirits from the marine world, reminiscent of the mami wata spirits ubiquitous in West Africa and elsewhere, who stand for sexual temptation. These practices allow young footballers to address the key difficulties they perceive in their aspiration to sporting success: forced immobility and closure of borders, and dangers of sexual temptations.
Looking “beyond the body proper” (Farquhar and Lock 2007), i.e. beyond the material body extracted from the social context, Pentecostal spirituality emerges as crucial for young Cameroonian footballers in their efforts to challenge and transform common notions of youthful masculinity that are grounded in performances of virility. In contrast to stereotypes of young footballers as hegemonic and virile young men, young footballers fashion themselves as moral and responsible, as well as gendered (masculine), subjects. Thus, football training, Pentecostal spirituality, and aspirations for transnational mobility come together to articulate novel gendered ideologies along the blurred lines between local and global, spiritual and material, and moral and immoral.