Abstract:

For the Bamileke people living in West Cameroon, “being is building, and building is stating who you are”, according to Malaquais (2002, 359). Nowadays, many young Bamileke migrate to other regions within Cameroon in search of economic opportunities and better social conditions. This paper sheds light on the intimate relationship between the act of building and the construction of one’s identity in these migration contexts. I argue that young Bamileke migrants construct their identity through their aspiration to build, while these in turn constitute techniques in the production of urban space. Combining ethnographic work and interviews, I build on de Boeck’s (2015) urban acupuncture approach in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to retrace the invisible lines created by young Bamileke migrants’ imaginaires in the context of the city of Douala. While building is crucial to ‘become someone’ among Bamileke people, the precariousness of their everyday life threatens the process of their identity construction. Their imaginaires help them cope with the difficulty of ‘becoming an accomplished person’, whereas the invisible is a constitutive aspect of the sense of cityness.