Becoming Useful and Humble: Masculinity, Morality, and Association Football in Cameroon

In the post-structural adjustment Southwest Region of Cameroon, young men are finding it increasingly difficult to achieve social adulthood and are turning to migration as a solution. During the past two decades, the transnational market of association football players has expanded and for young Cameroonian men football has emerged as one of the most desirable ways to migrate. Many young men are inspired by African footballers in elite international leagues and seek opportunities to play abroad and begin earning a livelihood. But opportunities for transnational mobility and careers in professional sport are rare and precarious. For footballers, their managers, and their families, success and failure are tied to the uncertainties of football and migration, but even more so to issues of moral standing and masculinity. Masculinity emerges as a result of self-fashioning as moral subjects, driven by new and old gendered aspirations to engage globalized markets and fulfill family demands of economic redistribution. Evocations of masculinity and morality reveal why young men aspire to precarious careers in sports, but can also obscure the uncertainties of transnational markets and the elusiveness of adulthood in structurally adjusted Africa