AIDS Rumour, Intellectual Anxiety, and Discursive Empowerment among Cameroonian Tradipractitioners

ABSTRACT

This article refines established notions of rumour as a strategy of discursive empowerment by differentiating typologies of empowerment. Specifically, I employ terminology from the anthropological literature on witchcraft to distinguish between ‘levelling’ rumour, which seeks to attack the power of others, and ‘accumulative’ rumour, which seeks to increase the power of rumour-tellers. To exemplify this, I explore a rumour that circulated in 2012 and 2013 among practitioners of traditional medicine in West Cameroon, which claimed that the state would kill tradipractitioners working to cure HIV/AIDS. I first outline the likely sociopolitical roots of practitioners’ anxiety regarding their intellectual labour. I then argue that this narrative was simultaneously levelling and accumulative in a national context, yet became accumulative in the more international context of practitioner–anthropologist relations. Ultimately, both forms of empowerment were key to understanding the rumour's favourable positioning of tradipractitioners in an increasingly uncertain, tense, and multinational part of Cameroon.

KEYWORDS:

• Cameroon
• rumour
• empowerment
• anxiety
• HIV/AIDS

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

I thank the Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group, and the Institute for Medical Research and Studies of Medicinal Plants for their institutional support in Cameroon. Particular appreciation is due to Walter Nkwi, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, David Zeitlyn, David Pratten, and an anonymous reviewer for their thoughts and/or reading earlier drafts. Above all, I am grateful to my Cameroonian interlocutors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I use the term ‘traditional’ medicine to acknowledge how non-biomedical practitioners in Dschang identify themselves – as traditional healers (guérisseurs) or tradipractitioners (tradipractiens).

2 In keeping with interlocuters' requests, all names here are pseudonyms unless otherwise specified.

3 My use of the terms ‘ethnic group’ and ‘ethnicity’ is in keeping with the ways in which many Bamiléké peoples describe themselves.

4 My repeated attempts to consult government documents pertaining to traditional medicine were unsuccessful, despite having the necessary research permit. Instead, I was offered a series of interviews with a senior official in the Ministry's Service for Traditional Medicine.

5 Interlocutors’ belief in a biomedical model of HIV/AIDS did, however, coexist with a ‘mystical’ one that could be transmitted via witchcraft.

6 These divisions are not clear-cut: many Bamiléké support splinter opposition groups, or are CPDM members often for political expediency.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a Fulbright Program grant sponsored by the US State Department and administered by the Institute of International Education.