Africa’s middle class: building houses and constructing identities in the small town of Buea, Cameroon

ABSTRACT

Across Africa households are commissioning new domestic buildings for their own use or to rent out rather than waiting for governments to supply urban shelter. We conceptualize this as two interwoven processes: building houses for a new middle class and the building of a new middle class identity. We draw particular attention to the impact of international migration on these processes. The paper uses quantitative data from building permits and qualitative data from 29 interviews and walk-round tours with homeowners and government officials in Buea, Cameroon. Despite some significant caveats (related to housing the urban poor, regulating building standards, and lost local government revenue), we argue that these individually initiated building projects do a reasonable job of meeting local demand for shelter. However, from the perspective of identity-building these buildings are less successful. Whilst homeowners take considerable pride in their building projects, the statements that these structures make about their identities are not always “read” by their neighbours in the way owners hope. New housing is the lens through which Buea’s residents interpret growing levels of inequality and its associated social tensions.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• new African middle class
• small towns
• international migration
• BueaCameroon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The precise origins of the term “Africa Rising” are unclear, but it achieved common currency after articles in the popular news magazines The Economist and Time in 2011 and 2012 following earlier analyses by McKinsey (2010) and Radelet (2010). The sustainability and optimistic developmental assumptions of recent export-led growth are widely contested (Rodrik, 2014), fundamentally on the grounds that this growth is not translating into industrialization. Africa Rising might well be a comforting rhetorical distraction from issues around industrialization but it has some value as a device for overturning earlier negative stereotypes and also for asserting African agency.

2. We use this term to capture the fact that though these owners were rarely personally involved in the physical labour of construction they nevertheless see themselves as having “built” the house because they have brought it into being by commissioning it. This is of significance because it is through “building” that individuals claim to have “become someone.”

3. The 2005 census gives Buea a population of 98,000. We have assumed a growth rate of 5% per annum, 2% above the rate of natural increase to reach the figure of 140,000 in 2015.

4. The Cameroonian government also owns two companies involved in house-building: La Mission d’Aménagement Des Terrains Urbains et Ruraux (MAETUR) and Société Immobilière Du Cameroun (SIC). The former prepares site and service layouts, whilst the latter builds houses on those layouts. These companies built many houses across the country in the early years of independence but became moribund in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of debts. In the past 4–5 years, having been recapitalized, they have been reactivated. However, they have focused their new building efforts almost entirely in the capital city Yaoundé and in Cameroon’s largest city, Douala. In Buea, there is one old MAETUR layout at West Farms, which has now become a popular site for middle class family properties.

5. A more extended discussion of research design, data acquisition and analysis is available as “supplementary material” with the online version of this paper.

6. Land issues are clearly key to this analysis as a whole, but are so complex and particular that they are being treated in a separate paper.

7. These boundary walls are locally referred to as “fences” which also leads to a description of some children as “born inside a fence” implying a privileged lifestyle of the children associated with these houses. They are stereotyped as being driven to school, having leisure time and access to sweet drinks, toys, video games, etc.

8. This term emerged from Canadian journalists and was widely used in Vancouver to describe houses built by recent Asian immigrants. For a good discussion of the complex politics of this label, see Mitchell (1998).

9. For a discussion of student housing issues in Nigeria, see Amole (2011).

10. Mbella Moki was Mayor of Buea from 2002 to 2013. Soon after most of this research was conducted he was elevated to the Cameroonian Senate, the second house of parliament, which comprises 100 Senators (70 elected from the 10 regions and 30 appointed by the president). More interviewees praised his achievements as Mayor than criticized him.

11. The median is the preferred measure of the average because the mean figure is strongly influenced by the effect of a few very large projects (either large minicités or large apartment blocks).

12. Interview homebuilder and contractor, 22 March 2013.

13. Interview senior civil servant, Ministry of Urban Development and Housing, 14 March 2013, Limbe.