The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of young men in Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Migration through the sport promises fulfillment of masculine dreams of sports stardom, as well as opportunities to earn a living that have been hollowed out by the country’s long economic stalemate. The aspiring footballers are increasingly turning to Pentecostal Christianity, which allows them to challenge common tropes of young men as stubborn and promiscuous, while also offering a moral and bodily regime that promises success despite the odds. Yet the transnational sports market is tough and unpredictable: it demands disciplined young bodies and introduces new forms of uncertainty. This book unpacks young Cameroonians’ football dreams, Pentecostal faith, obligations to provide, and desires to migrate to highlight the precarity of masculinity in structurally adjusted Africa and neoliberal capitalism.

Uros Kovač is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ＂Future Rural Africa＂ Collaborative Research Centre based at the University of Cologne, as well as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Münster Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He conducted doctoral research with the ERC-funded GLOBALSPORT research project at the University of Amsterdam Department of Anthropology.