SOLO INTERNATIONAL MOBILITY AND FAMILY STRATEGIES OF ANTIQUE DEALERS IN WESTERN CAMEROON
SOLO INTERNATIONAL MOBILITY AND FAMILY STRATEGIES OF ANTIQUE DEALERS IN WESTERN CAMEROON

Summary/Abstract: Globalization, the education of women, the female wage earners and their resulting emancipation are at the basis of a certain number of transformations that African societies are going through today. The transformations in question can be grasped through the dynamics of populations, in this case the mobility of men and women who circulate on either side of the terrestrial globe. Nowadays, we observe the emergence of new figures of mobility and international migration, namely women and children. Currently, women have become real actors of mobility and international migration. The reflection initiated in the context of this article follows on from work on international mobility and family strategies. It is based, empirically, on the analysis of the realities experienced by the populations of western Cameroon by seizing the antique dealers from the Nun, actors of international mobility in their family strategies. In the Nun, art constitutes a field which not only provides enormous wealth, but also the one which ipso facto leads its actors on the scene of international mobility. Like the members of their families who are there, when the antique dealers are staying in the Nun, they show signs of material and financial ease. However, the particularity of the international mobilities they carry out between Cameroon and other countries around the world is based on the fact that they are fundamentally male. Indeed, unlike other players in international migration that we meet in other fields of activity which most often transform family reunification into reality in record time, antique dealers carry out their travel movements to foreign countries on their own. Forms of mobility that do not result in the breaking of ties between antique dealers and members of their families who have remained in the middle of their departure, especially women and children. In concrete terms, the long-term stays of antique dealers outside the Cameroonian national framework do not destroy family harmony. Based on documentary analysis, direct observation and semi-structured interviews, this research enabled us to decipher the strategies that antique dealers, actors of international mobility, implement to maintain the bond they have with their family members. In fact, antique dealers use the telephone and the Internet to bypass the remoteness imposed on them by the exercise of their profession. They make significant investments in material and financial terms to ensure the management and control of their families from a distance. They do not hesitate to settle in a host environment as part of immigration or a white marriage contract. In the same sense, they proceed to the marginalization and the peripherization of the members of their families by involving them in their activities in a geographical space limited to the national framework. In terms of perverse effects, their movements are not without influence on the conjugal family and tradition.

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