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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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New family ties in a diaspora context: the case of Cameroonian migration in Italy
| Panel |
23. Family Dynamics an Migration: Tensions in Gender and Generation Relations
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| Paper ID | 153 |
| Author(s) |
Luraschi, Moira
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | The aim of this paper is to focus on the different types of family ties which Cameroonian migrants are building in Italy along with their tradition. Despite their different ethnic origins, Cameroonian migrants are facing common living conditions in the host country, developing similar attitudes, and in the meanwhile different from their traditional behaviours.
Cameroonians have rather closed, young and small communities in Italy, where they came mainly to complete their university education as the first migrants’ generation, leaving the rest of their family in Cameroon. They come from all over Cameroon and they are mainly Beti and Bamileké with an equal sex ratio. After the degree, the ones who decide to stop in Italy and to form a family there mainly choose other Cameroonians as partners, not minding about ethnical origins. This is something quite problematic for the rest of their families in Cameroon, because parents often would prefer new in-laws within their same ethnic group.
Moreover, these young migrants get married and have children after the end of their studies, in elder age for Cameroonian standards, especially for women; they do not practice polygamy because it is not allowed by Italian laws; they have a lower number of children. Because of the same educational level and wage of Cameroonian men and women, their domestic relationships are more equal than the ones in Cameroon. Actually, in Cameroon, men and women have separate domains of household expenses (i.e. women maintain their nuclear family while men afford extraordinary expenses for the whole extended family), but in this context women are economically submitted to men because they have a lower amount of cash than men, as many scholars as Sweetman and Rowlands show. In the diaspora context, this hardly happens because both men and women have waged jobs and, moreover, they have the same high qualified jobs.
All these changes in new Cameroonian families of diaspora are not always welcome by elders and parents in Cameroon and, sometimes, these also generate problems within the same migrated communities and families, between men and women, and between elders (in Cameroon) and youngers (in Italy). It should be interesting to underline how these changes affect the traditional idea of family both in Cameroon and in Italy, both in a micro-context such as domestic unity and in a macro-context such as the Cameroonian community I met in Italy, and both among old and young generations in the both countries.
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