Bushfalling: How young Cameroonians dare to migrate

This book is written in reaction to, on the one hand, trafficking and smuggling discourses in Europe, and, on the other hand to the strong belief in the possibilities of bushfalling in Cameroon. Tensions between ambitions for mobility and imposed immobility are reflected in the way that Anglophone Cameroonians have started since the late 1990s to refer to emigration in Pidgin as ‘bushfalling’. Bushfalling is the act of going out to the wilderness (bush) to hunt down meat (money) and bring back these trophies. On the basis of an ethnographic study of migration brokers, consulate officers, aspiring migrants and their families, as well as deported migrants, this research investigates what makes young Cameroonians migrate at all cost. The books argues that we can only come to understand dynamics of trafficking and bushfalling if we take seriously the perspectives of people in countries of departure, as well as the plurality of regulatory dynamics that shape conditions of departure. By studying rather than presupposing the place of state, market and family actors within conditions of departure, this study unravels how the phenomena of bushfalling and trafficking do not exist merely because individuals chose to migrate at all cost.