Students: The Great Absentees from Cameroon’s Post-Election Crisis. Why?
Abstract
The apparent silence of Cameroonian students does not signify depoliticisation, but a profound displacement of political identity towards the condition of precarious youth.
Education, youth and political life · Full reading edition
From student vanguard to apparent silence
During the 1960s and 1970s, students formed a political and intellectual vanguard in many African countries. The campuses of Dakar, Abidjan, Lomé, Kinshasa and Yaoundé were major centres of anticolonial mobilisation and opposition to authoritarian rule.
No comparable student mobilisation followed Cameroon’s presidential election of 12 October 2025. This absence requires a historical and structural explanation rather than a hasty judgement about indifference.
Classical theories no longer suffice
Jean-François Bayart described the African student as the holder of scarce educational capital, strategically placed between the modernising state and civil society. Dominic Thomas later highlighted the dissonance between a highly valued education and its weak economic return.
These models presupposed that students were a small future elite with a coherent collective identity. The sociological, institutional and economic conditions supporting that identity have now profoundly changed.
Massification and symbolic dilution
Three decades of underfunded expansion have overcrowded campuses and weakened the university’s status as a distinctive place of knowledge. Degraded buildings, inadequate libraries and the lack of spaces for debate produce both material violence and symbolic banalisation.
Students become anonymous members of a heterogeneous crowd, competing for increasingly devalued qualifications. Immediate survival leaves little room for the critical distance and shared culture required for organised political action.
Surveillance and the crisis of the state as employer
Political appointments, campus policing, administrative control of student organisations and the rapid repression of collective action have turned the university into a governed and neutralised space. Speaking publicly may endanger a grant, a degree or personal freedom.
At the same time, structural adjustment broke the former link between qualifications and public employment. Unemployment, underemployment and informal work transformed student expectations and encouraged strategies of prudence, personal security and migration.
A displacement of political belonging
The student has not become apolitical. Political expression has moved beyond the campus and now appears through social networks, diasporas, urban movements, informal resistance and the daily struggles of precarious youth.
Today’s student speaks less as a student than as a potential unemployed graduate, informal worker or future migrant. The political figure of the student has dissolved into that of youth. Understanding this transformation is essential for renewing African social science and democratic debate.
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