Kesum‐body and the places of the gods: the politics of children’s masking and second‐world realities in OKU (cameroon)

As emerging nation‐states in sub‐Saharan Africa engender warfare and rapid socio‐political change that increasingly affect children, this article examines the ways in which child masking may represent a means for children in Oku, a kingdom in the Cameroon Grassfields, to incorporate references to exogenous forms of modernist violence in their fantasy‐play. The means by which children overcome their fear of adult masks and the forest spirits they represent by becoming maskers themselves is first examined. Two new children’s masquerades, one representing a white man and the other referring to the SDF opposition political party, then serve as a focus to illustrate how children now extend their use of masking to incorporate the exogenous forces of the state, transforming the fragmentation of social ties and local cosmologies these forces threaten into new trans‐local models of social cohesion.