Asian Drivers

We welcome Visiting Fellow Dr Basile Ndjio

Dr. Basile Ndjio teaches Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Douala in Cameroon, and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the International development Centre of the Open University. He has been a Visiting Lecturer or a Research Fellow in several universities in Europe and the US.

Dr. Ndjio has studied at the University of Yaounde (Cameroon), and then at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) where he obtained his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology with distinction. He has written on topics as varied as west African organized crime in Europe, popular culture, democratisation processes in Africa, civil society and the state in Cameroon, autochthony and the politics of belonging, expectations of modernity among Cameroonian youths, African urban landscape, and new forms of wealth and power in Cameroon.

His most recent works include: 'Intimate Strangers: Neighbourhood, Autochthony and the Politics of Belonging,' 'Douala: Inventing Life in an African Necropolis,' 'Millennial Democracy and Spectral Reality in Postcolonial Africa,' , 'Migration, Architecture and the Transformation of the Landscape in the Bamileke Grassfields of West Cameroon. Parallel to his ongoing research on young West African transnational swindlers and confidence tricksters, he is conducting a research on Chinese migration and prostitution in West Africa. 

His forthcoming publications include 'Shanghai beauties and African desires: Migration, Trade and Chinese prostitution in Cameroon', and 'Asian bodies and African desires: Chinese prostitution and the structural transformation of the local economy of sex and pleasure in Cameroon'.