Abstract

This article examines the disappearance of the Bimbia slavery memorial from ancestry reconnection programming activities in 2018 as a reflection of an emerging effect of the “Anglophone” crisis in 2018: an anti-crisis atmosphere. Building on growing literature that treats atmosphere as a mode of sensorial attunement, this article puts ethnographic focus on how changes in postcolonial sovereignty against the “Anglophone” crisis became unobservable but were consistently on the precipice of being felt. By drawing on the affective conditions of ancestral knowledge production, including a simple curiosity to care precipitating initial public access to Bimbia, Cameroonians cannot only use the genetic diaspora’s return to neutralize the impact of atmospheric violence by the postcolonial state. Managing and sustaining the genetic diaspora’s return also signifies a chronic paradoxical struggle to create and maintain a reparative line of flight from the processes of racialization within and beyond the postcolony as “home.”

Keywords

crisis; African ancestry; genetic diaspora; racialization; Cameroon; atmosphere; postcolonial sovereignty

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Victoria M. Massie

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.