Seminar: "These Bitches are Witches": Chinese Prostitution and the Popular Invention of ‘Witch-Other’ in Cameroon

In addition to making Africa a dumping ground for its cheap consumer commodities since the early 2000s, China has also been exporting its surplus domestic urban and rural sex workers who are often construed in Chinese official discourse as being dangerous classes and problematic subjects (Wemheur 2008). Over the last six or seven years, the number of Chinese migrant sex workers, who are commonly characterized in Cameroon as ‘Shanghai beauties’, has grown to the point where remarkable changes have been effected in the African sex market, which was previously monopolized by local native sex workers. Symptomatic of these mutations is the structural transformation of many formerly highly priced red-light districts in major African cities into sexualized Chinese commercial sites where low-income-earning local men can now bargain for Chinese sex at cheap prices.
In this study based on fieldwork conducted among sex workers in Douala in Cameroon, an insight is offered into the tactics devised by some local sex workers in order to deal with what many now see as a 'Chinese sexual invasion' of their country. The analysis focuses on the production of radical nationalist discourses that not only dramatize the otherness of Chinese migrant sex workers as economic predatory strangers but also characterize them as dangerous Witch-Others, who allegedly make use of occult means to thrive in the prostitution business. The seminar will discuss how recourse to the pervasive idioms of occultism and magic money enables disgruntled local sex workers to render intelligible the success of Chinese migrant sex workers in the expanding local prostitution business, as well as the local men’s frenetic infatuation with them. By the same process, they can legitimize their own failures and setbacks.
In conclusion, the study argues that notions of occultism and magic money that now permeate much of the popular imagination of Chinese migrant sex labourers in Cameroon are only an expression of the disenchantment and disappointment that now shape the perceptions of many subaltern Africans towards the officially celebrated recent engagement of China with Africa.