UCLA

Mvog-Betsi Zoo-Botanical Gardens, located in the capital city of Yaoundé, brings together dozens of Cameroon’s 280 languages with dozens of species of its wildlife, serving as the touristic face of the country. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the summer of 2014, this paper looks at the issue of symbolic capital and multilingual communication at Mvog-Betsi, by focusing on the animals cared for by three keepers from different parts of Cameroon (the Fulfuldophone north, Anglophone southwest, and Francophone southeast). Each of these keepers occupies different spaces in the zoo, has access to different animals and resources due to their affiliations, and faces different challenges in communicating with other staff members and the visiting public. At Mvog-Betsi Zoo-Botanical Gardens, keepers gain social capital through the linguistic communities to which they belong – local, regional, national, and international. This social capital, in turn, offers keepers access to the cultural capital of the animals associated with those communities. However, drawing on Achille Mbembe’s description of the postcolony as a “plurality of spheres” (2001, 5), I argue that these affiliations offer access to different types, rather than different quantities, of symbolic capital.