Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the normative registers on which aspiring migrants draw to evaluate the trustworthiness and legitimacy of migration brokers, as well as how these normative registers relate to official norms of states.

Paper long abstract:

Although migration brokers are greatly admired public figures in Anglophone Cameroon, stories of duping are common. In this paper, I explore how aspiring migrants deal with the potential of deceit by migration brokers. By drawing on the cases of two aspiring migrants who failed to leave the country with the help of migration brokers, this paper unravels the socially grounded moralities that direct relations between aspiring migrants and migration brokers in Cameroon. I argue that relations between aspiring migrants and migration brokers cannot be understood through the lens of a Western European legal consciousness, but needs to be analysed through the moralities that shape the economy of departure. My paper develops an alternative way to conceptualise the credibility of migration brokers - not in terms of the supposed 'legal' or 'illegal' nature of their work, but in terms of locally operated distinctions between dokimen, feymen and big men. Starting from emic terminology, this paper proposes an evaluation scale of the 'powers' of migration brokers that goes beyond statist distinctions between smuggling and trafficking. In doing so, I question the relative place of state-enforceable law as opposed to the binding rules and customs generated in the social field of migration brokerage. The paper is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Anglophone Cameroon between 2007 and 2010 and illuminates the work of two NGOs that engage in so-called "travel consultations".