ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how a “knowledge of crisis” emerged, and how the production of numbers became a competitive game among humanitarian agencies. The best-established practice of enumerating needs by law is the “registration” of refugees. Registration thus constitutes a heuristic point of entry in the study of “humanitarian government.” Competition for humanitarian leadership became clear in the 1990s. Cameroon has only become the object of humanitarian knowledge. Since the 1970s, Cameroon has seemed to have escaped the great Sahelian famines, mass violence, and genocidal war. Humanitarian organizations, journalists, and diplomats thus multiplied observational missions in Eastern Cameroon. Interviews with seven Central African refugees and with the Accounting Commissioner for refugees in Kenzou’s soccer stadium, December 2014. United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has an interest in demonstrating that the host populations are consequential. In Cameroon, in 2014, UNHCR was generous in its estimation of the number of “host persons”: The organization counted, for every displaced person or refugee, 2.4 host persons.
