ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a journey between London in the UK and Bali Nyonga in Cameroon in order to show how an individual's place-making projects draw on multiple locales. It illustrates the inappropriateness of thinking about distinct cities as opposed to an urban process and it highlights the different emotional and material connections that emerge from the project of pursuing local concerns over long distances. The chapter focuses based on a research project that looked at four small African towns and traces the global connections between each of them and the diasporas of domestic, national, and international migrants who had left them. It sets out to answer a series of questions about translocalism and urban patriotism in the context of a comparative study of four hometown associations with connections to Cameroon and Tanzania. Parochialism, and introversion were all in evidence in Cameroon, fostered by a national politics that emphasized autochthony.
