ABSTRACT
During an entire year, my 25-year-old research assistant Delphine refused to take her salary because she wanted to save up her earnings to be able to travel abroad. Delphine was the first in her family (and one of the very few in her compound) to graduate from university. Her family earns a modest income. Both her parents are illiterate, do not speak English and continue working as farmers despite the father’s retirement. In order to reduce financial demands from her siblings and the wider family, Delphine kept it a secret that she was working for a foreign anthropologist and later pretended that her salary was about a third of what it actually was. Delphine wanted to study in either South Africa or Europe. Based on what she had heard from others abroad, she planned to study and ‘hustle’. In Cameroon, ‘hustling’ means to try and be ready to do any kind of work (Chernoff 2003).
