Attitudes of Bamenda Traders Vis-A-Vis “Ghost Towns” and Management of Psychological Reactance

Abstract

Since 2016 in Cameroon, an internal armed conflict with multifaceted repercussions opposes the State to separatists who are requesting their independence by force after the failure of negotiation. The perverse effect of that situation is the deprivation of economic actor’s freedoms through the phenomenon of ghost towns. It is also have pressure on the State giving his role as guarantor of fundamental rights of citizens. The deprivation of freedoms among Bamenda traders is manifested by the prohibition of selling on Mondays, which is considered a working day in Cameroon. That situation of deprivation made those traders to use some circumvented strategies to sell behind closed doors generally or by the use of various means. It is a situation in which the separatists forbid economic activities with “ghost towns” and the traders challenge that embargo despite the risks. Those traders finally developed a kind of resistance aimed to defy the interdiction. That particular form of resistance is called by psychologists the psychological reactance. The theory states that, individuals have certain freedoms with regards to their behavior. If these behavioral freedoms are reduced or threatened with reduction, the individual will be motivationally aroused to regain them (Brehm, 1966). However, researches on reactance do not usually include a conative component in strategies of recovering freedoms. This article, is based on an investigation carried out during “ghost towns” with a sample of 146 traders from the subdivisions of Bamenda I, II and III. In light of attitudes the conative component intervenes intensively in the Bamenda trader’s reactance vis-à-vis “ghost towns”. Moreover, the circumvented strategies used by traders in front of their shops suggested a new form of resistance that we considered as instrumental or operant reactance. From the quantitative (SPSS 25) and qualitative (content analysis) methods that we used, we confirmed our general hypotheses that the attitudes of Bamenda traders afferent to “ghost towns” predict their management of the psychological reactance.