Rogers Orock holds a PhD in Anthropology from Aarhus University in Denmark (2014). He teaches Africana Studies at Lafayette College and his research and teaching have focused on elites, power, and political imagination in Central and West African societies (Cameroon, Gabon, and Nigeria). He has published numerous articles on the political and sociocultural anthropology of elites and questions of morality and social discourses on elite power, legitimacy, and accountability. He has co-edited Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa (2021) and co-authored Conspiracy Narratives in Postcolonial Africa: Freemasonry, Homosexuality, and Illicit Enrichment (2024). He has also served as an editorial board member of the AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME) of as well as the HAU bookseries published by the University of Chicago Press. As a WARA board member, I will draw on my experiences working in Africa and in the United States to further strengthen WARA’s mission fostering decolonial partnerships and privileging African networks of knowledge production. Rogers is an anthropologist with multiple and overlapping research interests on elites, power, and political imagination in Central African societies, notably in Cameroon. Most recently, he has pursued a collaborative ethnographic project (2015-2023) on Freemasonry and moral panics over homosexuality in Cameroon and Gabon. They tracked, analyzed, and engaged with rumors and conspiracy theories as well as questions of political morality and narratives of coloniality and decoloniality in these postcolonial situations in Africa. The outcome of this project is a monograph (co-authored with Peter Geschiere), titled Conspiracy Narratives in Postcolonial Africa: Freemasonry, Homosexuality, and Illicit Enrichment (University of Chicago Press 2024). The book shows how attacks on elites as homosexual predators corrupting the nation have become a powerful outlet for mounting populist anger against the excesses and corruption by the governing elites in Cameroon, Gabon, and other Francophone African states.
Previously, Rogers studied elites, political mobilization, and development discourse in Cameroon (2010-2014). The study shows how popular expectations for development in Cameroon bind elites and non-elites as well as the state and society in relations of complicity in ways that define social and political life. Aspects of this earlier work on elites and political leadership have been published as articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Cultural Dynamics (2013), Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute (2014), Critique of Anthropology (2014), Anthropological Quarterly (2015). Materials from this project are under revision into a book manuscript. Additionally, with Wale Adebanwi, he has co-edited Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa (University of Michigan Press 2021). Other publications include “Rethinking Achille Mbembe’s ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” which is a special section of the journal Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute , celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Achille Mbembe’s inspiring argument about the meaning of power and authoritarian complicity in the postcolony in Africa. Since Fall 2024, Rogers has been assistant professor of Africana Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Prior to his current post at Lafayette college, he taught Africana studies for two years at Louisiana State University (2022-24) and he also taught anthropology for six years at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Rogers has also conducted research in Cameroon, Gabon, and France. He obtained Bachelor’s degree at the University of Buea in Cameron as well as master’s degrees in anthropology, public administration, and international studies in Finland and France. Lastly, He obtained my PhD in Anthropology from Aarhus University in Denmark (2014) and held postdoctoral fellowships in Belgium (2014-2015) and in France (2015).