Visual Rhetoric and Symbolic Capital in Cameroonian Private Higher Education: “Staging Quality as Postcolonial Legitimacy”

Private higher education in Cameroon is increasingly promoted through visual and performative claims of legitimacy rather than effective pedagogical practices. In a sector marked by informational opacity, competitive enrollment pressures, and uneven regulatory oversight, quality is experienced less as a verifiable practice than as a culturally mediated appearance. This article examines how institutions mobilize architecture, branding, accreditation artifacts, ceremonial rituals, and digital imagery to make quality visible, credible, and socially recognizable. Drawing on an eight-month ethnographically informed critical visual analysis of sixteen institutions in Yaoundé and Buea, the study introduces the concept of a visual economy of quality, showing how legitimacy is assembled, circulated, and converted into material resources. Analysis demonstrates that visual performance functions as a rational response to structural constraints while creating a bias toward auditable representations, producing a tension between staged credibility and pedagogical substance. The article contributes to African higher education studies by foregrounding the visual as a site for negotiating power, recognition, and knowledge

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Keywords: Visual culture; institutional performance; postcolonial legitimacy; higher education; symbolic capital.

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