Foreword
I was an early entrepreneur. My first real business started at 13 — a dorm room photography operation, complete with records. Not a hobby. A business.
I was 15 when I moved into fashion design, then party organizing. I was always building something, always moving. I started writing songs in 2011. It was just an outlet. I had just obtained my first degree and I was trying to make sense of the world — and of myself. I did not see myself taking the traditional career path. Making music became a placeholder. But deep down, I always knew it was not what I wanted to do. It was something I could do. A stepping stone. I admired Jay-Z enormously. His famous line — I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man — captured something I felt but had not yet named.
I had my first taste of what performance could do when I emceed during House Feast at Sacred Heart College. I understood something that day about presence, about a crowd, about what it means to hold a room.
Back then, entrepreneurship was considered stubbornness. So I ended up in university in the United States. I went through the motions. Graduated with honors. But I always felt I was not in my zone. Book smart, yes — but I always found myself in the streets, somewhat polyvalent, more interested in how the world actually worked than in what the curriculum said about it.
One thing that burned in me as I became exposed to the wider world was a question I could not shake: why did Africans seem to be left behind? I was an avid reader. A budding philosopher. Questioning things was not a habit — it was a reflex. And young, understanding that there was no place for people like me in the corridors of political power in Africa, I kept arriving at the same conclusion: culture. I had seen people move from culture to influence politics and policy. I believed it was the one space the bureaucrats could not fully control.
Around the time I started skirting the music scene, I was watching first-hand how artists like P-Square and Wizkid in Nigeria were linking up with Akon — quietly, steadily shifting the global narrative about Africa. In university, most of my friends were Nigerian. I knew 9ice. I knew Eldee. The Danfo Drivers and 2Face were urban culture in my world. At the college parties I organized, when my Nigerian friends played their music, we followed it with Coupé Décalé — and they knew that too. But there was almost no urban music from Cameroon I could play.
Then Jovi released Don 4 Kwat. It was a huge relief. I finally had something urban, something unmistakably Cameroonian, that I could share without explanation or apology.
By 2013, when he released the first studio album H.I.V, I felt something shift. Listening to the album and featured artists like Decee, I understood that Don 4 Kwat was not a singularity. There was a whole new generation budding. I could not miss that moment. It was my signal. I packed my bags and headed back home.
I came back in mid-2013, and the music industry in Yaoundé felt like one family — at least among those who had not yet made it big. We linked up, shared beats freely, freestyled together, learned from each other. Showed up to video shoots, stayed through studio sessions, did the whole nine miles. The competition was mostly positive.
Recently, Blueprint Hakeem shared a video that brought those days rushing back.
That era did not last. By December 2014, cracks were showing. I personally see Stanley Enow winning the MTV Africa Music Award as the turning point — not because of Stanley himself, but because of what it signaled: that real money was now entering an industry whose foundation was still fragile. The competition shifted almost overnight. I saw the cracks early. That is partly why I slowed down on music and created PoiseSocial.
The first article I published on PoiseSocial was a review of Ngoma’s Mangosi. The second was about Mic Monsta’s self-titled EP. We were never paid. The value we offered was recognition — acknowledgment of an artist’s specific worth. In local parlance: all man be get yi place. Everyone had something they excelled at. Everyone had a lane that was theirs.
I wrote about Salatiel’s business mind — used him as a case study to teach young artists the difference between assets and liabilities in a music career. I never wrote about him as the best artist in Cameroon. I wrote about what he specifically excelled at.
Wandji Wilfred wrote about Ko-C as an example of how artists can attract lucrative brand collaborations. He wrote about Gasha’s artistry. We wrote about how the current urban scene derives from — and could further inherit from — the Makossa tradition. Contributors examined artists from every angle: craft, business, cultural weight, storytelling, community.
However, that differentiated appreciation collapsed into ranking. And ranking collapsed into the singular metric system we are stuck with today.
Everyone had a place. Somehow, we forgot that. And the consequences are playing out in real time — on timelines, in comment sections, in the narrowing of what we ask music to be. This essay is my attempt to name what we lost, and to argue for what we could still recover.
Chapter I
The Tyranny of the Metric
Every few weeks, the Cameroonian internet erupts. Screenshots flood timelines. Voice notes circulate on WhatsApp. Two artists are beefing — and both sides are armed with the same weapon: numbers.
How many zeros in his account? How many shows did she sell out? How many followers? How many streams? How many reactions on the last post?
We have confused the scoreboard for the game. And in doing so, we are losing something far more valuable than any rap battle.
Let us be clear about what this obsession actually measures: visibility and commercial traction. Both are real. Neither is the whole story. A song can have ten million streams and say absolutely nothing. A concert can sell out and leave the audience emptier than when they arrived.
The numbers game is borrowed logic — imported wholesale from Billboard chart culture, from markets with entirely different infrastructures, different histories, and different stakes. — Numbers Don’t Lie. People Do.
When we apply that framework uncritically to Cameroon, we are not measuring greatness. We are measuring who has best learned to play someone else’s game. That is not an insult. It is a diagnosis.
Chapter II
What Urban Music Was Supposed to Be
Hip-hop did not begin as a numbers competition. It began as testimony. It emerged from communities that had been made invisible — politically, economically, culturally — and it declared: we are here, we see what is happening, and we will not be silent.
The greatest artists in the tradition are not remembered for their streaming figures. They are remembered for what they said, who they moved, what they changed.
Fela Kuti is not a legend because of album sales. Bob Marley’s estate did not build a cultural empire on concert attendance alone. The music was the message. The message outlasted the moment.
Nigeria understood this intuitively at a critical juncture. When Fela’s political directness gave way to a new generation’s melodic ambition, the artists who emerged — 2Face, the Danfo Drivers, later P-Square, D’banj, Wizkid — were not simply making hits. They were constructing a new image of Nigeria, of African youth, of what it sounded like to be young and creative and alive on this continent. The numbers followed because the meaning came first.
Cameroon has always had that same capacity. The country sits at one of the most linguistically and culturally rich crossroads on the continent.
Makossa is not just a genre — it is proof of what happens when a culture invests in musical seriousness. Its complexity, its emotional range, its technical depth: these are not accidents. They are the product of generations that understood music as something worth getting right.
Jovi understood this. When Don 4 Kwat landed, it was not just a good song. It was a statement of existence. It told an entire generation of young Cameroonians that their streets, their language, their experience was worth recording. That is not a chart position. That is a cultural event.
Chapter III
The Beef That Costs Us Everything
Here is what is genuinely at stake when we reduce the conversation to numbers. When artists fight over streaming ranks, the youth watching learn that music is about market position. When fans take sides based on follower counts, they are trained to defer to platforms — most of which were not designed with Africa in mind and extract far more value from the continent than they return.
We are teaching a generation that the measure of a voice is its volume, not its truth. — Numbers Don’t Lie. People Do.
And then we wonder why so few songs are about anything. Why the lyrics rarely touch the education crisis, the unemployment rate among youth under thirty, the slow drain of talent across borders, the everyday weight of surviving in a system that was built for someone else.
The beefs are a distraction. But more than that — they are a symptom. They reveal what happens when an industry loses its sense of purpose and fills the vacuum with competition. I watched this happen in real time. The warmth of 2013 — the shared beats, the open studio sessions, the mutual respect — did not disappear because the artists changed. It disappeared because the incentive structure changed.
Chapter IV
A Different Accounting
If we are serious about urban music as a vehicle for youth emancipation, economic development, and cultural change — and we should be deadly serious about this — then we need a different set of questions.
Not how many streams, but what did the song provoke? Did it start conversations? Did it name something people had felt but could not articulate? Did it make someone feel less alone in a country where being young, broke, and ambitious can feel like a private humiliation?
Not how many concerts, but who was in the room? Was the music building community or just audience? Not how much money, but how is the money moving? Is success being recycled into the ecosystem — producers, videographers, stylists, engineers, local studios — or is it being extracted by intermediaries who take the majority and build nothing?
All man be get yi place. That phrase is not just humility. It is wisdom. A forest is not made of one tree.
Chapter V
The Responsibility of the Mic
Artists are not just entertainers. In contexts where institutions fail and politicians perform, artists are often the only people actually speaking to — and for — young people. That is not a burden to run from. It is the most significant position of cultural power available.
I came back from the United States in 2013 because a song told me it was time. Not a government program. Not an economic incentive. A song. That is power. Jovi did not know he was doing that when he made Don 4 Kwat. He was just being honest. But honesty, at the right moment, catalyzes movement.
You can use the mic to tell the next generation that the measure of a man is his watch. Or you can use it to tell them that their language is not a handicap, that their neighborhood is not a sentence, that their hunger — intellectual, creative, economic — is legitimate, urgent, and deserves a soundtrack.
Chapter VI
The Call
To the artists: the mic is a responsibility before it is a brand. The culture is watching what you do with it. The numbers will come and go — platforms change, algorithms shift, trends die. What remains is whether you said something true.
To the fans: you are not consumers. You are the culture. What you reward, you reproduce. The fact that you have settled for beef as entertainment is the consequence of an industry that stopped offering you something better. You have the right to demand more.
To the critics and commentators: metrics are not analysis. Numbers do not tell you whether a song is brave, honest, necessary, or true. We had a language for that once. It is not too late to rebuild it.
Cameroon is at a generational inflection point. The youth cohort is enormous. The challenges are real. The window is not permanent. Do not waste it on a numbers game. — Numbers Don’t Lie. People Do.
We have been here before — in those early days in Yaoundé, sharing beats, staying through each other’s studio sessions, building something we did not yet have a name for. We knew then, intuitively, that music was bigger than any one of us. That the whole ecosystem mattered. That everyone had a place.
The numbers don’t lie. But they don’t tell the whole truth either. And we have always been capable of handling the whole truth.
— ✦ —
This essay is a call, not a verdict. The conversation belongs to all of us.