The video you just watched, as hard as it is to believe, is an advert for some hotel in the Nkoabang neighbourhood in Yaoundé. I don’t know how many of you have seen it before now. Personally, I came across it on Sunday during one of my pointless browsing on Facebook. I don’t know what you make of it, but I think it is one of the funniest things I have seen in quite a while. I’m not sure who sat and brainstormed the idea for the advert and what flash of inspiration hit them. It is one of the poorest quality adverts I have seen and yet it so entertaining and good. So good that it has even been exported beyond Cameroon already.
I did some little research and realised the advert is well-known, not only amongst Francophone Cameroonians but in Francophone Africa as well. I saw Facebook comments from people from Cote D’Ivoire, Senegal, Gabon, and the DRC. I’m not certain it is that popular amongst Anglophones though. So if you’re seeing this for the first time, you are welcome.
I watched the advert many times and I noticed something interesting. An issue with cultural signposts and their relevance to the image that we are moulding for ourselves and for the future generation of Cameroonians.
Now, if you notice, the advert has 3 main characters. The boy, his girlfriend and the man. Now, if you look at that from a different angle you do not see these 3 people but rather, 3 different characters of the contemporary Cameroonian social folklore.
- The ‘bushfaller’ - The small nga / la petite - The man for terre / grand for kwata / neighbourhood thug and often self-proclaimed vigilante.
These three characters can just on their own constitute fodder for a unique story that can be broken into many different storylines. We know these stories. They happen to us and around us every day. We all know the story of that bushfaller who has returned home only to find out that his cousin used the money he sent to buy a piece of land to get himself a wife, or of the other one who had to sell his laptop and phone to put together the money needed to buy the plane ticket for his return trip to Azerbaijan. N'est-ce pas?
We know the stories of the ‘grand for terre’ and ‘specialist for nkou’ who is the de facto chief of the quartier idle park, and whom can be seen idling around in his jobless bliss. We know the story of the kind-hearted ones amongst them, ready to help Ma’a Pauline break firewood in exchange for a meal and ready to entertain you at Ahmadou’s store with stories on politics and his own twisted view of philosophy in exchange for a bottle of small guigui. We know the story of the villains amongst them, scouring the faces of people new to the neighbourhood pour ensuite les “taxer” with a “grand il n’y a rien pour ton petit?”
We know the stories of the ‘petite du kwat’. The one girl that passes by, in a puritanical haste, oblivious to the cat-calling and the lecherous looks from the old, retired men drinking all day at the makeshift terrace at Ahmadou’s store as they listen to the Don Grand for Kwat’s stories on politics and his twisted view on philosophy. Even Ismael who roasts soya at the entrance to the neighbourhood would want to take her as his fourth wife.
We also know the stories of the other petite, who by extension has been labelled a panthere by the young guys in the quartier who falsely claim to have slept with her and whom can be seen sometimes prancing around the old men at Ahmadou’s store.
These are our stories. They happen to us every day. They are, I insist again, relevant to the contemporary social construct of our culture. And how we use them to characters to create and recreate our stories that we tell to ourselves and to the world is important.
The advert for Adora Palace takes that and beautifully puts it into four minutes of pure entertainment. They may have done so inadvertently, not thinking perhaps of the far reaches of their acts with regard to how they recreated a social construct into art by taking a simple theme from everyday life and deforming it just a little to fit into a narrative they imagined. And the beauty of it is that they did not go too far to fetch for ideas. They looked around and took a common and familiar scenario and made a story out of it.
It is authentic. It is Cameroonian.
I say this because we are living in a time where we facing an existential and identity crisis. First, the Anglophone problem is making us question who we are really, and secondly, the torch bearers and those who have the biggest platform to use Cameroonian cultural characters to create signposts and bearings can be can be caught slipping every now and then not because they want to spread their tentacles to newer places but because it seems "cool" and "trendy."
It’s somehow cool to sound Naija in songs. We use Chineke in music instead of Sango Yesu Cristo. We find people portraying the sapeurs from the DRC in music videos. The hypemen in our clubs borrow from the Ivorian DJs of the Coupe-Decale glory days. We do not say it outright that we are Nigerian but we drop ambiguous statements here and there that make people falsely believe that we are Nigerian or one of our parents may have been, and so publications about us carry “the Cameroon-Nigerian singer has….” And we bask in that sun because being Nigerian is somehow “cool.”
Hi Dencia.
The advert above doesn’t even dig too deep into the well of stories each of these characters have. It barely scratched the surface and yet even with terrible cameras and a less than convincing acting, it was able to produce something so entertaining, captivating and popular. I'm not saying it is outright sinful to have some foreign influence. I'm saying that we can influence too. As a matter of fact, we should actually focus on influencing. But that comes with accepting who and what we are first.
This advert and the popularity it has gained (and is still gaining) shows us that we don’t have to go too far to get value. It’s found in our everyday stories. We need to be able to value what we have. We need to use what we have to craft the stories we want to tell ourselves and others. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
- Wandji Wilfred.