Noni White will fit perfectly into the category of a celebrity entrepreneur in our context. Allegedly from Nigeria, he defines himself on his Facebook bio as - Fashion Designer 👩🎨 philanthropist.. lover of mankind.. Pushful influencer..business man..A father. He is definitely all of those things and does not miss any opportunity to be out there staying relevant. He might be Nigerian but I have not before gotten any indication that someone felt like he was not one of us. Well, now I do know that people do, and it is only a matter of time for the opportunity for them to show it to show up.
Since the revelation of the contestants for the second season of Biggy Studios, popular opinion has him as the favorite to win. He is by far one of the most known faces in the house and he sure has a lot of public outings that are the stuff for celebrity gossip juice consumers. Between his charity events, broken engagements, and likelihood of being found with another woman, he has managed to be a very likable person.
For some, that he is Nigerian and catching the proverbial cruise in Cameroon is a genuine concern, and for some it is a perfect opportunity to make fun of Cameroon for allowing that to happen. Some just don’t care; to them, for all intents and purposes, Noni is Cameroonian.
That we are even talking about it means something but who knows what to really make of it? If some people feel some type of way about it, we can’t just dismiss that because there could be a lot more people who feel the same but just choose to remain silent.
Any-Ha!
I decided to stop using the word woke because I realized how much we don’t know about being woke. This reminds of the the English vs native dialect debate; the one where some people claim we should do away with English language and use our native languages just to show just how woke we have become to colonialism, it’s remnants, and neocolonialism. And of course the Anglophone Crisis is playing a huge role in the identity crisis. I won’t even engage this debate because anyone who is of that opinion probably doesn’t have enough analytical skills to be remotely reasonable.
For a while now, there has been a relentless push for us to be less Nigerian and more Cameroonian. We have debates on pronunciations, slang, musical sounds and expressions that seem to be burrowed from Nigeria. I remember the first time some of my cousins visited us in Bamenda from Buea. They all sounded weird. They sounded more like Nigerians to me. I mean, at the time, if I didn’t know them to be my cousins, I would have more likely guessed they were from Nigeria as I expected someone from the SW region of Cameroon to sound more like me from the NW, as we had be taught to believe we were the same people.
Before the colonialist came, we definitely lived in tribes and most of these tribes were likely started by people of the same family. We see so much cultural similarities between places like Nso and Foumban but in the context of what Cameroon is today, the people of Foumban who will mostly identify as Francophone may seem to have more in Common with the Douala or Bulu man but that is actually not the case.
I am driving at the fact that in trying so much to ‘go back’ on the makings of colonialism, we risk denying who we really are just to fit in some new narrative we are trying to create. The fact is that the Anglophone in Cameroon has more in common with people from parts of Nigeria than with people from East Cameroon. Of course over time, by association, we are gaining common ground with the Francophones. It is ironical that we are currently fighting that assimilation while at the same time refusing parts of who we are just because it is shared by other people. So in our quest to assert our unique identity, we are pushing to get rid of some of the things that make us who we are.
So we claim to be woke but then we are the same ones trying to enforce the boundaries that colonialism created. In the process, we cut away part of who we are in trying to make a point. We need to be able to make such mental separations, lest we run the risk of alienating those who are really of our tribe by trying to fix what is not broken. A film maker today in Cameroon is more likely to get a job in a filmset in Nigeria than on a french film and this has not only to do with language.
This also brings me to the immense pressure we put on artists to sound a particular way. We forget also that besides our ancestral origins, our socialization is very different. I know people who have never traveled out of Cameroon but have an ‘American’ accent. I am not talking about those Buea girls who switch the accent when they hear what they believe is someone else ‘rapping.’ I mean people who just happen to grow up in a different environment and are not even faking it. I always say if an artist like Tems was Cameroonian, it’ll be so hard for her to be accepted as one. We have them here; the T’neeyas and Amatulas. That is why we have kids who never spent a day without their milk singing about coming from the streets. This idea of a universal experience of a people needs to be wiped out of our minds. Some people come up differently even though we have some shared experiences. Instead of dismissing who they are, it may help to get to understand their influences.
How would you feel if you moved to Nigeria, lived there, and became a part of the society and the question of your nationality pops up when you are up for an opportunity? I guess not good.
- Norbert Foy