In Cameroon, the term “influencer” exists in a gray area. It thrives and morphs in the most whimsical of manners. One day, it defines a lady who had a sulfurous affair with a sports star and is trying her best to rebrand and move past it, and another day, it defines a comedian who makes self-deprecating jokes on Instagram. Today, it may describe a journalist of international repute, and tomorrow, it may describe a young scammer in Buea who has garnered online fame through an unending series of cash giveaways.
On Thursday it describes a girl on Instagram whose 30,000 followers have been amassed thanks to the many well-edited photos of her rear end, while on Friday it describes a citizen of Facebook who jumps on and dissects every morsel of gossip that flies by her timeline. And on any given Sunday, an influencer in Cameroon describes a girl who leaked her own sex tape, went to prison, and seeks to rebrand herself as a web comedian in the most Fah-lacious of manners.
Our influencer soup has so many obstacles that it could give Cameroon’s culinary list a run for its money.
In the pure sense of the word, one expects an influencer to be someone who, by their knowledge and by their conscious, strategic, and consistent effort in disseminating information about a particular topic(s), becomes a leading authority figure who can influence behavior in that regard. There is a little gray area, some wiggle room to accommodate people who may not really be all of that but who, by virtue of their online following, can generate awareness around an issue, which can subsequently influence behavior. But it can be hard to tell if that happens because of them or despite them.
In Cameroon, however, the proverbial njanga ei back has been straightened out of this tight scope to accommodate a wild crowd of buzz merchants, gossip-peddlers, and beauty-products-of-dubious-manufacturing sellers who perfectly, inadvertently, serve this regime’s mandate to zombify the young people of this country as they spend hours in front of their phone screens consuming the worst of what this country’s ragtag band of ‘influencers’ can offer.
Sometimes, one must admit, it is hard to tell if these so-called influencers themselves are victims or perpetrators. Are they the victims of forty years’ worth of bad governance and the bottom-barrel filth it has to offer, or are they just chronic cases of m’as-tu-vu-laria, people who, since the time of the Andals and the First Men, have always wanted to be seen, to be heard, and to be known; and that by any means necessary? No doubt, a huge fringe of what constitutes this gray area brand of Cameroonian influencers belongs to the latter.
Our society is rotten. To quote Cameroonian philosopher Ndukong Godlove, in this excerpt from his book titled Monshung, “In Cameroon there are more bars than pharmacies.” It makes sense that the palliative that, for the most part, our young society has chosen to make it through life, is one that dulls the senses rather than cures them. Every day, we are confronted with this video or that video of one influencer or another saying something that is void of any edification whatsoever. For the most part, there is nothing to learn about these people but some crass jokes about relationships and intercourse.
It took the World Cup to actually see the extent of some of their talent and imagination, and what they could offer beyond stealing jokes from Nigeria. Many of them ran out of what to do and fizzled out ultimately. They ended up doing TikTok dances and selfies in the streets of Doha or, as in the case of Cabrel Nanjip, insulting other football fans.
Diana Bouli, whom we were all rooting for, somehow got lost along the way and is now a victim of the monsters that her colleagues created. This monster is a huge faceless mass of social media followers who have bought into that buzz and clash culture and have made her the punching bag of their own brand of insults and shading. Their argument is that they made her, elevated her, and are perfectly within their rights to bring her down now that she has dug up her umbilical from the earth of Cameroon. She has since left for Côte d’Ivoire, running away from this wild, faceless crowd of social media users in Cameroon.
But social media doesn’t need a visa. Digital bridges run across the entire world, and even the longest bridge takes only a few seconds to cross, depending on whether or not Camtel’s optic fiber woke up in a good mood. She was well reminded a week ago.
It’s been a week since Madame Cooper passed. The spectacle we all witnessed surrounding her death was one that we never thought we could witness. Even from her own colleagues, oh yes, she too existed in that gray area, who are no strangers to trying to break news even before CNN, one would have thought they would have some measure of decorum, some imagine-if-it-were-me-in-these-shoes kind of moment, seeing who was at the center of this tragic event.
That, unfortunately, under the skies of Crayfishkistan, is nothing but wishful thinking.
Rumors flew helter-skelter. WhatsApp statuses were updated with chats confirming and denying her passing, and the mortal remains of that poor young lady were published for all to see in a bid to prove to people that “yes indeed, I am a verifiable source and you, my followers, always need to understand that I give only the real news.”
The saddest spectacle of all was the flurry of TikTokers, each one thinking of themselves as an influencer, setting up their ring lights, applying some lip gloss, some light touch of mascara on their eyebrows, a bit of blush on the cheeks, and then proceeding to cry in front of their smartphones, feigning love for the newly departed. A very sad spectacle.
But none of these clowns came close to this Facebook citizen who jumps on and dissects every morsel of gossip that flies by her timeline. Aicha Kamoise, she calls her. Oh! She took it to another level. She was in a league of her own. In her characteristic high-pitched, eardrum-irritating voice, she announced the news, feigned some invisible tears that even crocodiles will deny, and then proceeded to talk about how life was short and how we needed to live in the moment. She said we needn’t always keep money for tomorrow because we don’t know what can happen tomorrow, and one of the ways to seize the day and smell the roses along the path was to spend some of that hard-earned money on her own brand of beauty serum (bottle in hand), which she sells via her website, now, because no one knows tomorrow.
Carpe diem, indeed. It’s a surprise she didn’t offer a special bereavement discount with COOPER being the discount code. You may think that is far-fetched, but with these people, you never know.
We have an influencer problem, a big one. As technology overall becomes cheaper and the number of bars increases at a geometric rate, while pharmacies increase at an arithmetic rate, it is only going to get worse—a true Malthusian catastrophe for Cameroonian society.