Authenticity and the Stories We Tell: Why Cameroon's Cultural Signposts Matter

The video you just watched, as hard as it is to believe, is an advert for a hotel in the Nkoabang neighbourhood in Yaoundé. 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, good and memorable.

I watched the advert many times and I noticed something interesting; cultural signposts. Cultural signposts and how they are relevant 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 thug. Now, if you look at that from another 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 grand for kwata / neighbourhood thug and often self-proclaimed vigilante.

These three characters, by themselves, 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.

NUMBER ONE: 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. WE know of the other bushfaller 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.

NUMBER TWO: We know the stories of the ‘grand for kwata’ 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 his own view on politics and social philosophy in exchange for a bottle of 33. We know the story of the villains amongst them, scouring the faces of people new to the neighbourhood to “taxer” them later with a “grand il n’y a rien pour ton petit?”

NUMBER THREE: We know the stories of the ‘petite du kwat’. The well-brought up girl (qui a grandi derriere la barriere) that passes by in a puritanical haste, oblivious to the cat-calling and the lecherous looks from the retired men drinking all day at Ahmadou’s store as they listen to the Don Grand for Kwat’s stories on politics and social philosophy. We also know the stories of the other petite, whom by extension has been labelled a panthere, and that all the young guys in the quartier claim to have slept with, whether true or not.

These are our stories. They happen to us every day. And how we use these characters to create and recreate the 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 wrote. And the beauty of it is that they did not go too far to fetch for ideas. They looked around and took an all-too-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 on a national level, and secondly, the torch bearers of our culture and whom, by default, also 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 don’t want to spread their tentacles to newer places but because it seems "cool" and "trendy" to be otherwise.

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 heavily from the Ivorian DJs of the Coupe-Decale glory days.

I'm not saying it is outright sinful to have some foreign measure of foreign influence. I’m writing this in English, and not Lamnso after all. I'm saying that we can influence too. But that comes with accepting who and what we are first and using our cultural signposts in our narratives in a beautiful and captivating manner. And we do that others buy into it; and that is how we influence.

The advert above doesn’t even dig too deep into the well of stories each of these characters have. It barely unearths the surface and yet, even with terrible cameras and a less than convincing acting, it was able to produce something so entertaining, captivating and memorable that carries the water.

And so, rather than drinking from the bitter waters of Marra, we ought to strike the rock and get our own saving grace from the spring that will carry us into the vast oceans where other people sail and can see who we are.

This advert shows us that we don’t have to go too far to do that. It is found in our everyday stories. We need to use what we have to craft the stories we want to tell ourselves and others and not be, instead, the water boy for other people’s stories.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

- Wandji Wilfred.

This article was first published in June 2018. It has been very heavily modified.