One Month After Kumba: On Platforms, Pressure, and the Work of Actually Showing Up
A month after the Kumba Massacre and the cultural industry's initial mobilization, the writer reflects on the gap between viral gestures and sustained ground action. They argue against blaming entertainers for unmet expectations, while naming those who did show up—not with statements, but with presence and material aid.
After much pomp and uniformed pageantry, the kinetic energy which seized the group of artists from different sectors of the entertainment and cultural industry seems to have gone into a somewhat state of entropy. At the very least, it has fizzled out.
What many hoped was going to be a spark that would ignite the fire to light the course of an advocacy that included tangible on-the-ground work, now instead looks as sour and as dour as the faces of the three people in the picture that accompanies this post.
As much as perhaps, some of you may want me to, this is not an article that puts our entertainment industry on trial. Because honestly, if we look at everything across the board and from a microscopic point of view, many of us are pretty much in the same state and the same 'bilan' can be said of our actions over the last past month.
Outside of Tino who has built the platform for the Anglophone Youth Conference, I don't know anyone in my immediate entourage who is doing something outside of internet advocacy to address the problems that have sprung off the board of the Anglophone Crisis.
And can I blame myself or you either? No, I can't. For one we live in a world where information flows so fast and barely have we had time to grieve over one tragedy, that another one occurs. Barely two weeks after the Kumba Massacre, soldiers fired into a beer parlour in Akum on the pretext that they thought Amba fighers were in there.
Two people died; amongst whom was a nursing mother. Only yesterday, Robertson Tange, an Economics teacher, was killed in Bamenda by Amba boys. His body was discovered in the morning - let's not pretend we do not know which entity in this conflict specialises in killing teachers.
But to come back to the people represented in the picture, what I am trying to say is that we should learn not to count on people who have a big platform. Sure they have a louder voice and it will be good to have that microphone at the service of a cause but at the end of the day, they are all people like you and me that have their daily struggles and their own personal conflicts. Thrusting them into the frontline battle cannot yield the results we expect.
You cannot ask someone who has not taken it upon himself to be a leader for such a ginormous cause if he himself has not put himself in that position. But that is the opposite of what we did. We pressured them into that position, they went ahead to organise whatever-the-hell that was and now one month later, three months later, 6 months later - people are going to ask what spawned from the whole thing, and likely nothing will exist to show for it.
Maybe I am speaking too soon. Maybe they have something planned (and I hope to the heavens that it's not a song). But quite honestly I am not hopeful, and neither should you be. And that should not be a reason to put any one of them on trial. Those who feel concerned and want to contribute in their little way will do so.
Salatiel, Tzy Panchak and Big G Baba, for example, went to visit the bereaved families and some of the survivors and bore gifts to them. Nabila helped to organize a food drive for IDPs living in Bonaberi. These acts are commendable. It is a splash in an ocean, but it also the little drops that make the ocean.
All we need now is discernment to identify true leaders with tangible ideas that are going to lead us through this crisis. And if some musician does not post #EndAnglophoneCrisis, you should not waste your time berating them.
The people always start a revolution, and everyone follows.
- Wandji Wilfred
The post sits in the immediate aftermath of a massacre in Kumba during the Anglophone Crisis, a period of intense violence and displacement in Cameroon's English-speaking regions. In this moment, cultural figures faced pressure to take visible stands, and some organized what the writer describes as a symbolic gathering. The piece speaks to a broader fatigue with performative activism in contexts of ongoing tragedy.
It captures a crucial and recurring tension: the hunger for public figures to use their platforms against injustice, and the simultaneous recognition that pressure and platforms do not substitute for actual commitment or leadership. The writer's refusal to perform outrage—toward either the entertainers or those who demanded their action—remains rare and instructive. The final line, 'The people always start a revolution, and everyone follows,' inverts the usual narrative and returns agency where it belongs.