The Untapped Power of Cameroon's Cuisine as National Brand
The writer argues that Cameroon's exceptional and diverse cuisine represents an underutilised asset for national branding and tourism promotion. While ordinary Cameroonians consistently affirm the quality of their food on every platform, government tourism infrastructure has failed to harness this into a coherent, strategic national narrative.
I came across this video of this American talking about Cameroonian food. In an article that was published here last year, I wrote two Cameroonian ladies that were participating in a cooking show in Australia.
I wrote that ...
"If there is something Cameroon can claim bragging rights to, it is obviously our cuisine. Ask any Cameroonian who has traveled across Africa and they will tell you that our cuisine is unmatched.
Ask any foreigner who has visited Cameroon – I mean, really visited Cameroon, and they will tell you that what impressed them most is our cuisine and how good and varied it is.
Unfortunately, this has not been used to promote tourism. A great opportunity for branding Cameroon as the food capital of Africa is being missed. Whose fault is it? Without a doubt, the government’s. Cameroonians have done their part by reminding foreigners on every communication platform that they can get on to, that our food is the best. But they can only do so much.
The office of tourism in this country, it would seem, has no idea what nation branding is.
For years, we have been pushing the slogan “Africa in Miniature” to describe the tourism potential in Cameroon. That in itself is not a bad thing. If you look at in intrinsically, it makes sense, we have a semi-desert area, a savannah region, a grassland region, an equatorial rainforest, a wetland, a coastal area, lakes, waterfalls, highlands, and the tallest mountain in west and central Africa, with its own peculiar ecosystem. All the climates in Africa are actually found in Cameroon.
We happen to have all of these, unlike many countries. That is just one good argument for touting ourselves as ‘Africa in Miniature’.
But HOW is that being communicated? That is where the biggest problems lie. Like everything in this country, we are fond of vapid slogans that have no clear roadmap, no defined objectives, no communication, and no federation of people around the idea. And you know many of them – Emergence 2035, Le Cameroun de grandes ambitions, Le Cameroun de grandes realisations. I am sure you can add others.
And it will not just be enough to call Cameroon the Food Capital of Africa. We will have to put in the work. Ghana for example used the “Year of the Return” campaign in 2019 to mark the 400th year of the start of the slave trade. The initiative was to encourage the sons and daughters of former slaves in the Americas and Caribbean to return to Africa and not just get in contact with their roots but also to see how they can invest in the continent, and in Ghana in particular.
But before that happened, Ghana had been putting in work to fight corruption and to significantly improve the business and social climate in the country. They even did a great marketing push by welcoming the AfroNation music festival in Accra that year.
The result, Ghana gained a massive PR in black and prominent media outlets in the west and many American celebrities visited the country in Decemeber 2019."
This video comes to re-affirm my views on the topic. We have to do everything at our different levels to promote our cuisine as a huge part of our nation's brand.
. - Wandji Wilfred.
#CameroonianCuisine #NationBranding
This piece reflects a moment when African countries were actively competing on the global stage through targeted nation-branding campaigns. Ghana's 2019 'Year of the Return' initiative had recently demonstrated how cultural narrative, paired with genuine institutional reform, could generate measurable economic and reputational returns. In Cameroon, a long gap persisted between citizen-led cultural advocacy and government-level strategic communication.
The essay diagnoses a pattern endemic to Cameroonian governance: the tendency to issue grand slogans—'Africa in Miniature,' 'Emergence 2035'—without the institutional coherence, communication strategy, or sustained investment needed to activate them. It mattered then as a critique of how potential gets squandered. It reads now as a clear-eyed study of what nation-branding requires: not aspiration alone, but the unglamorous work of institutional reform, consistency, and federation of effort across multiple actors.