ENGLISH ENTERTAINMENT IN CAMEROON: THE WAY FORWARD

                                                                

Before you begin reading this article, close your eyes and think of 3 prominent English entertainers in Nigeria. Easy, isn’t it? Now here comes the tricky part: Name three Anglophone entertainers in Cameroon who have gone international. Remember I said “INTERNATIONAL”. Take your time…not so easy now. The names that will come to mind will be those you hear around...but that ends there.

Ages ago, there was a movement in Anglophone Cameroon which threatened to put constructive entertainment in the hearts of Cameroonian English minds, both young and old. Sadly enough, that plan withered away, and what remains is a fragmentized embodiment of the hollow shadows left long before we even knew how to write lyrics or act in movies.

Ask any entertainer why he or she hasn’t gone international and there will be one quick answer: MONEY. Then there will be other reasons to support the first answer, like the reluctance of the public and private investors to support artists, and so on. When seen from an angle, these reasons seem tangible enough to be believable, but by the end f this article, you will realize how banal it is.

It saddens me to know that our only limit is our reasoning. Trust me, 80% of all Anglophone entertainers in Cameroon do stuff just so they could receive first class treatment from their peers and their fans (mostly young girls). I am not saying that there are no real entertainers. There are. That brings me to my point. CONSTRUCTIVE COOPERATION.

Notice I put ‘constructive’ in the sentence. This is because the sole aim of any cooperation should be geared towards a beneficial purpose. As long as we want to keep limiting ourselves by saying we don’t have enough financial resources, we will keep lagging behind, pretending to be the level of entertainers we are not.

Some entertainers reading this article will begin to nod their heads at this point, while others will simply attempt to close this page. But before they do, let them understand that if we count the numbers of ‘entertainers’ in Anglophone Cameroon, it will be more than the population of some countries. However, they continue to be local champions and ‘quartier’ heroes, afraid to take a challenging step and simply priding themselves with cheap popularity.

Buea alone has more than 200 music artists, with each one claiming to have released either an album or a single. Nice step. I must congratulate them. Sincerely. Now comes the bomb. How come most of what they do end where the deed was done? One does a show in Buea or Limbe, and not everyone in that respective town knows about the show. So it ends there.

What happens next? With the advent of Facebook, the organizer frantically posts and shares the excerpts of the show to as many people as possible, creating the illusion that the show was a hit. Trust me, if the show was a hit, others who attended would have shared the videos, without bias to friendship or allegiance. We should learn to do things creatively. One cannot do it all. We can only help those who can do what we can’t.

I am an entertainer, an English standup comedian, and there are others who claim to be comedians too. Yet, when it is time for them to come forward and do their stuff, they only want to show that they know it all. I do comedy in English, and that has been my success and style. Don’t try to change it. Be creative. We can’t always copy from Nigerians and pidgin. We must create our own identity.

This starts when we realize who we are and come together for the purpose of putting Cameroon on the map of world entertainment. The reason why Nigerians are succeeding now is because they began as groups, then split up. Due to the bonds they had as groups back in the days, they can now come together to collaborate to fortify their hold on the Nigerian Entertainment industry.

We find the exact opposite in Cameroon. We want to start like individuals, thinking we might collaborate in the future. WRONG. This is so because when we catch a glimpse of ‘success’, we also catch the ‘I KNOW IT ALL’ disease. We will put our egos ahead of our reasoning, leading to our own downfall.

Collaborating with someone doesn’t mean you can’t make it on your own. It means you can do it much better if two or more put all mistrust, envy and silly gossip aside to work towards a general motive. If we work for ourselves alone, we will end up ridiculing the situation of the Entertainment Industry in Cameroon. However, if we come together and do ONE serious and constructive project, the world will begin to notice that we are a people, not just a bunch of professional amateurs who crave for cheap fame and short-lived popularity.