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.
