‘If the lion does not tell its story, the hunter will’: a century of thrilling Cameroonian art — SkimNews
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- Ô Cameroon! features 180 artists across 424 pages, spanning 1919 to 2025 and covering both anglophone and francophone Cameroonian regions in non-chronological order, with the curator framing it as 'an act of cultural recovery and restitution.'
- Ozong Agborsangaya-Fiteu, a Cameroonian collector and development-finance executive based in Abidjan, curated the project after realizing during her travels that there was no single archive of Cameroonian visual artists.
- Posthumous additions include painter-sculptor Koko Komégné, who died three weeks after submitting his contribution, and Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale, who died of cancer last year.
- Roxane Mbanga, a 30-year-old Cameroonian-Guadeloupean-French artist featured in the volume, says she 'really lacked' spaces growing up 'where I could really see people that resemble me, that do things similar to me.'
- Em'kal Eyongakpa, an Amsterdam-based botanist turned artist, contributed a project called sǒbàtú ('to cleanse one's ears') inspired by a video smuggled out of a torture chamber during the anglophone conflict; he now runs creative spaces in Nigerian refugee camps hosting Cameroonians who fled.
- Agborsangaya-Fiteu invoked a Cameroonian proverb to position the book: 'If the lion does not tell its story, the hunter will,' arguing that pre-colonial Cameroonian sculptors like 19th-century Ateu Atsa influenced European modernists including Matisse, Picasso and Brâncuși.
Why it matters: Cameroon has produced more than two centuries of documented artistic practice — including 19th-century sculptors who, the curator argues, influenced European modernism — yet had no consolidated archive of its visual artists. The book fills that gap with 180 entries spanning colonial partition through to the present-day anglophone conflict, giving diaspora artists a reference they say they lacked growing up. Planned launches across London, Abidjan, Paris, Douala and Yaoundé position it as a starting point for further exhibition and research across the continent.
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