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Cameroon is best-known for makossa, a popular style that has gained fans across Africa, and its related dance craze bikutsi .
1 Beti folk music
Cameroon is home to numerous distinct ethnic groups. The Beti are among the most numerous, and live in the area around Yaoundé and south into Equatorial Guinea. The Beti are best-known for bikutsi music, which has been popularized and become a rival for the more urban and accessible makossa of Douala. Bikutsi is characterized by an intense 6/8 rhythm, and is played at all sorts of Beti gatherings, including parties, funerals and weddings. The word bikutsi can be loosely translated as beating the ground continuously.
Beti gatherings fall into two major categories:
- Ekang phase: the time when imaginary, mythological and spiritual issues are discussed
- Bikutsi phase: when real-life issues are discussed
A double sided harp with calabash amplification called the mvet is used during these ceremonies, by Beti storytellers, who are viewed as using the mvet as an instrument of God to educate the people. The Ekang phase is intensely musical, and usually lasts all night. There are poetic recitations accompanied by clapping and dancing, with interludes for improvised and sometimes obscene performances on the balafon (a type of xylophone). These interludes signal the shift to the bikutsi phase, which is much less strictly structured than Ekang. During bikutsi, women dance and sing along with the balafon, and lyrics focus on real-life problems, as well as sexual fantasies. These female choruses are an integral part of bikutsi, and their intense dancing and screams are characteristic of the genre. Another type of ceremony is the mevungu , when women dance all night in order to abstain from sex during those hours for a period of nine days. The so ritual is much-feared by Beti boys, as it involves a series of tests to mark a boy's passage into manhood.
2 Modern Cameroonian music
The earliest recorded music from Cameroon comes from the 1930s, when the most popular styles were imported rock music and French-style chanson. In Douala, the most-developed city in Cameroon, accordionAn accordion is a small portable free-reed wind instrument with a keyboard, the smallest representative of the organ family. Sound is made by a thin metal ribbon, a reed, that is held at one end and free at the other, like a ruler on the edge of a table ts and ambasse bey music were common, with performers like Lobe Lobe , Ebanda Manfred and Nelle Eyoum finding a local audience. Ekambi Brillant and the first major Cameroonian hit, "N'Gon Abo", set the stage for the development of makossa. Post-independence in 1960Events January-February January 1 Independence of Cameroon January 9 Aswan High Dam construction begins in Egypt January 11 Chad declares its independence. January 14 Ralph Chubb, the gay poet and printer, dies at Fair Oak Cottage in Hampshire. January 23, a local variant on palm wine music called assiko was popular, especially Jean Bikoko and Dikoume Bernard .
The urbanization of Cameroon has had a major influence on the country's music. Migration to the city of Yaoundé, for example, was a major cause for the popularization of bikutsi music. During the 1950s, bars sprang up across the city to accommodate the influx of new inhabitants, and soon became a symbol for Cameroonian identity in the face of colonialism. Balafon orchestras, consisting of 3-5 balafons and various percussion instruments (including the balafon, which is both a harmonic and percussive instrument) became common in the bars. Some of these orchestras, such as Richard Band de Zoetele , became quite popular in spite of scorn from the European elite.
