New book charts a century of Cameroonian visual art
The 424-page book Ô Cameroon!, launching at London's 1-54 contemporary African art fair, is the first comprehensive record of Cameroon's visual art from 1919 to 2025. It features 180 artists.
A book titled Ô Cameroon! is being launched this October at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London. The 424-page volume is the first attempt to comprehensively compile and document the visual art history of Cameroon, a Central African country. It includes 180 artists, and further stops are planned in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire), Paris and the Cameroonian cities of Douala and Yaoundé.
How the idea emerged
The book was conceived and curated by Ozong Agborsangaya-Fiteu, a Cameroonian collector and development finance executive based in Abidjan. During her travels she kept meeting artists from her homeland, of different generations, and found there was no single archive or directory about them. She feared that, without documentation, some of the work could disappear.
"The book is an act of cultural recovery and restitution," Agborsangaya-Fiteu says. She stresses that many voices shape the narrative, because Cameroon's history is complex.
A hundred years of history
In 1919, after Germany's defeat in the First World War, its former colony of Kamerun was divided unequally between France and Britain. European colonial administrators looted thousands of artefacts, yet artists' societies continued their work. The book runs to 2025 and spans anglophone and francophone regions.
After a 1961 UN plebiscite, Southern Cameroons rejoined the country, and regional tensions deepened, later feeding a civil war between anglophones and the state security apparatus. Some artists emigrated during the long rule of Paul Biya, the world's oldest head of state.
Artists' voices
Em'kal Eyongakpa, a botanist-turned-artist based in Amsterdam, says the conflict disrupted his plans for an art space in his native south-west Cameroon. He now runs creative spaces in camps in southern Nigeria for refugees who fled Cameroon.
Roxane Mbanga, a 30-year-old Cameroonian-Guadeloupean-French artist, believes the book can help young diaspora artists dream bigger. The volume also includes posthumous contributions, among them painter-sculptor Koko Komégné and Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale.
