Bikutsi is still going strong, judging by the crowds filling up the Carossel, the legendary bikutsi cabaret in Yaoundé’s Kondengui neighbourhood. From Thursday to Sunday, a working-class, alcohol-loving clientele comes to forget the worries of their week and dance to this traditional Beti rhythm reworked by the latest big stars.   

The Carossel may be a modest joint, with its simple wooden tables covered in oilcloths, but that doesn’t deter the big bikutsi names from giving regular live performances here. This weekend, the well-known singer K-Tino is on the bill and set to be a sell-out. At the moment, her hits are popular enough to compete with music by Lady Ponce, Majoie Ayi, Mani Bella and Letis Diva.

Recent years have seen women moving centre stage in the bikutsi genre. K-Tino, alias Catherine Edoa Ngoa and nicknamed “woman of the people” opened the road about fifteen years ago, followed by a whole range of artists who share a talent for mixing dance with very suggestive lyrics, mainly focusing on sex and jealousy, “kongossa” (gossip) and conflictual relationships between men and women.

“I give you my body, I give you my mind and that, that there, you can have that down there as a gift,” sings Lady Ponce up on stage, pointing unflinchingly to her intimate parts.  Uncontested star of bikutsi in Cameroon, in the space of three albums Lady Ponce has carved herself a niche with her party music, modern videos and daring dress sense (which some call vulgar, sparking much debate among Cameroonian bikutsi fans). Ça la (“that thing there”), the flagship track on her third album, modestly entitled Bombe A, has proved a mega hit and unflaggingly popular, even with the imminent release of a much hyped new album. The forthcoming collection may well be her last for some time, since the singer has recently announced that she will be taking a career break.

One of the contenders waiting to fill the gap is Majoie Ayi, another contemporary bikutsi figure with a distinctive deep voice and an impressive dance style – an indispensable ingredient in any bikutsi hit. Qui a bu boira, hit single from her second album New Horizon released in November, is a staple feature in all of the capital’s cabarets.  

Electric dancing, crude lyrics

In the wake of these young women, a clutch of young artists are helping to popularise the style with an infallible combination of electrifying dance steps and crude lyrics. Another trend of the new guard is that bikutsi, the traditional rhythm from southern and central Cameroon generally sung in Beti, Ewondo or Eton (very similar languages spoken in the centre and south of the country), has started to open up to wider horizons. Alongside the young Mani Bella who sings Kongossa in the Beti tradition, Letis Diva, for example, composes in Bamiliéké and French.

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The new bikutsi scene may electrify the crowds, but not everyone has been won over. The artists are often criticised for being full of themselves, and hard-line bikutsi lovers esteem that the genre has gone down over the years. Jean-Marie Ahanda, the leader and trumpeter of the legendary band Les Têtes Brulées, which revolutionised the genre in the 1980s by introducing electric guitars in place of the traditional balafon, has an open-minded, slightly amused attitude to the bikutsi of the last decade: “You can say a lot of things in Beti. Originally, our culture didn’t make any moral censorship on intimate issues. (…) These young women have a really strong village culture. In some ways they’ve made bikutsi tribal again. It’s popular culture’s vengeance and a victory over the academic rules of music theory.”

René Ayina, the founder of Festi Bikutsi, an event that awards a prize to the best artist in the genre each year, aims to encourage “politically correct” artists: “Young artists are coming up with lyrics less focused on sex than in the past. (…) But it’s true that there’s an emphasis on the party aspect as a way of forgetting your everyday problems.” Purists can always find consolation by listening to the Mendzang (“balafon” in Beti) groups, which still perform live in numerous cabarets throughout the capital.

Translation: Anne-Marie Harper