One Sunday last year, the Cameroonian-Guadeloupean-French artist Roxane Mbanga was relaxing in bed when she received a message that made her sit up. It was about working on an art history project.
Growing up in Paris, she had been a regular at Maasai Mara, the now defunct restaurant owned by her father, where Africans in the diaspora, including the artists whom he helped organise exhibitions, convened to eat and chat. Thus the concept of a book, attempting for the first time to comprehensively compile and document key players in Cameroon's vast visual art history, made obvious sense to her.
"It's a magical reconnaissance, being recognised by my peers and being in the same book as people I look up to," says the 30-year-old artist. "This idea of creating spaces, as with the book, is incredibly important because it allows us to build from there and leave traces for people that will come after. I really lacked that growing up … spaces like books, podcasts or whatever, where I could really see people that resemble me, that do things similar to me."
She is one of 180 artists who appear in Ô Cameroon!, a 424-page volume that launches at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in October, with planned stops in Côte d'Ivoire's Abidjan, Paris and the Cameroonian cities of Douala and Yaoundé. Posthumous additions include the painter-sculptor Koko Komégné, who died three weeks after submitting his contribution to the book, and the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale, Koyo Kouoh who died of cancer last year.
The book was curated and conceived by Cameroonian national Ozong Agborsangaya-Fiteu, an Abidjan-based collector and development finance executive. During her travels, she kept encountering artists from her homeland of different generations and in different places, and realised that there was also no single archive or directory to find out more about them.
"There was a sense of absence or loss … I became increasingly conscious that if we did not document these artists' works, some could just simply disappear," she says. "At some point, my own curiosity became a feeling of urgent responsibility. I began to feel that if we did not gather these histories right away, we might lose them for ever."
In 1919 , a year after Germany was defeated in the first world war, its former colony of Kamerun was split into two unequal halves between the French and British. Despite the profound transformation – and as European colonial administrators looted thousands of artefacts from the country – societies of artists continued their intellectual and cultural work underground. Royal carvers and bronze-smiths in the ancient walled city of Foumban, for example, thrived under the reign of Sultan Njoya, famed for his promotion of the arts.
Ô Cameroon! covers from then until 2025, a century of diverse art from east to west and between anglophone and francophone regions, presented in non-chronological order. "The book is an act of cultural recovery and restitution," says Agborsangaya-Fiteu. "Art for Cameroon is not a new story. Before Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși, there were big sculptors like Ateu Atsa, who is Cameroonian" – from the 19th century. "Many of these artists influenced European modernism.
"If the lion does not tell its story, the hunter will," she adds. "This is an attempt for the lion to tell its own story, and given that Cameroon is so complex, it was very important that the story be told by multiple voices so that there could be multiple interpretations and perspectives shaping the book."
In 1961, a UN plebiscite led to English-speaking Southern Cameroons rejoining the country after almost four decades as part of neighbouring Nigeria, while Northern Cameroons voted to remain in Nigeria. That reunion laid the foundation for a civil war between the anglophones and the state security apparatus, while deepening regional tensions. In that time, some on the art scene who didn't leave earlier under the repressive, four-decade rule of Paul Biya, who remains the world's oldest head of state, emigrated.
The most recent chapter of Cameroon's art history has been tough to document. Among those included in the book is Em'kal Eyongakpa, an Amsterdam-based botanist turned artist, who has worked on subjects focusing on the Cameroon volcanic line. He had plans for building a physical art space in his native south-west Cameroon, but they were disrupted by the anglophone conflict.
"I think [the book is] mainly for historicity and because there is a need for accuracy, especially with respect to people from my side of the Cameroons, as Cameroon is two colonial entities that came together," says Eyongakpa, who now runs creative spaces in camp settlements in southern Nigeria hosting refugees who fled Cameroon.
One of his projects documented in the book is s "to cleanse one's ears" (in the Kenyang language), inspired by a horrific video smuggled out of a torture chamber as the crisis intensified. He hopes it can fill a gap. "There had not been any discussions within the academia that really looks at this conflict that has taken the lives of so many people and it really felt like kind of a big betrayal," he says.
For Agborsangaya-Fiteu, this book is only a start. She wants to inspire more exhibitions and research including elsewhere in Africa. "This was a very emotional project and I'm getting goosebumps as I reflect," she says, sobbing quietly. "It's a love story since we are all immigrants. We all left to go out to find things to do, to find our dignity and get education, to find our purpose. But I was born in Cameroon, so you cannot [but] love where you're from."
Mbanga, who has been on a lifetime quest for identity, believes that the book can help broaden the scope for young artists like her in the diaspora: "I think it can allow people to dream bigger."