The Life and Times of a Cameroonian Icon: Tribute to Lapiro De Mbanga Ngata Man

Chapter 4 - Lapiroisms: Language of Resistance in Cameroonian Music

61 Chapter 4 Lapiroisms: Language of Resistance in Cameroonian Music Introduction Regardless of genre, music performs a myriad social functions; it reflects the joys, sorrows, hopes and despair of the people whose lived experiences constitute the subject matter of songwriting. As Rick Hesch points out, “songwriting may be the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, despair and hope” (1). He notes that the Wobblies wrote and performed songs as instruments of mobilization in the early twentieth century. Music and the American civil rights movements of the sixties became almost synonymous, as many African-American musicians, from James Brown to Stevie Wonder, celebrated black consciousness and called for social change. Tayannah Lee McQuillar and Fred Johnson (2010) note that Tupac Shakur’s rap songs translate the traumas experienced by Tupac himself and disillusioned African-Americans. His song titled “Holler If Ya Hear Me” from his album Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z struck a chord with a large section of disaffected African-American youths exasperated by poverty, police brutality, racial profiling and more. In the same vein, the rappers who presaged urban riots in France have proven that social imbalances can provide material for resistance. They see the connection between their experience in the banlieues15 and that of African-Americans living in the inner cities. Most French Rappers tend to have 15 Ghettoes 62 recourse to Verlan in their songwriting as a means of masking significations in order to say out of legal harm’s way. In an article titled “Le Camfranglais, Un cousin du Verlan?” (1989), Michel Lobé Ewané draws striking parallels between Camfranglais and Verlan. He posits that Verlan was invented as a secret code by French youths, drug users and criminals to communicate freely in front of authority figures (parents and police). The term ‘verlan’ is itself a reverse-syllable, which becomes l’envers (meaning backwards) when turned round. French musical groups such as NTM, Ministère AMER, and Assassins often resort to Verlan in order to speak angrily about life in the French suburbs through songs that attack the police, the government and the French state. Lapiro de Mbanga has followed in the footsteps of the French thanks to his Lapiroisms. Musical Lapiroisms Lexical manipulation is a major feature of Lapiro’s use of the French language. Singing mainly in Camfranglais (township lingo), and Pidgin English (Cameroonian Creole), he is able to reach a broad audience in all strata of society, especially those where his diatribes are well received, i.e., the young urban unemployed, cart-pushers, hawkers, sauveteurs or hawkers, bayam sellam or market women, taximen and bendskin drivers. In one of his early albums titled, Kob Nye, Lapiro uses coded language to berate Cameroonian politicians for their role in the socio-economic morass and widespread misery orchestrated by bad governance in Cameroon. He identifies with the opposition in Cameroon and has become popular as a result of his outspokenness during the trial of two Cameroonian intellectual critics of the government of Mr. Paul Biya—Célestin Monga and Pius Njawé, both 63 charged with treason and contempt of the Head of State many years ago. Lapiro’s diction serves as a smokescreen for veiling the insults he hauls at the powers- that- be in Cameroon. His lyrics speak volumes about the experience of hunger, deprivation, uncertainty in the lives of suffering masses, and the need for the rule of law in his homeland. His songs admonish State officials against turning a blind eye to the predicament of the petit peuple or the small people. Lapiroisms are created for the purpose of veiling discourse from law enforcement officers—gendarmes, police and the military. Sometimes, Lapiro resorts to clipping in a bid to produce new words. The word ‘milito’, for instance, is a truncation of the word ‘militaire’ (military). Lapiroism is a composite language minted to communicate to the common people in a language they best understand. Lapiroisms became popular in Cameroon between 1990 and 1992, an era associated with the emergence of opposition political parties. An impressionistic inspection of fluent speakers of Lapiroisms reveals that they are peddlers, taximen, bendskinneurs, wheelcart pushers, hawkers, prostitutes, vagabonds, thieves, prisoners, gamblers, conmen, musicians and comedians. The lexical manipulation, phonological truncation, morphological hybridization, semantic shift, relexification, and dysphemistic extensions characteristic of Lapiroisms reflect the provocative attitude of its speakers and their jocular disrespect of grammatical rules. This urban slang functions like other slangs...