Artists try to make Cameroon sing a different tune

In the hustle and bustle of Yaounde, Quartier Mozart is a unique artists' refuge, which its creator hopes will free Cameroonians from the "self-censorship" they say is fuelled by the political status quo.

The lower level of the industrial-looking loft is sometimes a cinema or a concert hall. At other times it is a restaurant with bric-a-brac decoration.
Furniture is made from pallets and film posters cover the walls. A laundry basket acts as a lampshade and iron staircases cut through the soaring height of the ceiling.

One morning in December, Landry Mbassi, a well-known local art critic, plunged this corner of the centre in darkness for the day's film club.  The screening was intended to be intimate -- and for good reason.

The subject matter is "highly sensitive", he joked as he introduced the session to the dozen or so artists, performers and other regulars gathered in the gloom.

On the bill were two previously censored Cameroonian films: "Um Nyobe, Unite Nationale" ("Un Nyobe, National Unity") by Nabe Daone, the first episode of a documentary series about Ruben Um Nyobe, a key Cameroonian independence figure.
The second was "Le President" ("The President"), a 2013 fictional film by Quartier Mozart's owner Jean-Pierre Bekolo, whose strangely close-to-reality plot has created controversy.

It paints a picture of an African president who has clung to power for 42 years -- just like Cameroon's actual President Paul Biya.
"Cinema allows you to go where it's impossible to go in reality," the director told the small admiring audience via a microphone.
The 58-year-old filmmaker is convinced that cinema must "allow things to change".

He named the space "Quartier Mozart" in reference to his first film, which the Harvard University archive that mounted a retrospective of his work called "a comedy with a burlesque and fickle accent" and "social satire".

Bekolo even went so far as to imagine his own local currency, the "Quartier Doll'Art", to be used "exclusively for art, culture and artists".
The smallest denomination would be a 10 million note to "give the impression to the person who holds it of being rich", he said with a smile.
"As I don't like Cameroon as it is... I created this space to have a Cameroon that I love and to attract people who are going to make me want to love this country," he added.

The authoritarian government of Biya is regularly accused of corruption, bad governance and silencing dissent.
"Self-censorship has taken over to the point where the system no longer has to exercise it," said Bekolo, who said he created the Quartier Mozart centre in 2019 as a "place of awakening and awareness".