ARREST THE MUSIC! THE REBEL ART AND POLITICS OF LAPIRO AND VALSERO: A PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This article is a celebration of the vendetta of two anti-establishment songwriters in Cameroon. It chronicles the protest trajectory undertaken by Lapiro de Mbanga and Valsero, alias Le Général against the government of the President of Cameroon, a cancerous regime that thrives on the rape of democracy, human rights abuses, and the emasculation of social justice. The songs analyzed in this article constitute a caustic critic of the inhumaneness, misgovernment and the abortive democratization process with which Cameroon has come to be identified. The leitmotif in the music of these songwriters is dystopia and protest in post-independence Cameroon under President Biya. As songwriters, Lapiro and Valsero have distinguished themselves from their peers by dint of bravado, valiance and the audacity to speak truth to power. The purport of this article is to underscore the critical role played by protest music in fostering post-independence revolutionary ideas in Cameroon and Africa. To do this effectively, we have revisited the songwriters’ musical compositions during the 1990s, an era that marked the advent of multiparty politics in Cameroon. The overriding objective of our work is to propose a few dependable pedagogical paradigms that could be utilized by instructors desirous of adopting the works of these renowned songwriters for pedagogical purposes.