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This paper examines the conditions under which selected Cameroonian pop songs may be read as candidates for cultural canonization within postcolonial African music studies. While Cameroonian popular music circulates widely across local and diasporic spaces, it remains under-theorized as a corpus capable of generating enduring aesthetic, ideological, and historical value. The paper addresses this gap by interrogating how certain pop songs function not merely as entertainment, but as cultural texts that crystallize collective memory, gendered subjectivities, and glocal negotiations of identity. Through a comparative reading of “Crying for Salvation” by Afo Akom, “Ça Va Aller” by Salatiel, “Jongde Ma” by Tao, and “Esingan” by les Têtes Brûlées, the study hypothesizes that songs become canonizable when they successfully mediate between global musical idioms and localized cultural codes while engaging urgent socio-political concerns. In order to examine Cameroonian pop songs as geocritical texts capable of contributing to cultural canonization through spatial and narrative analysis; Cameroonian pop songs function as geocritical texts that construct complex spatial, temporal, and cultural meanings through intertextuality, referentiality, and multisensory representation, thereby justifying their inclusion within an expanded African cultural canon. Leaning primarily on geocriticism, the article reads these works as cultural artifacts embedded in the socio-political conditions of postcolonial Cameroon and its diasporic extensions. Through close lyrical analysis, sonic interpretation, and attention to performance and reception contexts, the study argues that canonization in Cameroonian pop emerges at the intersection of aesthetic innovation, historical resonance, and transnational circulation. Ultimately, the paper proposes a framework for understanding how popular music participates in shaping national memory and diasporic belonging. These songs are selected because they span different historical moments—linguistic registers and stylistic orientations—ranging from bikutsi, folklore-inflected performance to contemporary Afro-pop, yet converge in their thematic engagement with moral responsibility, resilience, gender construction, and communal continuity.
Banda et al. (Mon,) studied this question.