Yaoundé (AFP)

It is one o'clock in the morning in Quebec, a cabaret tucked away in a warm corner of Yaoundé where the beers parade at a frantic pace. The audience is impatient. Finally the percussions start to resonate, the guitar gets excited, and the projectors illuminate the hips which undulate, twirl, convulse. Bikutsi singers make their entrance.

"I want to, want to, want to do ... I want to ...", they intonate. "You shouldn't have wo oooho sure you weren't dribbling wo oooho" ...

Raw texts that address romantic relationships and sexuality, bold metaphors sung by warm and powerful voices, dizzying thrusts to make you dizzy: this is the tasty recipe of bikutsi. A frenetic rhythm that looks like an outlet, originally practiced by women in central and southern Cameroon, which has occupied the front of the music scene in this central African country for three decades.

Black lace dress, electric gray camisole, top above the navel and stillettos heels, the three evening divas take up a tube of silver Coco, one of the Bikutsi queens of the moment whose videos accumulate millions of views on YouTube.

"I put my life on hold for your career, I sacrificed my life for your future and, once you became a manager, you dumped me", they sing before breaking their back, swinging their pelvis back and forth.

The youngest continues in solo: "Today I am fueled by the euro, kind of looser, revenge is a dish that can be eaten cold" ... In the room, women of all ages get up and dance with them. The men clap their hands, call out to each other. Three reckless men climb onto the platform to test themselves against it.

"Show me how you dance," send the brazen to the first. "Softly, I said softly," she orders the next. Bulging shoulders and smirking, the last swagger dashes, kneels at the level of his pubis and swings his head to the left, then to the right. "So is that how you dance?" She sends him, mockingly, before making him leave the stage under the exclamations of a hilarious audience.

- "The tail of my pussy" -

Most female bikutsi singers tackle the question of female pleasure. "In a society where young girls are taught to be reserved and discreet, women have started to sing loudly their sexual desires", underlines Flora Amabiamina, who teaches Letters at the University of Douala.

Women like K-Tino, the mother of the bikutsi who, in the early 90s, marked by a wave of democratic demands, ignited Cameroonians as much as she shocked them with her titles "The tail of my pussy", "Action 69 "or" the 7th heaven ".

"By expressing their desires and claiming their right to pleasure, while sometimes reducing the role of men, these women appear to be masters of their sexuality," added the researcher.

This freedom of tone scandalized at the time a part of the opinion, which accused the female bikutsi to be immoral and pornographic, qualified for example of "Songs of Sodom and Gomorrah", work of the Cameroonian philosopher Hubert Mono Ndjana which made great noise when published in 1999.

It must be said that these songs with the most often sexually explicit lyrics arouse such a craze that they pass in loop during family celebrations, where the children also start to sing them loudly, notes Ms. Amabiamina.

- Outlet -

Even if the modern variant of this traditional rhythm was popularized in the early 80s by men, especially with the electric guitar, women "are indeed at the origin" of this musical genre, insists the academic.

Bikutsi was born in pre-colonial times in the regions of the Fang, Bulu and Beti ethnic groups, in central and southern Cameroon, where women found themselves after a hard day's work, without men, to sing and dance their joys, their sorrows and their frustrations.

In this airlock, some expressed, for example, the pain of living by the side of an abusive husband, and others, again, revealed the secrets of a successful marriage to the youngest.

An "outlet" in these "patriarchal societies", where these villagers were forbidden "to raise their voices in public", reveals the Cameroonian ethnomusicologist Jean Maurice Noah in his work "Le Bikutsi du Cameroun".

"I am proud to perpetuate this art of my ancestors," said the young singer Olivia Beyene after leaving Quebec. She wipes the sweat from her face after an hour of show, while thanking the customers who came to congratulate her.

"I am proud," she continues, "to continue to sing like they love, violence, injustice, to carry the voice of Cameroonian women too."

© 2020 AFP