Cameroonian Pop Songs and Gendered Glocal Dynamics: Contextualising Afo-A-kom’s “Femme rurale,” "Femme," by Coco Argentee,“ "Mairamdjo" by Faadah Kawtal, and "Yéléle," by X – Maleya

Abstract

This paper discusses Cameroonian pop songs as a site of gendered glocal negotiation through a comparative reading of Afo-A-kom’s “Femme rurale,” “Femme” by Coco Argentée, “Mairamdjo” by Faadah Kawtal, and “Yéléle” by X-Maleya. Adopting a qualitative methodological approach that combines fieldwork and library-based research, the study examines these songs as historically and culturally situated forms of oral literature. It explores how global musical idioms intersect with local cultural codes to articulate gendered subjectivities within the transnational African experience. While “Femme rurale,” “Yéléle,” and “Mairamdjo” mobilize contemporary Afro-pop aesthetics, and predominantly local and French lyrical expression to foreground themes of moral regeneration and social vulnerability, “Femme” reworks bikutsi rhythms and indigenous linguistic registers to reaffirm communal values and embodied cultural memory. These contrasting stylistic strategies, examined through a New Historicist lens, reveal how gender is discursively constructed at the intersection of tradition and modernity, locality and global circulation. Through close lyrical analysis, sonic interpretation, and contextual reading of performance and reception, the paper demonstrates that these songs function as glocal texts that mediate anxieties surrounding femininity, masculinity, social responsibility, and cultural continuity. The study argues that Cameroonian pop music does not merely reflect globalization but actively reshapes it by producing culturally situated gender narratives capable of traveling across borders. In doing so, it situates popular music as a critical medium through which Cameroonian identities negotiate power, morality, and belonging within global cultural economies.