There is a distinct rhythm to life when the conveniences of the modern world are stripped away. For my first few weeks in Bamenda — a city nestled in the verdant, rolling highlands of Cameroon's Northwest Region — I stayed in Upstation, a secured enclave insulated from the daily grind of the broader population. It was comfortable, and it was useful. But to truly understand a place, you have to move into its heartbeat.
By the time I crossed the line into the community just beyond Upstation, the romance of the journey had already been stripped down to its essentials. The local infrastructure had no interest in pretending. There were no flushing toilets. Electricity arrived in unpredictable bursts. And there was no running water.
When I first arrived in this new neighborhood, I found buckets of water waiting for me. It wasn't until the following morning that I discovered the grueling truth behind them: to get that water, my hosts had to hike down the face of a giant, plunging hill — and back up. Compelled by a sudden sense of shared duty, I started making the trek myself. For five days, seven or eight times a day, I walked the same hill the locals walked, carrying plastic buckets up on my shoulders. The first time I did it out of necessity. After that, I did it on purpose — part penance, part workout, mostly communion. That hill was the first thing Cameroon taught me. It would not be the last.
It is in these unvarnished moments that you find the truest sense of community. One evening, huddled beneath a corrugated tin roof as a tropical thunderstorm battered the metal, I sat with a dozen neighbors watching a football match. The television screen was drained of color and fraught with static, flickering like an old memory. No one seemed to mind. We talked instead — about life, about what was possible, about what had been lost. It had the kinetic, easy camaraderie of a bustling neighborhood bar — a setting I hadn't frequented in years.
In another life, during a much darker chapter dominated by drinking and drugs, I was the guy in the actual bars. Even then, amidst the chaos of my own making, I would somehow deliver messages to strangers that cut straight to their private pain and their private hope. I would tell them things only they knew about themselves; I would speak life into them. My friends treated it like a party trick. Years later, through sobriety, I understood it as something closer to a calling.
Here in Cameroon, halfway across the world, that gift returned unbidden. God kept handing me words for people who needed them, and I delivered them without embarrassment in living rooms, on dirt paths, and under that same tin roof. The irony is not lost on me: the man who once ran from his own possibilities now spends his days reminding others of theirs — speaking life into an environment that outsiders have too often written off as dead.
"I had originally come to Cameroon with a more cinematic script in mind. I arrived carrying the blueprint for what I now teach as Cell Phone Sovereignty."
I imagined entertainment hubs rising where conflict and neglect had left only silence. What I found instead was something older and more stubborn: people who already knew how to make art under impossible conditions.
The Art of Bamenda
Bamenda and neighboring Bafut are not defined by their struggles. Cameroon, in many ways, is its own California — and Bamenda and Bafut are its Hollywood and Los Angeles. Before the regional conflict, locals were actively building toward an entertainment hub here. The talent was always present; the infrastructure simply wore out before it was finished. I came carrying media-empowerment tools — and instead found myself trading my own Hollywood dreams for buckets, barbecues, and the raw business of speaking life into a place that refuses to stay silent.
During the Speed Talent Show we organized in Bamenda, local artists rehearsed with no microphones, no speakers, and no stage lights. They performed anyway. The artist Tila Tla showed up, not to perform, but simply to be present — and to be seen alongside the performers who did. The night before, I had grilled chicken killed minutes earlier, roasted over rocks in a makeshift iron contraption forged in that same spirit of improvisation. It tasted like celebration.
The community doesn't lack talent; it lacks resources. So we left tools behind. Hands-on training programs in camera operation and solar-panel installation. A waste-to-wealth initiative teaching residents to turn discarded plastic into paving stones, furniture, and income — literal trash converted into literal treasure. Thanks to the Swedish group Royal Majong, sewing machines arrived in Bafut to outfit the next generation of Cameroonian fashion designers.
Empowering Through Solar Training
My journey hasn't been confined to the grassroots. I sat for press interviews. I met with journalists working under conditions that would break newsrooms in the West. I met with members of the regional government. And I was granted the rare privilege of spending hours at the Royal Palace with the Fon of Bafut II, presenting the full vision for what could take root here in Cameroon — Bamenda, Bafut, and Limbe — through The Sovereign Protocol. Watching the room rally around the vision was one of the most humbling moments of my professional life.
But the real audience, I have come to realize, was never the powerful. It was the woman carrying water up the same hill I climbed. The young tailor cutting patterns on a donated machine. The kid rapping into a phone recorder because there were still no microphones. They are the show.
Yet, nothing could have prepared me for the descent to the coast.
The road to Limbe is punishing. The seaside city is a sauna — hotter and more suffocatingly humid than anything I have ever known. But the ocean was waiting. I stripped down to my underwear and plunged into the water at Black Rock Beach just to survive the heat, swimming alongside locals who had been doing the same thing for generations. Between cities I chased waterfalls down hidden roads, found pockets of nature that looked untouched, and reminded myself — repeatedly — that we should be good stewards of what we are blessed with.
But Limbe holds ghosts. Just down the coast lies Bimbia, the site of a historic slave port. The geography is undeniably breathtaking — lush, oceanic, almost Eden-like. But standing on the very stone blocks where human beings were once auctioned off, peering into the remains of the holding prisons, my heart broke completely.
The Shadows of Bimbia
It shook me. It rocked my world. Learning that the United States bore no direct role in this particular chapter of the trade offered a thin, complicated solace. Still, the visceral horror of Bimbia changed me permanently. I keep returning to the contradiction: paradise and hell sharing the exact same coordinates.
On Saturday, April 25, I returned to that beautiful, complicated coastline to participate in a beach cleanup. We should be good stewards of what we are blessed with. The ocean does not separate the work of carrying water from the work of cleaning up after ourselves.
Beach Cleanup · Limbe Coast
An Hour with Melvis Touch
On Sunday, April 26, I traveled inland to Yaoundé to film an appearance on Time with Melvis Touch — one of the most respected long-form interview programs broadcasting out of Cameroon.
The show was a tremendous success. I am genuinely grateful for the questions Melvis asked — they were thoughtful, generous, and deeply informed — and even more grateful that she gave me the space to answer freely and authentically. Too often, broadcast interviews are designed to extract a soundbite. This one was designed to make space for a story. We talked about The Sovereign Protocol, about why I am here in Cameroon, and about what becomes possible for a creator, a community, or a country when sovereignty over its own media is no longer treated as a luxury. You can find more of her work on her channel, Melvistouch TV.
On Set with Melvis Touch · Yaoundé
Ghost Town Monday — Teaching from a City Forced Empty
On Monday, April 27 — a day traditionally marked here as a "Ghost Town" lockdown tied to the ongoing regional conflict — I taught the first global session of the Cell Phone Sovereignty Workshop. The streets outside were forced empty. Inside, I taught the framework for how a person carrying nothing more than a smartphone can become an entire media company. Teaching a class about creating your own opportunities on a day when the streets are forced empty felt like the exact work I was sent here to do.
The full session is now public. The companion field report — with the curriculum, the after-action notes, and the resources we left behind — is published at joshuatberglan.com / The Cell Phone Sovereignty Workshop — Field Report from Cameroon.
Still Here, Still Being Taught
I am writing this from Limbe. I am still in Cameroon. And every day, this country teaches me something new.
Some days the lesson is small — a phrase in a language I'm still learning, a turn of a road I haven't yet driven, a name I am only just hearing for the first time. Some days it is enormous — the weight of the buckets coming up the hill, the silence inside the prisons at Bimbia, the moment a roomful of artists rehearses with no microphones because the show was always going to happen anyway. The trainings we set up in Bamenda are running. The sewing machines are stitching. The solar lessons are turning into installations. The kids who couldn't get on a microphone last month now have a workshop telling them they don't need one.
I do not know how long I will be allowed to stay. I hope it will be long enough to keep teaching, to keep hauling water, to keep speaking life. I have become, almost by accident, a water carrier — not just a man fetching buckets up a Bamenda hill, but one carrying stories back and forth across an ocean that once carried other cargoes entirely.
The hill is still there. The buckets are still heavy. Cameroon is still teaching me. And for the first time in a long time, I am in no hurry to leave the classroom.
