as “Cameroonian popular theatre” to distance it from more serious forms of theatre. Followed by ordinary people, such as taxi drivers, beer-retailers, and shop-keepers, it circulates widely. Beyond the radio, it is staged in cultural centers, official ceremonies, bars, conference halls, street corners, and recorded on sound cassettes, CDs and videos, sold in markets and by itinerant paddlers. Its main features are comedy, improvisation and linguistic creativity. Its comic quality comes from the exaggerated and grotesque representation of the everyday, through a series of stock characters such as the poor villager and the old man who does not understand the modern world around him. This type of theatre is motivated by the material interest of the practitioners who aim at winning over the widest public as possible in order to earn a living, but it also conveys some social critic, behind its apparent escapism. Unlike other Cameroonian theatrical productions, it is generally oral, sometimes combining dramatic action with musical performances, singing and dancing. The actors improvise the dialogues on the scene and directly address the public that can participate in the creation of the play. They use Camfranglais – i.e. the local vernacular language made of a mix of French, English, Pidgin English, local languages and other Western languages - instead of standard French/English. Taking up the slang of the disadvantaged districts of Douala and Yaounde, they embrace the fluidity of this young and oral language to make up hilarious neologisms. As a result, their plays are set in a very specific Cameroonian setting. However, some Cameroonians condemn this linguistic creativity as a bastardization of Western languages, while others see it as a simple way to win over a non-educated public, without transmitting any social message. The main promoters of the Cameroonian popular theatre are Daniel Ndo (with the character of Oncle Otsama, the stereotype of the old ewondo villager, who misunderstands the meaning of what is happening in the world around him), Dieudonné Afana (with the character of Jean Miché Kankan, the parody of the stingy and bad-tempered bamileke man), and David Kemzeu (alias Deiv K. Moktoï, with the character of Newrich Proudlove, a professor of “social affarism” who teaches how to get rich fraudulently, without being caught. They are well-known characters not only in Cameroon, but also in the rest of Africa and in the diaspora. List of troupes Théâtre National Club d’Art Dramatique The Barombi Players Théâtre