Beyond Music: How I Discovered Tata's Inspiration

My Limbum is now terribly rusty but when I first listened to Tata's 'Lunga,' I felt an instant connection. After listening to the song a couple of times, I wondered why it was profoundly familiar; it was the kind of feeling you have when a new thing gives you that déjà vu wink. I asked a childhood friend of mine, a Wimbum man, to listen to the song and tell me if there was anything familiar about it apart from the obvious fact that it was in his mother tongue. After taking a listen, he replied with the words " Lunga am kohmbi bu ntee " (Lunga went to heaven alive); the exact line that had caught my attention. Voilà! The lines were from a folk song that I came in contact with about twenty years ago when l was in Nkambe. You had to have lived a cloistered life not to have heard the song.

Many months later, when my team and I were gathering information on the Legend of Lunga particularly, the story of Ku Lunga, everything became clear to me. This made Tata's song even more beautiful. Not many Cameroonian music artists have followed this trajectory — giving their songs a strong cultural identity deeply rooted in a collective unconscious that matches their DNA, even though it's modernised to reflect present trends.
Click here to watch Lunga (Wild Fire) by Tata

Luna P. M.