Acting Without Craft? Performance, Improvisation, and the Politics of Credibility in Anglophone Cameroonian Cinema

This article examines acting in Anglophone Cameroonian cinema through a performance-ecological lens, arguing that screen performance in this context is best understood as situated professional competence rather than as a technical deficit measured against external cinematic norms. Drawing on close textual analysis of selected Anglophone Cameroonian feature films, audience-reception studies, and qualitative actor-interview data, the paper demonstrates how acting practices emerge under conditions of material scarcity, institutional fragility, and labour precarity. It shows that improvisation, theatrical expressiveness, explicit dialogue, and emotional intensity function as adaptive strategies that sustain narrative intelligibility, cultural legibility, and audience credibility when cinematic support systems are weak. Performance credibility is shown to be relational and culturally grounded, shaped by alignment between expressive strategies and audience interpretive frameworks rather than by adherence to universalised aesthetic standards. By reframing acting as labour carried out under constraint within a specific performance ecology, the article challenges deficit-based evaluations of Anglophone Cameroonian screen acting and proposes an analytical framework applicable to other minor and under-resourced cinemas.

Keywords: Anglophone Cameroonian cinema; acting craft; African cinema; Performance studies; Cultural labour; Minor or small cinemas