What's new at BotangRecords

BotangRecords returned to the Minnesota African Cultural Festival this past Saturday to once again lead the Children & Youth Cultural Village, and this year, the organization raised the bar. For the first time, BotangRecords invested in custom costumes for the children in its care, and staged a full dance performance led by BotangRecords alongside more than 20 kids, all in matching traditional dress. Alongside the performance, a full slate of games kept children and youth playing, connecting, and building friendships across communities all day long.

BotangRecords' first-ever custom costumes, and the warm-up before the show.

Two worlds, side by side

What makes the Cultural Village a signature draw at the festival every year is the instrument stand, a hands-on collection unlike anything else on the grounds. This year's lineup of traditional African instruments included samba drums, friction drums, standing drums, metal gongs, shakers, njembes, bamboo flutes, and akwa drums, each one unique to the cultures BotangRecords represents.

The Village tent: traditional drums, gongs and shakers, ready for hands-on play.

Right alongside them sat a full stand of contemporary instruments: eight piano keyboards, three electric guitars with amps, a saxophone, a trumpet, an assortment of drum sets, maracas, and more.

On the contemporary side: keyboards, drums and congas, open to every child who wanted a turn.

That pairing isn't incidental; it's the whole point. Traditional instruments tell the story of where the community comes from; contemporary instruments tell the story of where it lives now. Letting children move between both, often in the same ten minutes, tells a story neither set of instruments could tell alone: a fusion of two worlds that shapes how this generation understands its own identity, drawing knowledge and confidence from both sides of a story that's still being written.

More than an activity booth

This is what mentorship looks like when it isn't sitting in a classroom. Understanding where you come from, BotangRecords believes, is what makes it possible to fully appreciate where you are, and that understanding is exactly what shapes the next generation of leaders and culture-keepers. It's a simple formula, repeated year after year at a folding table in a public park: give kids an instrument, a costume, a game, and a reason to be proud of both halves of who they are.

BotangRecords also joined the festival's Parade of All Nations, the event's signature moment, marching alongside representatives of dozens of countries with flags held high, one more chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of Minnesota's diaspora communities and be seen doing it.

A partnership that keeps growing

This year's festival reinforced what's become one of BotangRecords' strongest relationships in Minnesota: its partnership with One Tikar One People, the festival's organizer. Each year the Cultural Village grows (more instruments, more costumes, more kids, more games), and each year that growth positions BotangRecords further as a partner organization whose work shows up immediately in the lives of the next generation.

More from the day

Photos: BotangRecords

Montreal, Quebec, Canada, July 30-August 2, 2026

It started with an invitation. When Kom Canada delegates visited Afoakom USA's national convention in Minneapolis, they watched BotangRecords bring the room to life, and immediately began asking one question: could BotangRecords come do the same thing for the Kom community's own annual convention, north of the border? This July, BotangRecords and a group of Minnesota supporters answered "yes," joining Kom Canada's convention in Montreal, hosted by the Woynkom Montreal chapter.

Thursday opened with a traditional fireside welcome, BotangRecords telling the kind of stories fathers once told over a cooking fire back home, holding a room of guests until bedtime with nothing but voice and memory. Friday brought a morning boat ride on the St. Lawrence River, where BotangRecords turned a bus ride into a call-and-response celebration and led the dancing on deck, moments captured on Facebook and Instagram Live that drew online attention and pulled new faces into that night's cultural program, where the community honored the memory of the late Fon of Kom through performances led by the youngest generation.

Saturday's Gala night was the centerpiece: BotangRecords performed "WoynKom America," an original song produced in collaboration with eight other Kom artists across the U.S., and led the Njang dance that had the entire room moving as one. By Sunday's closing BBQ, BotangRecords had become the DJ too, turning a park into one last dance floor before everyone flew home.

Why it matters

This is what BotangRecords' mission looks like at international scale: a Minnesota-based nonprofit invited across a border specifically because of the cultural energy it brings, carrying Kom heritage between two countries and strengthening a diaspora that spans both. It's proof that the work being built at home is being recognized and requested well beyond it.

BotangRecords has already been invited to bring the same energy to next year's Kom Canada Convention in Toronto. If you're in Canada, or have family there, this is a community worth belonging to.

BotangRecords' Facebook announcement, July 20, 2026: "Just three days ago, we posted a video of the Lion of Kom... Sadly today with heavy hearts, we share the news of his missing."

On Sunday, July 19, 2026, His Royal Majesty Foyn Clement Ndzi II, the 15th Fon of the Kom Kingdom, passed away at the royal palace in Laikom after a brief illness, following a nine-year reign. In Kom tradition, as in several other fondoms of Cameroon's Grassfields, a Fon's death is never announced as a death. He is instead declared "missing," or to have "disappeared": language that marks his transition from the world of the living to the world of the ancestors, and reflects his standing not just as a political leader but as the kingdom's spiritual custodian. BotangRecords shared the news the same way the kingdom itself did: with reverence, and with the customary language the moment demanded.

What followed was one of the most significant cultural events in Kom's recent history, and BotangRecords was there for nearly all of it, documenting the mourning, the sacred rites, and the coronation that followed through Facebook posts, YouTube livestreams, and hosted discussions that gave a global diaspora audience real-time access to a moment many of them could not travel home to witness in person.

A three-century-old process, set in motion

The Kom Kingdom traces its origins to three founding clans (Ikui, Itsinala, and Achaf) who migrated together and settled at Laikom, the kingdom's ancestral capital. While the royal bloodline runs through the Ikui clan, the Fon is not chosen from the clan broadly; the succession follows a matrilineal line, drawn from a specific royal branch, and the identity of the next Fon is not made public knowledge in advance. Guiding that process is Kwifoyn, the kingdom's sacred governing council, together with two hereditary King Makers (one from each of the other two founding clans) who serve for life once appointed and who alone hold the authority to identify and install a new Fon according to ancestral law.

BotangRecords spoke directly with both of the King Makers currently serving Kom: Yuh Kevin Nsom, the Waindum, representing the Itsinala clan, and Yuh Cyril Kwain, the Nkfein, representing the Achaf clan. Both were raised within Kom tradition (one appointed during Foyn Clement Ndzi II's own reign, the other raised alongside him in the royal palace), and both carried the responsibility of guiding the kingdom's succession rites following his passing. Their offices exist to do exactly what they did in July 2026: ensure continuity, legitimacy, and the preservation of custom during a moment when a kingdom is, by definition, without a king.

During the mourning period, palace activity was restricted, sacred rites were observed, and (as is customary between Kom and its centuries-old ally, the Nso Fondom) an enclosed royal message was carried to the Fon of Nso, activating a mortuary alliance between the two kingdoms that dates back generations. Mourning rites of this kind also carry distinct traditional dress customs (including forms of dress that differ sharply from everyday or Western norms), practices that have long drawn public curiosity and, this year, a wave of renewed attention on social media from a generation encountering them for the first time.

The palace grounds at Laikom during the kingdom's succession rites.

A new Fon at Laikom

Three days after the kingdom entered mourning, on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, Kwifoyn and the kingdom's King Makers completed the sacred succession process. Foyn Kini Joseph, born in 1973 into the Kom Royal Lineage and a brother of the late Foyn Clement Ndzi II, was crowned the 16th Paramount Fon of Kom at Laikom Palace. Before ascending the throne, he had served nine years as Bo Fuli, Village Head of Fuli, appointed to that role by his brother in 2017, a period the kingdom has pointed to as evidence of the discipline and loyalty that shaped his readiness for the throne.

BotangRecords' Facebook announcement, July 22, 2026: "The Kingdom of Kom has a new Paramount Fon... enthroned just moments ago at Laikom by the Kom kingmakers and the sacred Kwifoyn."

Why BotangRecords showed up for this

For an organization whose mission is documenting and preserving African cultural heritage, a transition like this one is exactly the kind of moment that mission exists for. Scholar Bobe Richard Munang, reflecting on the surge of public curiosity the transition set off, put it this way in remarks shared during the mourning period: "Kom is not merely a geographical expression. Kom is a feeling." He went on to describe the moment as an unplanned classroom, young people across social media suddenly asking what the rituals, the dress, the masquerades, and the symbols they were seeing actually meant, many of them realizing they knew more about cultures imported through film and music than about the traditions that shaped their own grandparents.

That is precisely the gap BotangRecords' documentation work is built to close. A livestream, a hosted discussion, a recorded interview with a King Maker: these aren't just news coverage. They're an archive, built in real time, so that the next generation doesn't have to rely on the rest of the world to explain their own kingdom back to them.

Why this matters for what comes next

Culture that isn't documented can be distorted. Culture that isn't taught can quietly disappear. BotangRecords' coverage of the Kom transition (from the first announcement to the coronation at Laikom) is part of the same work as the label's language classes, its Children's Village booths, and its festival stages: making sure Kom heritage is recorded, explained, and carried forward, not left for others to define.

Afoakom USA's Komvention (the annual national gathering of the Kom community across America) has been running for more than twenty years. In 2026, for the first time, it came to BotangRecords' own backyard: Arden Hills, Minnesota, the state where BotangRecords is based. As a major partner in the convention's cultural programming, BotangRecords didn't just show up, it helped build the event from the ground up, determined to make Komvention 2026 one this community would talk about for years.

Thursday: Ndo Chiehsi and a first for America

Every Komvention opens with Ndo Chiehsi, the traditional welcome event. Working alongside Afoakom USA, BotangRecords helped deliver what many in the room called the best Ndo Chiehsi in the organization's more than two-decade history. Building on what the community learned at the 2025 Dallas Convention, where Kom people gathered to understand the meaning of the Bobe title, the traditional house-sitting protocol, and a live demonstration of Imyangli Iwayn, the child initiation ceremony, this year the Arizona Chapter went further, staging a full presentation of Ichensi Yindo a Kom, the Kom succession ceremony, an institution many in the diaspora had never seen explained before.

Thursday night also marked a genuine first for the Kom community in America: the formal reception of Bo Nteh Dr. Eva Chu, the first-ever Quarter Head of Kom in the United States, newly commissioned by the Fon of Kom to lead the community stateside. Both women and men leaders of the community received him in a fully traditional ceremony led by Chong, before the evening opened into food, drink, and celebration that carried on late into the night.

Scenes from Thursday's Ndo Chiehsi welcome ceremony and the formal reception of Bo Nteh Dr. Eva Chu. Photos: Nice Image Photography.

Friday: recognition, and an Annual General Meeting that mattered

Friday morning brought the Annual General Meeting, the working heart of Komvention, where the organization's major decisions and partnerships for the year ahead are set. It was here that host chapter president Mr. Nyah Sunde singled out BotangRecords in his annual report, crediting the organization's cultural programming, language lessons, dance, and consistent engagement with the community's children, with visibly boosting monthly meeting attendance and membership over the past year. He asked founder Martin Tohmo to stand and be recognized; the ballroom answered with loud, sustained applause.

That evening's Cultural Night was, by every account, one for the books, standing room only, with the hall filled well past capacity. BotangRecords led across nearly every tradition on display: Njang, Chong, Fimbang, juju dances, Akwa, and more, one performance rolling into the next without a lull.

Saturday: white shirts, a boat, and a Gala

Saturday morning, the hotel lobby turned into a sea of shining white BotangRecords T-shirts as the group prepared for the day's signature excursion: a cruise on the Mississippi River. BotangRecords and band animated the entire bus ride from the Twin Cities to Hudson, Wisconsin, without a quiet moment, drawing the attention of onlookers at the dock before the group even boarded. The same energy carried the group all the way back to the hotel, and social media lit up with clips of the ride throughout the day.

The BotangRecords crew in white ahead of Saturday's Mississippi River cruise.

That night's Gala was the convention's largest gathering yet. As a partner organization, BotangRecords contributed its own donation (its widow's mite) during the fundraising portion of the evening, standing behind the mission it showed up to serve all weekend.

Sunday: closing the loop

The convention wound down with an all-day BBQ, giving old friends and new acquaintances room to relax, reconnect, and trade stories before heading home. Before the weekend closed, plans were already set for Komvention 2027 in Kansas City, to be hosted by Woynkom Mid West next June.

One community, one convention

If you're Kom and you've never been to a Komvention, here's what to expect: four days that move from sacred tradition to full-room celebration and back again, a welcome ceremony rooted in centuries of custom, a working meeting where the community's future gets decided, a cultural night where every dance your grandparents knew gets performed in one room, and closing days built for nothing but connection. It is, without exaggeration, one of the largest and most complete expressions of Kom identity gathered in one place each year.

And it's a place for everyone. Afoakom USA has spent more than twenty years building one shared home for Kom people across America, and the door stays open to every branch of this community, including those who, in recent years, have gathered separately. BotangRecords' hope, plainly, is to see everyone under one roof in Kansas City: one people, one convention, one culture carried forward together.

BotangRecords artists and drummers backstage at AfroFest Minnesota 2025, Becker Park, Crystal.

Summer 2025 had already given BotangRecords the Cosgrove Stage at the Minnesota State Fair and an opening-ceremony trip to Cincinnati for the National Veterans Tournament. It closed with one more stop: AfroFest Minnesota, a celebration of African and Afro-diaspora culture presented by Afromaha and the Minneapolis Diversity Experience (MNDX) at Becker Park in Crystal. BotangRecords took the stage for a 30-minute set, traditional drums, dance, and a live performance built around "Kwang Kwang (Remix)," a BotangRecords production.

BotangRecords' traditional drummers had an official slot on the AfroFest Minnesota 2025 lineup, one of nearly twenty acts across the day.

AfroFest Minnesota runs as a single-day, single-stage celebration, arts, music, food, and education, all in one park, all in one afternoon, and BotangRecords shared the bill with a full slate of DJs, dance groups, and artists from 2 p.m. until the night's headliner closed the show after 8. Getting a dedicated drummers' slot on a lineup like that is its own kind of recognition: proof that traditional Kom rhythm and dance belong on the same stage as the rest of Minnesota's Afrobeats and diaspora music scene, not set apart from it.

BotangRecords' name on the official AfroFest Minnesota 2025 promotional poster, featuring traditional masked dance.

Why it mattered

By the time BotangRecords' drummers stepped up at Becker Park, it was the third major public stage of the summer, after the Minnesota State Fair and the National Veterans Tournament, and the performance folded in something newer than either: a live moment built around "Kwang Kwang (Remix)," turning a studio production into a shared, danced, drummed experience for a park full of people who might never have heard it otherwise. That's the whole loop BotangRecords is built around, record it, produce it, then carry it back out to a crowd in person.

Watch the performance: [facebook.com/reel/1318620553317569](https://www.facebook.com/reel/1318620553317569)

Why this matters for what comes next

Three stages, three different crowds, one summer, and every one of them because a partner organization made room on a lineup for BotangRecords to show up and perform. Moments like AfroFest are how a small nonprofit's reach keeps growing one festival booking at a time.

Watch: catch the "Kwang Kwang (Remix)" performance on Facebook. Book us: if you're organizing a cultural festival or event and want traditional African drumming and dance on your lineup, reach out. Donate: support helps cover instruments, travel, and production for performances like this one.

Every September, Centennial Park in Brooklyn Center becomes, for one day, the center of African heritage in Minnesota. The Minnesota African Cultural Festival (hosted by One Tikar One People and described by organizers as a declaration of unity and a living bridge to community roots) draws families, artists, talent groups, and entrepreneurs representing more than 50 African nations for a free, day-long celebration. In 2025, that celebration drew its largest crowd in the festival's history. BotangRecords was there, in the middle of it, running the Children's Village.

A partnership built one festival at a time

BotangRecords and One Tikar One People didn't start as festival partners; they started with a consultation call in 2024, when BotangRecords offered strategic and cultural guidance as One Tikar One People prepared its annual African Cultural Festival for the first time at real scale. That early support shaped youth-centered programming designed to do more than celebrate heritage on the surface; it was built to actively grow cultural identity in young people.

By 2025, the partnership had deepened considerably. BotangRecords became an essential planning partner, contributing creative direction and hands-on production: a youth ambassador video featuring members of Minnesota's African diaspora speaking in their own words about identity and pride, and an original theme song for One Tikar One People, composed, produced, and released with a professional music video and promotional content, entirely at BotangRecords' hand.

Most visibly, BotangRecords led the Children's Village at the 2025 festival, a hands-on learning space built around music exploration, traditional and contemporary instruments, drawing, storytelling, and cultural dance. For many families, One Tikar One People has said, it was the first structured cultural education experience their children had ever had in Minnesota.

The 2025 festival went on to record the highest attendance in the organization's history, and One Tikar One People has credited BotangRecords' professionalism and commitment to community engagement as central to that success.

Ask what the Children's Village actually looked like on the ground, and it wasn't a stage or a spectacle; it was a keyboard set up on a picnic table, and a line of kids in Kom dress waiting their turn to press the keys themselves. One BotangRecords mentor spent the afternoon moving from child to child: showing a boy where to place his fingers, then turning to a group of girls waiting their turn, then pausing to point out a shaker or a drum worth trying next. No performance, no audience, just one adult who kept showing up, and a rotation of kids who kept coming back.

This is the part of the festival that never makes it into an attendance count. It's also the part that One Tikar One People pointed to directly when they wrote that for many families, this was the first structured cultural education experience their children had ever had in Minnesota.

Why it matters

This is what BotangRecords' mission looks like when it leaves the recording booth and walks into a public park: a child touching a conga drum for the first time, a teenager seeing themselves represented in a video made by people who look like them, a theme song that gives an entire organization something to rally around. None of it happens without two things, a partner organization willing to open the door, and a nonprofit willing to walk through it and do the unglamorous, hands-on work once it's there.

One Tikar One People put it simply in their own letter of support for BotangRecords: they do not simply produce media; they create meaningful platforms that strengthen identity, preserve heritage, and support generational continuity.

The festival returns this weekend

The Minnesota African Cultural Festival comes back to Centennial Park on Saturday, September 12, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., free and open to the public. BotangRecords will be back too, and after 2025's record-breaking turnout, this year's Children's Village has a high bar to meet.

The Minnesota State Fair is often called the largest music festival in the state, with more than 900 free shows across a dozen days and roughly two million people passing through the gates before Labor Day. In 2025, for the first time, BotangRecords had a place on that stage, 45 minutes on the Cosgrove Stage, one of the fair's dedicated platforms for local community organizations and dance groups, in front of a crowd that had no idea Kom rhythms and African heritage performance were about to become part of their fair day.

This moment didn't happen by accident. It happened because of a partnership two years in the making with Minnesota Africans United (MAU), a fellow 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to empowering African immigrant communities across Minnesota. MAU had already stood alongside BotangRecords on entrepreneurship education and digital-literacy programming reaching African families across the state. In 2025, MAU extended an invitation that changed BotangRecords' visibility overnight: a featured slot on the Cosgrove Stage, at the largest and most public gathering in Minnesota.

For 45 minutes, BotangRecords artists and drummers, in full Kom regalia, guitars and traditional drums in hand, turned a fairground stage into a cultural showcase. Families who came for cheese curds and livestock barns stayed to watch djembe rhythms, call-and-response vocals, and dance steps carried straight from the valleys of Kom to the heart of the Twin Cities.

This was, by a wide margin, the highest public exposure BotangRecords has ever had in Minnesota, and in the United States. It reached a bigger, broader, more unfamiliar audience in one afternoon than months of digital content could reach on its own. And it put a simple, powerful idea in front of thousands of Minnesotans at once: African culture isn't a guest at Minnesota's biggest tradition; it's already part of it.

BotangRecords members connect with fairgoers on the grounds, filming the day for the community back home and abroad.

A partnership worth celebrating

In its own words to the Minnesota Humanities Center, MAU described the Cosgrove Stage performance as a showcase that entertained and educated fairgoers about African heritage, music, and performance traditions, one that represented not just BotangRecords and the Kom community, but MAU's broader mission of showing Minnesota that African culture is a living, vibrant part of the state's identity.

That kind of trust doesn't come from a single event, it comes from two years of showing up. BotangRecords and MAU have worked side by side on entrepreneurship workshops and digital-skills training for African families across the Twin Cities, long before either organization stood on the Cosgrove Stage together.

Where to see it

Highlights from the performance live across BotangRecords' Facebook and Instagram pages, and footage from the Cosgrove Stage was woven into the visuals for “Tchiroma,” BotangRecords' YouTube release.

Why this matters for what comes next

A performance like this doesn't just entertain, it opens doors. Every fairgoer who stopped to watch, every family who asked “who are they?”, every video shared afterward is someone newly aware that BotangRecords exists, and that its mission is happening in their own state.

Over Labor Day weekend 2025, BotangRecords traveled to the Cincinnati area for one of the largest gatherings in the African diaspora sporting calendar: the National Veterans Tournament (NVT), marking its 10th anniversary. Founded in 2015, the NVT has grown from a small gathering into what organizers describe as the premier African diaspora soccer and cultural event in North America, and for its milestone tenth year, the tournament drew an especially large crowd.

Soccer is the headline, but anyone who has been to an NVT knows the tournament is never really just about soccer. It's the fan fair, the food, the traditional dress, the drumming, and the sheer scale of a Cameroonian and wider African diaspora community showing up for itself in one place, at one time, in the middle of the United States.

Why we were there

BotangRecords covered the tournament's opening ceremony, the part of the event built almost entirely around cultural display: traditional attire, dance, music, and the kind of collective pride that doesn't always make it into a highlight reel built around goals and scorelines. Camera in hand, BotangRecords documented that ceremony and shared it with the world.

The footage lives now as a permanent BotangRecords YouTube release, free for anyone, a diaspora family in Minnesota, a curious stranger scrolling late at night, a Kom elder back home in Cameroon, to watch and feel part of a moment they weren't able to attend in person.

A tournament built to travel, and a mission built to follow it

The NVT rotates to a different U.S. city each year, which means the community it serves is never in one fixed place. BotangRecords' presence in Cincinnati reflects the same instinct: the mission doesn't stay in Minnesota, and it doesn't stay in one country.

Why this matters for what comes next

Coverage like this doesn't just document an event; it builds an archive. Every ceremony filmed, every performance preserved, is one more piece of proof that African culture in the diaspora is thriving, organized, and worth investing in.