BotangRecords Named Best Diaspora Showbiz Promoter at the 2025 Cameroon English Awards

Douala, Cameroon / Saint Michael, Minnesota — December 19, 2025

In December 2025, BotangRecords received its first-ever public nomination at the Cameroon English Awards, competing in the category of Best Diaspora Showbiz Promoter. The ceremony was held over two nights, December 18th and 19th, at Las Vegas Bonamusadi in Douala — a category built specifically to honor the individuals and organizations carrying Cameroonian culture across borders, on stages most of the homeland will never see.

The moment BotangRecords shared the nomination with its community and asked for votes.

We didn't expect it to move as fast as it did. Within days of the nomination going public, votes poured in from Minnesota, from Cameroon, from every corner of the Kom and wider Cameroonian diaspora — family, friends, and strangers who had only ever known BotangRecords through a YouTube upload or a shared song. When the results were tallied, BotangRecords had won the category by an overwhelming majority.

Artist-producer Macdonald Nfor — known to the community by his stage name Maxi De Pounder — stood in for BotangRecords on the ground in Douala to accept the honor, and carried the trophy home to Minnesota, where it now sits in the organization's Saint Michael home office. It is a small, golden, winged figure on a black base. Most days it goes unnoticed in a room full of instruments waiting to be shipped and mentorship sessions waiting to happen. But it marks something real: the first time an outside body, independent of BotangRecords' own community, looked at two years of unpaid, volunteer-driven work and called it what it is — excellence.

Why this recognition matters

BotangRecords was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Minnesota in December 2023. Since then, a small team of volunteers has mentored more than 50 artists, produced a documentary, launched Kom-language classes, performed at the Minnesota State Fair, shipped donated instruments to Cameroon, and built a YouTube audience of over 12,000 people who tune in for one reason: because almost no one else is telling these stories, in this language, with this much care.

None of that work asks to be seen. It happens in recording sessions, in WhatsApp voice notes coordinating a shipment of guitars, in a volunteer staying up late to edit a video so a young artist's first release looks the way it deserves to look. The Cameroon English Award doesn't change any of that work — but it confirms that people are watching, and that what BotangRecords builds quietly for the diaspora is landing.

As the organization put it in the days after the win: this recognition belongs to the community — the families who vote, who share, who show up — because the show only exists to serve them in the first place.

From Minnesota, for the world

BotangRecords is proof that a Minnesota-based nonprofit can carry weight far beyond state lines. This trophy sits in a home office 7,000 miles from the stage where it was awarded, but it represents work that spans two continents: artists in Cameroon getting instruments and studio access they couldn't otherwise afford, and a diaspora community in Minnesota staying connected to a culture and language that doesn't get a second chance if it's lost.

How you can be part of the next chapter

Every trophy on the shelf started as someone believing an unpaid promoter, a volunteer editor, or a nonprofit with a lean bank account was worth backing before the recognition came. BotangRecords is asking for that same belief now — before the next award, the next artist, the next shipment of instruments.