Kum Cletus

Kum Cletus Ngum is a Cameroonian artist from Buea, born in 1993. He studied art at the University of Buea. His paintings reflect a deep sense of concern, emotional empathy, and pain.

Kum Cletus grew up as an orphan and was forced out of high school by mental illness. After several wrong diagnoses and failed treatment attempts in different hospitals, the family decided to chain him at home to stop him from moving aimlessly. This action by the family aimed at preventing him from being shot to death, a typical characteristic of the anglophone crisis rocking the two English-speaking regions.

The young girls and women in his paintings are those he knew or had known through mutual sources and had been either exploited or treated unfairly. He also worked on a new series where the same women express confident, proud, and victorious body language.