“I think America is very materialistic,” he offers, an observation built from a life lived in two different places, with parents who still travel back to Cameroon with some regularity. “And to learn from a very upfront, close and personal perspective of, it’s not actually the amount of money you have that ends up making you happy or makes you somebody.
“It’s your character, it’s kind of these other intangible things that are materially cheap but spiritually expensive.”
Njongmeta credits much of who he is to his parents, Leo and Nenge Lynda Njongmeta. Maybe it’s because they grew up in a country where they had to depend on themselves more—”things were a lot more uncertain where they grew up,” he says.
Or maybe it was the value they placed on education, ensuring their children would grow up in a home that knew the importance of learning about the world around them.
“I remember being young, and there’s this, the Naked Brothers Band, it was this Nickelodeon show,” he starts with a chuckle, knowing where the story is going. “And they had a song called ‘I Don’t Wanna Go To School,’ and it was super catchy. I still remember it to this day. I remember playing it on the little drum set my mom had, and my mom came in, and she was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? We love school in this house.'”
Maybe it was because his parents knew that moving their children to a country very different from their own would require striking a balance between who their kids were and who they dreamed of being, and therefore raised them with that in mind.