Cultural tourism, as currently practised, takes more than it gives. A community opens its ceremony to outside visitors and the value flows away from them — to airlines, to international tour operators, to platforms headquartered elsewhere. The community itself receives a fraction, or nothing.

Worse, the ceremony itself begins to shift. Sacred moments are scheduled for tour-bus arrivals. Rituals are performed in shortened, more photogenic forms. Children are taught the version that sells. Within a generation, the tradition is preserved in the way a wax figure preserves a person — recognisable, unmoving, no longer alive.

Most cultural platforms exist to solve the wrong problem. They optimise for the visitor’s convenience, the algorithm’s appetite, the investor’s return. The community is treated as content — at best as a supplier, never as a co-owner.

Wesaka is a platform on which communities are co-owners, not users. The events, the photographs, the witness journals, the audio recordings — these belong to the community that hosted them, in writing and in our payment system.

Seventy per cent of every euro generated by a community’s participation returns to that community. This is not a policy we can decide to reduce next quarter when we are under pressure to grow margins. It is enforced in the code that handles our payments. Try to change it and the platform refuses.

Every community can close any event at any moment, without giving a reason. Every guest passes through a preparation module before they apply. Every guide is endorsed by the community they accompany. Sacred events are not commercialised, not streamed, not sold. The community is always the protagonist. The visitor is always the guest.

I grew up in a village in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon, in a community whose language UNESCO classifies as endangered. The festival of my grandmother’s childhood — the one she described to me carefully, over months — was performed for the last time in 2003. Not because the elders died, though some did. Because the world stopped showing up in a way that made the work worth doing.

I have spent fifteen years trying to understand why. I worked at three international platforms with “cultural” in their mission statements and watched, each time, as the business model overruled the mission. I am not a neutral observer. I am building this for my grandmother, and for the village she walked back to three years before she died, hoping the festival would be there.

— Yvon Mbé, founder · Yaoundé / Berlin