Osvalde Lewat was born in Garoua, in northern Cameroon, and grew up in Yaoundé. A French-Cameroonian writer, filmmaker and photographer, she explores in her films, images and novels the silences of power and the lives kept on the margins.
Yaoundé, the image
As a child, she collects her family's Polaroids and frequents every cinema in Yaoundé. She studies at the École supérieure des sciences et techniques de l'information et de la communication in Yaoundé and then at Sciences Po Paris, and trains in image-making at La Fémis in Paris and at the Institut national de l'image et du son in Montreal, where she shoots her first short film, Le Calumet de l'espoir, with Indigenous communities in Ontario.
Journalism, documentary
In 2000, she returns to Cameroon and becomes a journalist at the daily Cameroon Tribune. She then moves into documentary: Au-delà de la peine, Un amour pendant la guerre, filmed in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then Les Disparus de Douala and Une affaire de nègres, released in French cinemas in 2009, which looks back at the abuses of the Commandement opérationnel in Douala.
She then makes Sderot, Last Exit, and Land Rush, filmed in Mali for the international series Why Poverty?, which received a Peabody Award. In 2023, MK: Mandela's Secret Army, co-produced with Arte, sheds light on the armed wing of the ANC in the struggle against apartheid.
Couleur nuit
From 2012, based in Kinshasa, she devotes herself mainly to photography. Her series Marges and Couleur nuit, born of night-time wanderings through Congolese cities, are exhibited in Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, Paris and New York; the book Congo, couleur, nuit was published in 2015 by Éditions Phénix. She is represented by the Galerie Françoise Livinec in Paris.
Les Aquatiques
In 2021, she publishes her first novel, Les Aquatiques (The Aquatics), with Éditions Les Escales. In 2022 the book receives the Grand Prix panafricain de littérature, the prix Ahmadou-Kourouma at the Geneva Book Fair and a prize from the Académie française. It is translated into English, German and Japanese.
In August 2026 her second novel, Un corps indocile, is published by Philippe Rey and is included in the selections for the prix Renaudot.
Passing it on
In 2020, with Véronique Cazeneuve, she founds the Ateliers Mwinda, writing and short-film workshops for secondary-school students in sub-Saharan Africa. The first edition takes place in Cameroon in January 2021, with Lilian Thuram as patron.