Cameroon

The Bantu homeland — Cameroon as the cradle of a continent

The grasslands of modern Cameroon (c. 3000–1000 BCE) are the most widely accepted origin point for the Bantu expansion — the greatest migration in African prehistory — in which Bantu-speaking agricultural peoples spread from a homeland near the Benue River southward and eastward to populate most of sub-Saharan Africa, taking their languages, iron technology, and farming practices to every corner of the continent.

Mount Cameroon and the Cameroon highlands — biodiversity at the crossroads

Cameroon is described by biologists as the "hinge" of Africa — the point where West Africa's forests meet Central Africa's forests, where the Sahel meets the Congo Basin, and where altitude gradients from sea level to 4,095 metres (Mount Cameroon, the highest peak in West and Central Africa) create extraordinary biological diversity in a country that contains more plant species than all of West Africa combined.

German Kamerun — the colony that became two countries

German Kamerun (1884–1916 CE) was acquired at the Berlin Conference, administered with brutal efficiency through the plantation system and forced labour, and lost in WWI — divided between France (80%) and Britain (20%) by the League of Nations, establishing the dual French-English heritage that makes Cameroon the only country on earth with both a French colonial and a British colonial administration as its past.

Cameroon's unification and the anglophone question

Cameroon's creation as a unified state (1961 CE) — through a UN plebiscite in which British Southern Cameroons voted to join French Cameroun rather than Nigeria — united two populations with different colonial languages, legal systems, and administrative traditions in a federation that francophone President Ahmadou Ahidjo converted to a unitary state in 1972, gradually marginalising the anglophone minority.

Paul Biya — Africa's patriarch of permanence

Paul Biya's Cameroon (1982–present) has been governed by the world's longest-serving non-royal leader (as of 2024, 42 years in power) — a man who spends months at a time in Geneva hotels while Cameroon faces an anglophone civil war, Boko Haram attacks in the north, and one of Africa's most stagnant economies relative to its resource wealth, embodying the "big man" politics of post-independence Africa at its most extreme.

The Anglophone Crisis — Ambazonia's war of separation

The Ambazonia conflict (2017–present) — the armed struggle by English-speaking separatists in Cameroon's northwest and southwest regions for independence as the "Federal Republic of Ambazonia" — has killed over 6,000 people, displaced 700,000 internally, and produced systematic atrocities by both government forces and separatist factions, with no peace process in sight.