Cameroon

From the Sao of Lake Chad and the Bantu cradle of the Grassfields to a German colony, a divided trusteeship, and a bilingual republic still seeking its unity.

Cameroon's land holds one of Africa's deepest pasts. Near Lake Chad the Sao culture raised walled towns and cast striking terracotta and bronze, while the western Grassfields are widely held to be near the cradle from which Bantu-speaking peoples spread across central and southern Africa. Over centuries the region grew dense with states and societies: the trading Douala of the coast, the Grassfields kingdoms and fondoms — among them Bamum, whose King Njoya invented an original script — and, in the north, the Adamawa Emirate forged by the Fulani jihad of Modibo Adama. Portuguese sailors named the Wouri estuary the Rio dos Camaroes, the river of prawns, giving the country its name. From 1884 Germany ruled the protectorate of Kamerun until Allied forces conquered it in the First World War, after which the League of Nations split the territory between France and Britain. French Cameroun won independence on 1 January 1960 under Ahmadou Ahidjo, and in 1961 the British Southern Cameroons voted to join it, forming a federation reunified on 1 October 1961, while the British Northern Cameroons joined Nigeria. Since 1982 the country has been led by Paul Biya, and since 2016 the Anglophone regions have been gripped by a grave separatist crisis.