Cameroonian culture: a colonial language line drawn over older kingdoms

How many languages are spoken beneath English and French

The counts disagree, and the disagreement says something about the material. The main Wikipedia article on the country puts the languages spoken besides the official pair at between 250 and 280, and the distinct ethnic and linguistic groups at between 230 and 282. Its article on Cameroonian culture gives 250 to 300 groups and more than 300 languages. The Ministry of Tourism and Leisure, on its own site, speaks of nearly 200 African dialects. None of the three prints a census figure, and the spread is largely a question of where a dialect ends and a language begins.

The Adamawa Plateau divides the groups broadly into a north and a south. Sudanic-speaking peoples live in the central highlands and the northern lowlands, the Fulani are spread across the whole north, and a small number of Shuwa Arabs live near Lake Chad. Bantu speakers hold the coast and the equatorial forest. Speakers of Semi-Bantu languages live in the western grassfields, and small communities of Gyele and Baka live in the south-eastern and coastal rainforests.

Between the indigenous languages and the official pair sit the languages people actually use to cross from one group to another. Cameroonian Pidgin English is the lingua franca of the territories Britain once administered. Camfranglais, a mixture of English, French and Pidgin, has been gaining ground in the cities since the mid-1970s. German, the language of the first colonial power between 1884 and 1916, has long since been displaced by French and English.

The constitution, in the text as amended to 2008, makes English and French official, "both languages having the same status". It then gives the state two duties of different strength. It "shall guarantee the promotion of bilingualism throughout the country", and it "shall endeavour to protect and promote national languages". The state guarantees the first and endeavours at the second.

Why English and French divide the country

Germany held Kamerun as a colony from 1884 to 1916. After the First World War the territory was split between a French and a British League of Nations mandate, and in the words of the International Crisis Group in 2017 each colonial power "shaped their territories in their own image".

The British strip along the Nigerian border took English as its official language, and its justice system, its schools, its currency and its social norms followed the British model. Britain governed it through indirect rule, which left traditional chiefdoms in place, and administered it as though it were part of Nigeria. France governed its much larger share directly, on the assimilationist model. It taught French across the whole territory and imposed French law, with the aim of making the German presence forgotten.

The two halves came back together in stages. The French territory became independent on 1 January 1960. In the plebiscite of 11 February 1961, 60% of voters in the Northern Cameroons chose Nigeria and 70% in the Southern Cameroons chose Cameroon, and the south joined as the federated state of West Cameroon on 1 October 1961. The terms of that union were negotiated at a conference in Foumban, the Bamoun royal town, from 16 to 21 July 1961. A referendum on 20 May 1972 replaced the federation with a unitary state, and West Cameroon became the North-West and South-West regions.

Both dates are now holidays, for different people. National Day on 20 May commemorates the unification of 1972. In the two English-speaking regions, 1 October is kept by those who regard it as the day of their independence from Cameroon, under the name Ambazonia.

The Presidency's own estimate puts French speakers at 70% of the population and English speakers at 30%. Religion follows the old mandate line in part. Protestant churches are concentrated in the North-West and South-West, the French-speaking south and west are largely Catholic, and the Fulani of the north are almost entirely Muslim. Across the country Christianity is practised by about two-thirds of the population and Islam by just under a third, and the Fulani call followers of the indigenous religions of the north Kirdi, meaning pagan.

What the lawyers and teachers struck over

How schooling and law became the dispute

The first open fight over the colonial inheritance was about examinations. In 1994 the government moved to standardise the English-speaking and French-speaking school systems. Teachers' unions and parents resisted, and the government finally had to create an independent General Certificate of Education Board by presidential decree.

The second began in October 2016. Lawyers in the North-West and South-West went on strike against the appointment of French-speaking judges in the English-speaking regions, which they saw as replacing the common law with the civil law. They asked for the business law code of OHADA and other legal texts to be translated into English, and for the common law to be taught at the universities of Buea and Bamenda. On 21 November 2016 teachers joined them, protesting the shortage of English-speaking teachers, the posting of teachers with a poor command of English, and the erosion of what they called the Anglo-Saxon character of their schools and universities. All schools in the English-speaking regions closed.

What changed in the classrooms afterwards

The government's answers were cultural ones. In December 2016 it announced the recruitment of 1,000 bilingual teachers. On 23 January 2017 a presidential decree created a National Commission for Bilingualism and Multiculturalism, which Anglophone activists criticised because nine of its fifteen members were French speakers. On 30 March 2017 it announced common law benches at the Supreme Court, and the internet in the two regions came back after a 92-day cut. Crisis Group reported in August 2017 that leaders of the Anglophone movement regarded the measures as too little and too late.

Separatists declared the independence of Ambazonia on 1 October 2017, and the conflict that followed moved into the schools. Armed groups enforced a school boycott, and 79 students were kidnapped from a school in Nkwen, near Bamenda, in November 2018 and released three days later. Separatist lockdowns were called for the first two weeks of the school year in September 2019. On 24 October 2020 gunmen killed seven children at a school in Kumba; no one claimed the attack, and the government and the separatists blamed each other. By June 2020 an estimated 740,000 people had been displaced inside the country, and many English-speaking children lost years of school.

How the Bamoun put their monarch on trial

The Bamoun kingdom was founded in the seventeenth century by Nshare, the son of a Tikar chief, as one of numerous kingdoms that emerged in the grasslands of the west. The Fulani conquered it briefly without converting it. Islam arrived later, accepted by Sultan Njoya in the early twentieth century, and the Bamoun of the West Region remain largely Muslim.

Njoya's other act was to give his language its own writing. In 1896 he created the Bamum script, called Shu Mom, and it is still taught in Cameroon through the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project. A kingdom with a script designed by its own ruler, in a country where the state's two written languages both arrived from Europe, sits on the lower layer of the argument this article makes.

The institution the kingdom is best known for now is Nguon, inscribed by UNESCO in 2023. Every two years in early December, ritual chiefs consult the community on the state of the kingdom. On an agreed Friday they carry what they have collected into the palace, at night and in secret, to speak with the Mfon, the monarch. The next day the Mfon sits through a public trial on his governance, with the ritual chiefs reading out indictments drawn from the community's complaints. He may be fined, and he may be removed from office. If he is given a new mandate he makes an acceptance speech and receives a renewal of allegiance, and the three days end on the Sunday with a parade and his return to the palace.

Other western kingdoms are on Cameroon's World Heritage tentative list, entered in 2018. The Chefferie de Bafut belongs to a fondom that fought German colonial forces in the Bafut Wars until 1907, and the Lamidat de Rey-Bouba is entered beside it.

Which traditions UNESCO has inscribed for Cameroon

What the inscriptions cover

Cameroon's entries on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity began in 2023 and have followed at a rate of about one a year.

Mvet Oyeng is the one file Cameroon shares. The term covers the stories, the storyteller, the instrument and the musician at once. It has a sacred form, transmitted through initiation and used at important events, and a popular form performed at public celebrations. Women can be storytellers, particularly in the popular form, and do not typically make or play the instrument.

The Diy-Gid-Biy listing in the Far North Region covers sixteen archaeological sites across seven villages. The dry-stone structures were probably built between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries by builders who remain unknown, and the Mafa have lived among them since the fifteenth century. The name means "ruin of the chief's residence" in the Mafa language.

What carvers and potters make

Britannica maps the crafts by people. The Fulani of the Adamawa produce elaborately worked leather goods and ornate calabashes, and the Kirdi and the Matakam of the western mountains make distinctive pottery. The Bali carve masks representing elephants' heads for ceremonies for the dead. Bamileke statuettes take human and animal figures, the Tikar decorate brass pipes, the Ngoutou carve two-faced masks, and the Bamum carve smiling masks. The Bangwa ritual sculptures of Ateu Atsa, who lived from about 1840 to 1910, have been collected and exhibited in Western museums. The oldest layer is the Sao civilisation around Lake Chad, known for its terracotta and bronze work.

The Diamaré Museum at Maroua holds anthropological collections on the Sudanic peoples of the north, and the International Museum and Library in Bamenda houses numerous cultural objects.

What people eat and wear across the country

A large one-course evening meal is common across the country, whatever the region. Its base is a starch, cocoyams, maize, cassava, millet, plantains, potatoes, rice or yams, often pounded into a dough-like fufu and served with a sauce, soup or stew made from greens, groundnuts or palm oil. Meat and fish are popular and expensive, and chicken is often kept for special occasions. Dishes run hot, seasoned with red pepper sauce and maggi mixes. Cutlery is common, though food is traditionally eaten with the right hand. Breakfast is often made from wheat flour as puff-puff doughnuts, accra banana or bean cakes, and in larger towns snacks are bought from street vendors.

The tourism ministry presents the national dishes as coming from four cultural areas. In 2026 Cameroon put Achu forward to UNESCO as "an expression of the traditional culinary art of Cameroon".

The division of labour behind the meal differs across the Adamawa line. In the north, women tend the home and men herd cattle or farm. In the south, women grow the family's food and men provide meat and grow cash crops.

Dress follows region and religion. Women wear the pagne, a wrapped cloth. Men wear the gandura and carry the kwa, a man's handbag, and the chechia is a traditional hat. Fulani styles carry more weight in the north, and Igbo and Yoruba styles in the south and west. The designer Imane Ayissi has received international recognition.

How makossa and bikutsi left their home regions

How the popular styles formed

Britannica sets the music of the southern forest, with its drumming, against the flute music of the north. Traditional instruments include bells worn by dancers, clappers, drums and talking drums, horns, rattles, scrapers, stringed instruments, whistles and xylophones, in combinations that vary by people and region. In a typical performance a chorus echoes a soloist, and men and women often dance separately.

Regional styles carry the names of their peoples and places: ambasse bey on the coast, assiko among the Bassa, mangambeu among the Bangangte and tsamassi among the Bamileke. Two styles left their regions entirely. Makossa developed in Douala from folk music, highlife, soul and Congo music, and Manu Dibango, Francis Bebey, Moni Bilé and Petit-Pays carried it abroad in the 1970s and 1980s. Bikutsi began as war music among the Ewondo; Anne-Marie Nzié turned it into dance music from the 1940s, and Mama Ohandja and Les Têtes Brulées took it abroad between the 1960s and the 1980s. Nigerian highlife shaped performers in the English-speaking west, where Prince Nico Mbarga's "Sweet Mother" was a hit.

What writers and filmmakers argued about

The colonial-era writers Louis-Marie Pouka and Sankie Maimo were educated by European missionary societies and argued for assimilation into European culture. After the Second World War, Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono criticised colonialism and rejected assimilation, and in the 1960s they and others turned to postcolonial questions and the recovery of an African identity. Film followed a similar course. Jean-Paul Ngassa and Thérèse Sita-Bella worked shortly after independence, and in the mid-1970s Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa and Daniel Kamwa made films about the conflict between traditional and postcolonial society.

Contemporary art is promoted mainly by independent organisations, Doual'art and Africréa among them, and by artist-run initiatives such as Art Wash, Atelier Viking and ArtBakery.

Why football carries the national argument

The Wikipedia article on Cameroonian culture lists school and a national love of football among the public institutions that make one national culture out of the two regional ones. Britannica records football as part of nation building, with patriotic pride rising when the Indomitable Lions won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1984 and 2000 and reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 1990. The men's team has won the continental title five times and took Olympic gold at Sydney in 2000. Amateur clubs are organised along ethnic lines or under corporate sponsors, and the women's team, the Indomitable Lionesses, competes on the same continental stage.

Cameroon hosted the Women's Africa Cup of Nations in November and December 2016, the African Nations Championship of 2020 and the Africa Cup of Nations of 2021, which was played in January 2022. The conflict reached the tournament. On 12 January 2022 the Mali team suspended training before its match against Tunisia after clashes between separatists and the army in Buea killed two people. Separatists have also called lockdowns over Youth Day on 11 February and National Day on 20 May, the day the unitary state is celebrated.

Village sport runs on older lines. Wrestling, in one form or another, is found in almost every village. Tug-of-war is common, dancing competitions are held in the north-west, the Fulani of the cattle-keeping north race horses, and coastal villages race canoes against each other. Where game is hunted, shooting contests are held just before the season opens. Several hundred runners take part each year in the Mount Cameroon Race of Hope, a 40 km course on the mountain.

Cameroon first competed at the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964. Joseph Bessala won its first medal, silver in welterweight boxing, at Mexico City in 1968, and Françoise Mbango Etone won the triple jump at Athens in 2004, the first Olympic gold for a Cameroonian woman. Cameroonians have also played in the NBA, Joel Embiid and Luc Mbah a Moute among them, and Francis Ngannou is a former UFC heavyweight champion.