Cameroon's history: one colony split in two and a union still argued over

Who lived here before the Germans came

Excavations at Shum Laka in the Northwest Region show human occupation going back about 30,000 years, and in the southern forests the oldest evidence of settlement is around 7,000 years old. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic work places the start of the Bantu expansion in the highlands on the border between present-day Nigeria and Cameroon around 1000 BCE. From there Bantu languages, farming and possibly iron tools spread first east and then south. In Cameroon itself Bantu speakers largely displaced hunter-gatherers such as the Baka, who now live in much smaller numbers in the forested south-east.

The north looked to Lake Chad. The Sao civilisation built round walled settlements near the lake and worked terracotta and bronze; its city-states were at their height between the ninth and fifteenth centuries and had been displaced or assimilated by the sixteenth. The Kanem-Bornu Empire, Muslim from at least the eleventh century, traded in salt and in people taken in raids to the south, and held much of northern Cameroon until the Fulani War of 1804 to 1808 pushed Bornu out. The north then passed to the Sokoto Caliphate, most likely as part of the Adamawa Emirate.

The Muslim states never reached south of the highlands of the Cameroon Line. In the western grasslands, kingdoms and fondoms formed instead. Bamum, founded in the seventeenth century by Nshare, the son of a Tikar chief, was conquered by the Fulani for a short time without being converted, and in 1896 its ruler Sultan Ibrahim Njoya created a script for the Bamum language.

The name came from the sea. Portuguese sailors reached the coast in 1472 and called the Wouri estuary Rio dos Camarões, the river of shrimps, after the ghost shrimp they found in it. For the next three centuries the coast was a market of the Atlantic slave trade, supplied through Bimbia, Douala and other ports by kingdoms far inland, until British abolition in 1807 cut the trade sharply. The Baptist Alfred Saker opened a station at Akwa Town, now Douala, in 1845, and in 1858 founded a settlement of freed slaves on Ambas Bay that was later renamed Victoria and is now Limbe. That settlement is where English first took permanent root in the territory, and the bay later lent its name to the separatist state of Ambazonia.

How Germany drew the borders of Kamerun

German trade came before the German flag. The Hamburg firm C. Woermann opened a trading post in the Duala area in 1868, and by 1884 Adolph Woermann, speaking for all the West African houses, was petitioning Berlin for protection. Otto von Bismarck, long sceptical of colonies, agreed. Gustav Nachtigal arrived at Duala in July 1884 and signed treaties with the rulers around it, and the protectorate officially began on 17 August 1884. Britain, which had traded on the coast for decades and declared its own protectorate at Ambas Bay the same year, accepted the claim and ceded Ambas Bay to Kamerun in 1887.

The borders were settled in a run of negotiations with Britain and France, and the colony kept changing shape while they went on. Under the Treaty of Fez of 1911, which closed the Agadir Crisis, France ceded nearly 300,000 km² of French Equatorial Africa to Kamerun as Neukamerun, and Germany ceded a smaller area in present-day Chad to France. At its widest Kamerun took in northern parts of Gabon and the Congo, western parts of the Central African Republic, south-western Chad and the far north-east of Nigeria.

Inland, control came by treaty, by arming one local power against its rivals, and by war. The Bafut Wars and the Adamawa Wars had ended in German victories by 1907. Jesko von Puttkamer, governor from 1895 to 1906, is the figure most associated with the colony's reputation: under him and the officer Hans Dominik the record includes massacres, a system of man tithes that took labourers from conquered peoples, and floggings severe enough that the German colonies were nicknamed the flogging colonies. Puttkamer was eventually relieved of duty over his treatment of Cameroonians. Forced labour worked the plantations of the south-west and built the two railways out of Douala, a northern line of 160 km to the Manenguba mountains and a main line of 300 km to Makak on the Nyong.

Why Britain and France divided the colony so unequally

British troops invaded from Nigeria and French troops from French Equatorial Africa in 1914, and the last German fort surrendered in February 1916. The two allies then cut the colony in two. In the account of the historian Joseph Nfi of the University of Buea, Britain needed only a slender strip to adjust Nigeria's eastern border and surrendered four-fifths of the land to France, partly so that France could use the port of Douala as a way into Equatorial Africa. The division was formalised on 28 June 1919 and confirmed in 1922 as two Class B mandates of the League of Nations.

Each half was then governed as though the other did not exist. France handed Neukamerun back to its neighbouring colonies, kept the rest outside French Equatorial Africa as a separate mandate, and set out to make German rule forgotten by teaching French throughout the territory and imposing French law. It finished the Douala to Yaoundé railway with forced labour, and in 1925 the mortality rate on the works stood at 61.7%. In August 1940 French Cameroon rallied to Free France, and troops under Philippe Leclerc took Douala on 27 August.

Britain ran its share from Lagos. It treated the north as a natural part of the Fulani-dominated Northern Region of Nigeria and governed the south as a province of the Eastern Region, and residents complained of being a colony of a colony. German planters came back: few investors bid at the London auctions of the confiscated estates, Britain sold most of them to their former owners, and in the 1930s most of the white population was still German. In 1953 a Southern Cameroons delegation in London asked for a region of its own, and in 1954 it got one, with a parliament at Buea and E. M. L. Endeley as premier.

The two administrations left two legal systems behind them. The common law and English stayed in the courts and schools of the former British south, and French civil law and French governed the rest.

How France fought the independence movement

The Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) was founded in 1948, and under Ruben Um Nyobè it demanded both independence and the reunification of the two Cameroons. After riots in several cities in May 1955, the governor Roland Pré banned the party on 13 July 1955. The French administration listed twenty-two dead in the riots; its own secret reports acknowledged many more. UPC activists went into the forests and formed guerrilla bands, and close to 5,000 crossed into the Southern Cameroons after the ban, by Nfi's count.

What the fighting looked like

An insurrection among the Bassa began on 18 and 19 December 1956, and the repression that followed fell hardest on the Bassa and the Bamileke, with razed villages, forced relocations and indiscriminate killings in what was sometimes called the Bamileke War. In the night of 30 to 31 December 1956, troops under French command attacked a UPC meeting at Ekité; the historians' report of 2025 describes a massacre that the commanding officer recorded as a pitched battle, with the death toll revised downward. Um Nyobè was shot dead by French forces in the maquis on 13 September 1958. His successor Félix-Roland Moumié was poisoned in Geneva in November 1960 by an agent of the French secret service.

Independence on 1 January 1960 did not stop the war. The regroupment camps, into which hundreds of thousands of people had been moved, stayed open; bilateral treaties let the French army go on operating; and the report places one of the peaks of the violence in early 1960, with aerial strafing and bombing of homes in the west in April and May. Ahmadou Ahidjo, prime minister from 1958 and president from 5 May 1960, asked for continued French help and used the emergency powers of the war to build a centralised state. The last important rebel leader was captured in 1970, and Ernest Ouandié, one of the UPC's historic leaders, was publicly executed in January 1971. Estimates of the dead run to several tens of thousands, most of them after independence.

Why the war went unacknowledged for so long

A commission of fourteen Cameroonian and French historians, working from March 2023 under Karine Ramondy, handed over a report of more than 1,000 pages on 28 January 2025. It calls the conflict a war of decolonisation, of the same nature as those in Indochina and Algeria if not the same scale, and holds the French army and state responsible for the deaths of five UPC leaders. It obtained the declassification of 2,300 French archive documents and was refused access to Cameroon's national archives after 1964.

That verdict reversed an official French position. In 2009 the prime minister François Fillon had called accounts of these killings pure inventions. The report's explanations for the silence are practical: no more than 400 soldiers from metropolitan France were in the country in 1960, no conscripts were sent, the war ran at the same time as Algeria's, and Ahidjo promoted an account of independence as a grant from France that left the UPC out of it.

What the British Cameroons plebiscite offered

Nigeria was due for independence later in 1960, which left the British trust territory with no settled future. Nfi describes the Southern Cameroons politicians of 1955 as divided into three camps. The largest wanted an independent Southern Cameroons state. John Ngu Foncha's Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP) wanted to leave Nigeria and reunite with French Cameroon. Endeley's Kamerun National Congress and N. N. Mbile's Kamerun People's Party wanted autonomy inside Nigeria. Foncha defeated Endeley at the election of 1 February 1959.

In October 1959 the UN settled on two questions: independence by joining the Federation of Nigeria, or independence by joining the Republic of Cameroon. The British representative on the Trusteeship Council, Sir Andrew Cohen, opposed a third option of separate independence, and it was left off the ballot. The International Crisis Group records that the leading Southern Cameroons politicians had argued at the UN for an independent state, or for a period of independence in which to negotiate union from a stronger position, and that Britain objected that such a state would not be economically viable.

The campaign was fought largely over fear. Opponents of reunification pointed to the war across the border, and a pamphlet of the Cameroon People's National Congress told voters that in French Cameroon political differences were settled by guns and poison. Nfi argues that the British exaggerated the threat, and that the KNDP won the villages on bread-and-butter issues and on a widespread antipathy towards Nigerians.

On 11 February 1961 the two halves of the territory voted opposite ways. In the Northern Cameroons about 60% chose Nigeria. In the Southern Cameroons 233,571 votes went to union with the Republic of Cameroon against 97,741 for Nigeria, about 70%. The north became the Sardauna Province of Northern Nigeria in 1961, and the south joined Cameroon on 1 October 1961, the day its trusteeship ended. Supporters of union called it reunification, because both halves had once been German Kamerun.

How the federation was built and then taken apart

What Foumban settled and what it left open

Foncha's delegation met Ahidjo at Foumban in July 1961 to agree the terms. The Crisis Group's 2017 report records that the Anglophone delegates believed they were attending a constituent assembly, that the conference produced no written agreement, and that the failure to keep its promises remains among Anglophone grievances. The constitution that came out of it was based heavily on the one French Cameroon had approved by referendum on 21 February 1960, with a federal structure added: two states, East Cameroon governed from Yaoundé and West Cameroon from Buea, each with its own legislature, government and prime minister. The National Assembly in Yaoundé approved it in August 1961 and Ahidjo promulgated it on 1 September, while the south was still under British trusteeship. Ahidjo had wanted a unitary state and the West Cameroonians firmer protections, and neither side was satisfied. At union, Anglophones were about 20% of the federal population.

How the centre absorbed the two states

Ahidjo became federal president, and Foncha vice president and prime minister of West Cameroon. On 20 October 1961, three weeks after union, a decree divided federal territory into six administrative regions, West Cameroon among them, each under a federal inspector who answered to the president. The federated states had no financial autonomy of their own. The Cameroon National Union became the sole legal party on 1 September 1966.

On 20 May 1972 a referendum replaced the federation with the United Republic of Cameroon, and official results gave a turnout of 98.2% and 99.99% in favour. The date is now National Day. Anglophone critics have contested the change ever since: the Crisis Group notes their argument that the 1961 constitution made no provision for altering the form of the state and allowed only parliament to amend it, and pro-independence groups add that most of West Cameroon's deputies never consented.

Paul Biya, prime minister since 30 June 1975, succeeded Ahidjo when he resigned on 4 November 1982. On 22 August 1983 the Anglophone region was divided into two provinces, the Northwest and the Southwest, and Law No. 84-1 of 4 February 1984 renamed the United Republic as the Republic of Cameroon, which is the name French Cameroon had carried alone at independence in 1960. The flag's two federal stars had given way to one on 20 May 1975, according to the country's record; the Crisis Group report dates the removal of the second star to 1984.

Why the Anglophone question turned into a war

The argument that 1961 had been an annexation was put in writing early. In a memorandum dated 20 March 1985, Fongum Gorji Dinka, an Anglophone lawyer and president of the Cameroon Bar Association, called the government unconstitutional and declared that the former Southern Cameroons should become independent as the Republic of Ambazonia. He was imprisoned without trial the following January.

The return of opposition parties in December 1990 reopened the question. The All Anglophone Conference at Buea in 1993 called for the federation of 1961 to be restored, and the second conference, at Bamenda in 1994, warned that the south would declare independence if it was not. The Southern Cameroons National Council (SCNC) took a petition against annexation to the UN in June 1995. The constitutional revision of 1996 decentralised the government to a minor extent and stopped well short of federalism. Militants took over Radio Buea on 1 October 1999 to proclaim independence, and the SCNC was declared illegal in 2001.

The present conflict began in the courts. In October 2016 lawyers in Bamenda went on strike over the posting of Francophone magistrates trained in civil law to common-law jurisdictions and over the lack of English translations of the laws they applied, and in November teachers struck over colleagues sent to Anglophone schools without a good command of English. Security forces broke up the protests, the internet was cut in the Anglophone regions for 92 days, and the leaders of the lawyers' and teachers' consortium were arrested on 17 January 2017. Interviewing in the two regions between December 2016 and May 2017, the Crisis Group concluded that the government's response had probably left most Anglophones seeing federalism or secession as the only ways out.

On 1 October 2017, the anniversary of union, a separatist umbrella group declared the independence of Ambazonia, and the army moved into the two regions in force. The government formally declared war on the separatists on 4 December 2017. Talks mediated by Switzerland in 2019 failed. A special status granted to the Northwest and Southwest in 2019 created regional assemblies with more powers than the councils elsewhere, which the BTI 2026 country report describes as very weak and under the control of appointed regional governments. The same report counts about 6,500 deaths in the fighting between government and separatist forces since 2017, and about 1 million people displaced by all of the country's conflicts together.

How old colonial treaties still decide Cameroon's borders

The plebiscite drew one frontier and the colonial agreements drew the others, and in one case those agreements were still being argued in court in 2002. The Bakassi peninsula, on the Gulf of Guinea between the Cross River estuary and the Rio del Rey, was administered by Nigeria throughout the colonial era, but an agreement of 1913 between Britain and Germany had placed it in German Kamerun. The dispute sharpened once oil was found in the area. Nigerian and Cameroonian forces clashed in 1981 and several times through the 1980s, both countries sent large contingents in 1993, and Cameroon referred the matter to the International Court of Justice on 29 March 1994.

The court ruled for Cameroon in October 2002. Nigeria resisted the judgment and then, under pressure from the UN and its aid donors, agreed in the Greentree Agreement of June 2006 to transfer administration over two years; the northern part of the peninsula was handed over in August 2006 and the rest in 2008. Many inhabitants kept their Nigerian citizenship, a local separatist insurgency followed, and the low-level violence that outlasted it was absorbed into the Anglophone crisis from 2017.