Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Its coastline lies on the Bight of Biafra, part of the Gulf of Guinea, and the Atlantic Ocean. Due to its strategic position at the crossroads between West Africa and Central Africa, it has been categorized as being in both camps. Cameroon's population of nearly 31 million people speak 250 native languages, in addition to the national tongues of English and French, or both. Early inhabitants of the territory included the Sao civilisation around Lake Chad and the Baka hunter-gatherers in the southeastern rainforest. Portuguese explorers reached the coast in the 15th century and named the area Rio dos Camarões, which became Cameroon in English. Fulani soldiers founded the Adamawa Emirate in the north in the 19th century, and various ethnic groups of the west and northwest established powerful chiefdoms and fondoms.
At the crossroads of West Africa and Central Africa, the territory of what is now Cameroon has seen human habitation since some time in the Middle Paleolithic, likely no later than 130,000 years ago. The earliest discovered archaeological evidence of humans dates from around 30,000 years ago at Shum Laka. The Bamenda highlands in western Cameroon near the border with Nigeria are the most likely origin for the Bantu peoples, whose language and culture came to dominate most of central and southern Africa between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE.
British Cameroons or British Cameroon was a British mandate territory in British West Africa, formed of the Northern Cameroons and Southern Cameroons. Today, the Northern Cameroons forms parts of the Borno, Adamawa and Taraba states of Nigeria, while the Southern Cameroons forms part of the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon.
Paul Biya is a Cameroonian politician who has served as the second president of Cameroon since 1982, having previously been the fifth prime minister of Cameroon from 1975 to 1982. As of 2024, he is the second-longest-ruling president in Africa and the longest consecutively serving current non-royal national leader in the world and the oldest head of state in the world.
Ahmadou Babatoura Ahidjo was a Cameroonian politician who was the first president of Cameroon from 1960 until 1982. He was previously the first prime minister of Cameroon from the country's independence in January 1960 until May of that same year following the creation of the presidency.
The Union of the Peoples of Cameroon is a political party in Cameroon.
Articles related to Cameroon include:
The Southern Cameroons was the southern part of the British League of Nations mandate territory of the British Cameroons in West Africa. Since 1961, it has been part of the Republic of Cameroon, where it makes up the Northwest Region and Southwest Region. Since 1994, pressure groups in the territory claim there was no legal document in accordance to UNGA RES 1608(XV) paragraph 5, and are seeking to restore statehood and independence from the Republic. They renamed the British Southern Cameroons as Ambazonia.
Félix-Roland Moumié was an anti-colonialist Cameroonian leader, assassinated in Geneva on 3 November 1960 by an agent of the SDECE with thallium, following official independence from France earlier that year. Félix-Roland Moumié succeeded Ruben Um Nyobé, who was killed in September 1958, as leader of the Union des Populations du Cameroun.
Ruben Um Nyobè was an anti-colonialist Cameroonian leader, slain by the French army on 13 September 1958, near his natal village of Boumnyebel, in the department of Nyong-et-Kellé in the maquis Bassa.
Andre-Marie Mbida was a Cameroonian statesman, a nationalist, the first Cameroonian to be elected Member of Parliament at the French National Assembly, a Prime Minister of Cameroon, the second African-born Prime Minister in Sub-Saharan Africa, the first Head of State of French-speaking autonomous Cameroon from 12 May 1957 to 16 February 1958, and the first political prisoner of independent Cameroon from 29 June 1962 to 29 June 1965.
Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP) was a pro-independence political party active in Southern Cameroons during the period of British Mandate rule.
Relations between Cameroon and Nigeria were established in 1960, the same year that each country obtained its independence. Since then, their relationship has revolved in large part around their extensive shared border, as well as the legacy of colonial arrangements under which areas of Cameroon were administered as part of British Nigeria. The countries came close to war in the 1990s in the culmination of a long-running dispute over the sovereignty of the Bakassi peninsula. In the 21st century, however, a return to conviviality has been achieved, partly because the demarcation of their border has been formalised, and partly because the Boko Haram insurgency in the Lake Chad basin has necessitated increasingly close cooperation in regional security matters.
Ernest Ouandié was a leader of the struggle for independence of Cameroon in the 1950s who continued to resist the government of President Ahmadou Ahidjo after Cameroon became independent in 1960. He was captured in 1970, tried and condemned to the death. On 15 January 1971, he was publicly executed in Bafoussam.
Castor Osendé Afana was a Marxist economist and militant nationalist who died in 1966 while fighting as a guerrilla against the government of Cameroon.
Boumnyébel is a community in Cameroon about 120 kilometres (75 mi) along the road from Yaoundé to Douala. The village is on the road from Edéa to Yaoundé, at the junction with the road from Bafia.
Abel Kingué was a political leader in the struggle for the independence of Cameroon from France.
The Cameroon War is the name of the independence struggle between Cameroon's nationalist movement and France. The movement was spearheaded by the Cameroonian Peoples Union (UPC). Even after independence, the rebellion continued, shaping contemporary politics. The war began with riots in 1955 and continued after Cameroon gained independence in 1960. Following independence, the first President of Cameroon, Ahmadou Ahidjo requested continued French military intervention to fight the UPC rebels. The UPC rebellion was largely crushed by the Cameroonian Armed Forces and French Army by 1964. This war is often forgotten because it occurred at the height of France's biggest colonial independence struggle, the Algerian War.
The Anglophone problem is a socio-political issue in the modern Republic of Cameroon, rooted in the country's German, British, and French colonial legacies. Anglophone (English-speaking) Cameroonians form a minority population of around 16 percent, mainly from the Northwest and Southwest regions that formerly constituted the Southern Cameroons, part of the former British Cameroon colonies. These Anglophone regions were formerly controlled by Britain as a mandate of the League of Nations, and then as a United Nations trust territory. During the Foumban Conference of 1961, territories with different colonial legacies were finally united into one state.
The Anglophone Crisis, an ongoing civil war between the Cameroonian state and Anglophone separatists who are trying to establish a new state called "Ambazonia", broke out due to grievances which built up within Cameroon at large and its English-speaking parts specifically over several decades.
