The history of Cameroon

Cameroon stretches from the rainforests of the Gulf of Guinea to the dry plains around Lake Chad, and its history is as varied as its landscape. The western highlands are probably where the Bantu languages first spread across half a continent; the north was drawn into the orbit of the Kanem-Bornu empire and later the Fulani emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate; and the Grassfields produced kingdoms such as Bamum, whose king invented his own script. Germany made the territory a colony in 1884, and after the First World War it was divided between France and Britain, a split that still shapes politics through the country's French- and English-speaking regions. Independent since 1960, Cameroon has had only two presidents, Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, who has ruled since 1982.

Stone tools show that people lived in the region tens of thousands of years ago. The rock shelter of Shum Laka, near Bamenda in the north-western Grassfields, was occupied for some 30,000 years, and ancient DNA recovered from children buried there around 8,000 and 3,000 years ago has given geneticists rare evidence of the deep population history of Central Africa. The earliest inhabitants of the southern forests were the ancestors of the Baka and other forest peoples, hunters and gatherers whose descendants still live in the south-east.

Linguists place the homeland of the Bantu languages in the borderlands of today's Nigeria and western Cameroon. From around 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, farming communities speaking early Bantu languages began moving south and east through the rainforest, the beginning of the Bantu expansion that eventually carried Bantu speech to East and Southern Africa. Pottery, the cultivation of yams and oil palms, and later ironworking spread with them. The country's population today speaks more than 250 languages, a diversity that reflects this long history of movement and settlement.

Around the southern shores of Lake Chad, a civilisation known to later tradition as the Sao developed walled towns along the Chari and Logone rivers. It flourished for centuries, peaking between about the 9th and 15th centuries CE, and left fine terracotta figures and bronze and copper work. The Kotoko towns of the far north regard themselves as its heirs. To the north and east rose the Kanem–Bornu Empire, a Muslim state whose cavalry raided and taxed the lands south of the lake; after long resistance, the Sao ceased to exist as a distinct culture by the 16th century as Bornu expanded.

In the Mandara mountains along the modern Nigerian border, the kingdom of Mandara, or Wandara, grew into a powerful state, alternately a rival and tributary of Bornu, and its rulers adopted Islam around the early 18th century. The many peoples of the northern hills, often called Kirdi by their Muslim neighbours, kept their own religions and fiercely defended their independence from all these states.

From the 18th century Fulani pastoralists moved into the northern plains with their cattle. In 1804 Usman dan Fodio launched the jihad in Hausaland that created the Sokoto Caliphate, and in 1809 he commissioned a scholar, Modibo Adama, to carry it east. Adama's campaigns created the Adamawa Emirate, which from 1841 had its capital at Yola, now in Nigeria, but whose territory covered much of northern Cameroon. Sub-emirates, or lamidates, were founded at Garoua, Maroua, Tibati, Banyo and Ngaoundéré, where Fulani rule was established in the 1830s. The emirates were built on slave raiding: by the late 19th century enslaved people may have made up half the population of Adamawa, and raids on the non-Muslim peoples of the plateau and the southern savanna fed both local labour and long-distance trade. The cultural imprint of the lamidates, many of whose lamido titles survive, remains strong in the north.

The cool, fertile western highlands, known as the Grassfields, supported dense populations and dozens of kingdoms and chiefdoms, many of them tracing their ruling dynasties to the Tikar of the Mbam plain. The kingdom of Bamum, according to tradition founded around 1394 by Nchare, had its capital at Foumban. In the early 19th century King Mbuembue enlarged it and beat off a Fulani attack. His successor King Ibrahim Njoya, who reigned from the 1880s until the French deposed him, built a new palace, experimented with a syncretic religion drawing on Islam and Christianity, and from around 1896 devised a script for the Bamum language, which he developed through several versions into a syllabary used for court histories, medicine and a map of the kingdom.

South of Bamum lay the Bamileke chiefdoms, more than a hundred small states each headed by a fon or chief, with secret societies, masked associations and elaborate wood carving and beadwork. North-west, kingdoms such as Nso, Bafut and Bali-Nyonga, founded by Chamba warriors who arrived in the 19th century, competed for land and trade. Royal palaces with their carved posts and thrones are among the finest monuments of African art.

On the coast, in 1472 the Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó reached the island that later bore his name and the estuary of the Wouri, which his crews named Rio dos Camarões after its swarms of prawns. The name, in its English form, eventually passed to the whole country. Portuguese, then Dutch and English, traders bought ivory and enslaved people, supplied through networks run by the Duala, who controlled access to the interior along the Wouri and its tributaries. Cameroon's coast was a secondary but significant source for the Atlantic slave trade, much of it through Portuguese and later British and Dutch ships.

In the 19th century, after Britain abolished the trade, its naval patrols signed anti-slavery treaties with the Duala rulers, notably the lineages of King Bell and King Akwa, and commerce shifted to palm oil and ivory. British Baptist missionaries, among them Alfred Saker, established missions at Douala from the 1840s and founded the town of Victoria, now Limbe, in 1858. By the 1880s German trading houses from Hamburg, notably Woermann, had become the main merchants on the Wouri.

In July 1884, days before a British consul arrived to do the same, Duala chiefs signed treaties placing their lands under German protection, and the explorer Gustav Nachtigal raised the flag on behalf of Otto von Bismarck. The German Empire recognised the colony of Kamerun in the Scramble for Africa. A revolt by rival Duala chiefs was quickly suppressed, and over the next two decades German forces pushed inland in a series of military campaigns. Many peoples resisted, among them the Bulu in the south, whose rising lasted from 1899 to 1901, and the Grassfields kingdoms of Bafut and others; some rulers, like Njoya of Bamum, chose alliance instead.

German rule, especially under Governor Jesko von Puttkamer, relied on forced labour and harsh punishment. Large plantations of cocoa, rubber and oil palm were created on the fertile slopes of Mount Cameroon, where the Bakweri people were driven from their land. Concession companies extracted rubber from the south-east with great brutality. Railways were built inland from Douala, along with roads, telegraph lines and the port, and in 1911 a Franco-German treaty added a large stretch of French Equatorial Africa, called Neukamerun. When the authorities began expelling the Duala from their riverside land in Douala in 1913 to create a European quarter, King Rudolf Duala Manga Bell protested that this violated the 1884 treaty. He was charged with treason and hanged on 8 August 1914, at the start of World War I, and became a national martyr. In the same month the Germans also executed Martin-Paul Samba, a Bulu leader.

British, French and Belgian colonial forces invaded in 1914, taking Douala in September. German troops held out in the interior until early 1916, when most withdrew into neutral Spanish Guinea and the last fort, at Mora in the north, surrendered in February.

On 28 June 1919 the territory was divided. France took about four-fifths, French Cameroun, with its capital at Yaoundé; Britain took two narrow strips along the Nigerian border, Northern and Southern Cameroons, which it governed as part of Nigeria. Both were confirmed as League of Nations mandates in 1922 and became United Nations trust territories after World War II, which meant that, in principle, they were being prepared for self-government.

The French continued forced labour, building the railway from Douala to Yaoundé at great human cost, and expanded cocoa and coffee cultivation. In August 1940 French Cameroun rallied to the Free French of Charles de Gaulle, becoming one of the first territories to do so. The British, by contrast, ruled their portion with little investment through the Nigerian administration; the Southern Cameroons, with its plantations around Mount Cameroon, developed an English-speaking elite, common-law courts and its own political parties.

In April 1948 trade unionists in Douala founded the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC), led by Ruben Um Nyobè, which demanded immediate independence and the reunification of the French and British territories. After riots in May 1955 the French administration banned the party, and in December 1956 the UPC took up arms, first among the Bassa of the Sanaga-Maritime and then in the Bamileke country. French forces fought a counter-insurgency war that included regrouping villagers into camps, burning villages and public displays of the heads of killed rebels. Um Nyobè was killed by a French army patrol on 13 September 1958. His successor, Félix-Roland Moumié, died of thallium poisoning in Geneva in 1960, an assassination widely attributed to French intelligence. The war continued after independence, with French troops assisting the new government, and the last major rebel leader, Ernest Ouandié, was captured in 1970 and executed in January 1971.

How many died is uncertain, since neither government kept reliable records. A British embassy estimate in 1964 put civilian deaths at 61,300 to 76,300, most of them in the Bamileke region; historians' estimates range from around ten thousand to several tens of thousands, and some campaigners give much higher figures. A joint French-Cameroonian historical commission reported in January 2025, and in a letter to President Biya published in August 2025, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France had waged a war against the independence movement in Cameroon between 1945 and 1971.

French Cameroun became independent on 1 January 1960 during the decolonisation of Africa, with Ahmadou Ahidjo, a Fulani politician from the north whom France favoured over the UPC, as president. In a United Nations plebiscite on 11 February 1961, Southern British Cameroons voted by about 70 per cent to join Cameroon, while the Muslim-majority Northern Cameroons voted to join Nigeria, a result Cameroon contested without success. After talks at Foumban in July 1961, the Federal Republic of Cameroon was formed on 1 October 1961, with French-speaking East Cameroon and English-speaking West Cameroon each keeping its own government.

Ahidjo concentrated power steadily. In 1966 the parties merged into his Cameroon National Union, creating a one-party state, and in May 1972 a referendum abolished the federation in favour of a unitary United Republic of Cameroon. Many Anglophones regarded this as a breach of the terms of reunification. Ahidjo maintained close ties with France and the West during the Cold War, and the country achieved steady growth, helped from 1977 by oil from offshore fields.

On 4 November 1982 Ahidjo unexpectedly resigned, and his prime minister, Paul Biya, a Catholic from the south, succeeded him. Relations between the two men soon broke down. Ahidjo went into exile, and on 6 April 1984 members of the Republican Guard loyal to the north attempted a coup, which was crushed after heavy fighting in Yaoundé. The same year the country was renamed the Republic of Cameroon. In August 1986 a cloud of carbon dioxide released from the volcanic Lake Nyos in the north-west suffocated as many as 1,800 people.

Falling oil and commodity prices brought economic crisis in the late 1980s. Under domestic and international pressure, opposition parties were legalised in December 1990, and in 1992 Biya won the first multiparty presidential election with about 40 per cent of the vote against the Anglophone opposition leader John Fru Ndi, in a result the opposition rejected. Biya won every subsequent election. In February 2008 protests over rising prices and a planned amendment to remove presidential term limits were suppressed with dozens of deaths, and the amendment passed in April. A long dispute with Nigeria over the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula was settled by the International Court of Justice in Cameroon's favour in 2002, and Nigeria handed over the territory in 2008 under the Greentree Agreement. From 2014 the Islamist group Boko Haram, based in Nigeria, carried its insurgency into the Far North, killing and abducting civilians and drawing Cameroon into a regional military campaign.

In October 2016 lawyers and teachers in the English-speaking North-West and South-West regions went on strike against the appointment of French-speaking judges and teachers and the erosion of the common-law and English-language education systems. Protests spread, and the government responded with arrests and a months-long internet shutdown in 2017. Supporters of the government and of the protesters disagree sharply about the causes: Anglophone activists describe decades of marginalisation since the end of the federation, while the government insists on the unity of the state and says it has addressed grievances through decentralisation and, after a national dialogue in 2019, a special status for the two regions.

On 1 October 2017 separatists declared the independence of "Ambazonia", and armed groups began attacking security forces; the government declared war on them in December 2017. In 2018 separatist leaders including Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe were detained in Nigeria and handed over to Cameroon, and in 2019 a military tribunal sentenced them to life imprisonment. Human rights organisations have documented abuses by both sides: security forces have been accused of burning villages and killing civilians, as in the Ngarbuh massacre of February 2020, while separatist fighters have been accused of kidnappings, attacks on schools and killings of civilians, including the Kumba school attack of October 2020, for which responsibility was disputed. By early 2023 more than 6,000 civilians had been killed, and hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced inside the country or had fled to Nigeria. Attempts at mediation, including Swiss-facilitated contacts in 2019, made little progress, and by 2025 observers described the conflict as a stalemate.

Biya, born in 1933, stood again in the presidential election of 12 October 2025. The Constitutional Council declared him the winner with 53.7 per cent of the vote against 35.2 per cent for Issa Tchiroma Bakary, a former minister who claimed that he had in fact won. Protests followed in several cities; authorities reported 16 deaths and opposition groups many more, and hundreds of people were arrested. Biya was sworn in for a new seven-year term on 6 November 2025, while Tchiroma left for exile, continuing to call himself the rightful president. The Anglophone conflict and Boko Haram attacks in the north continue, and the question of succession to the world's oldest serving head of state hangs over the country's politics.