Before the Europeans
The north was drawn into the great Sahelian systems — the reach of Kanem-Bornu, and later the Fulani jihad states of the early nineteenth century that pushed Islam and the Fulani aristocracy south. The forest south held decentralised farming and trading peoples, and the coast around the Wouri estuary was long a hub, its Duala traders acting as middlemen between the interior and European ships.
The name itself comes from the Portuguese Rio dos Camarões, "river of prawns", for the estuary's shrimp. That coastal window into a huge, varied interior is the country in one image.
German, then French and British
Germany claimed Kamerun in 1884 and held it for three decades, building plantations and railways with forced labour. When Germany lost the First World War, the League of Nations split the territory between France, which took about four-fifths, and Britain, which took two strips along the Nigerian border and governed them as part of Nigeria.
That partition is the root of everything that followed. Two colonial powers, two languages, two legal and school systems, imposed on peoples who had often been one before. When independence came, the country had to be reassembled across that line.
Reunification and one long rule
French Cameroun became independent on 1 January 1960 under Ahmadou Ahidjo. In 1961 the British Southern Cameroons voted in a UN plebiscite to join it (the Northern Cameroons chose Nigeria), creating a federal, bilingual state. The struggle for independence had already been bloody: the nationalist UPC movement was crushed by France in a war that killed many thousands and is still barely acknowledged.
Ahidjo ruled until 1982, then handed power to his prime minister, Paul Biya — who has held it ever since. Biya centralised the federation into a unitary state, survived a coup attempt, and became one of the world's longest-serving heads of state, governing well into his nineties and often from abroad.
The Anglophone crisis and a contested vote
The old colonial seam tore open again from 2016, when protests by English-speaking lawyers and teachers against their marginalisation were met with force. The confrontation escalated into an armed separatist campaign for a state called "Ambazonia" in the two Anglophone regions; thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands displaced, and schools disrupted for years. In the far north, Boko Haram spilling over from Nigeria has brought a second front.
The October 2025 presidential election returned Biya, then in his nineties, to office for another term. The result was disputed by opposition figures, and the count and the protests around it were contested; independent verification of the details is limited. The underlying question — whether a state built across a colonial fault line can be governed as one, and by whom after Biya — remains open.