British Cameroons

Two disconnected strips of a German colony, administered from Nigeria and then split between two countries by a single vote. Britain received about a fifth of German Kamerun in the 1916 partition, a long narrow band along the Nigerian border in two pieces, and governed it as part of Nigeria rather than as a separate territory - which meant it got Nigerian administration, Nigerian courts and Nigerian officials for four decades while formally being a League mandate and then a UN trust territory. Southern Cameroons developed a distinct English-speaking, common-law identity and a real grievance about Igbo commercial dominance in its towns. Northern Cameroons, Muslim and Fulani-influenced, was closely tied to the Nigerian emirates. When independence approached the UN put the question to plebiscite in February 1961 with only two options on the ballot: join Nigeria or join Cameroun. Independence as a separate state was not offered, a decision still bitterly resented. The north voted for Nigeria, the south for Cameroun, and the territory was divided. The federal arrangement promised to Southern Cameroons was dismantled by 1972, and the anglophone grievance that produced became an armed separatist conflict from 2016. Buea and Bamenda are its principal towns. The two strips together covered about eighty-eight thousand square kilometres. Mount Cameroon, the region's volcano, is the highest point in west Africa. Buea had been the German colonial capital. The plebiscite turnout was high in both halves. Northern Cameroons is now part of Nigeria's Adamawa and Taraba states. The separatist movement calls the southern territory Ambazonia, after the Ambas bay on its coast.

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