Cameroon

A country assembled from a German colony split between two victors, still arguing about the seam. Germany held Kamerun from 1884 until Allied forces took it in 1916, and the League of Nations divided it, giving France roughly four-fifths and Britain two narrow strips administered from Nigeria. That division created two legal and educational systems - civil law and French in the east, common law and English in the west - inside one eventual country. The Union des Populations du Cameroun demanded independence and reunification from 1948; France banned it in 1955 and the war that followed in the Bassa and Bamileke regions was among the least reported and most violent of the decolonisation conflicts, continuing into the mid-1960s after independence in 1960. Southern Cameroons voted to join in 1961 on a promise of federation that was dismantled by 1972, and the anglophone grievance that produced became an armed separatist conflict from 2016. Ahmadou Ahidjo governed until 1982 and Paul Biya has governed since, one of the longest tenures anywhere. The country is sometimes called Africa in miniature for its range of landscapes, from Sahel to rainforest to volcanic highland. Yaounde is the capital and Douala the port. Cocoa and oil are the main exports. The country has about twenty-nine million people and around two hundred and fifty languages. French and English are both official. Mount Cameroon is the highest point in west Africa and an active volcano. Lake Nyos released a cloud of carbon dioxide in 1986 that killed some seventeen hundred people. Its football team is nicknamed the Indomitable Lions.

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