French Cameroun

A mandate rather than a colony, which changed less in practice than in law. Germany had held Kamerun since 1884; Allied forces took it in 1916, and the League of Nations divided it in 1922, giving France roughly four-fifths and Britain two narrow strips along the Nigerian border. France administered its share as part of the Equatorial African system, with the same forced labour and indigénat, while formally answerable to Geneva and later to the United Nations Trusteeship Council for a territory it did not own. That supervision mattered: it gave Cameroonian nationalists a forum outside the empire, and petitions to the UN became a standard tactic. The Union des Populations du Cameroun, founded in 1948 and led by Ruben Um Nyobè, used it relentlessly, demanding both independence and reunification with the British portion. France banned the party in 1955, and the war that followed in the Bassa and Bamileke regions was one of the least reported and most violent of the decolonisation conflicts. Um Nyobè was killed in 1958. Independence came on 1 January 1960, several months before most of French Africa, with the fighting still going on and French troops still involved - it continued into the mid-1960s under the new government. The southern British strip voted to join in 1961 and the northern to join Nigeria, producing the bilingual state whose anglophone grievances remain unresolved. Yaoundé, chosen by the Germans as an inland station, remained the capital. Douala stayed the commercial centre and main port. The UPC was legalised again only in 1991. Um Nyobè's grave was concealed for decades.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration