Cameroon

The territory that now constitutes Cameroon has been inhabited for thousands of years, with archaeological evidence suggesting that some of the earliest occupants were ancestral Baka and other forest peoples of the equatorial belt. The grasslands and forests of the region are widely associated with the Bantu expansion, and many linguists place the original Bantu homeland in the highlands along the present Cameroon and Nigeria border, from which agricultural, iron-working populations dispersed across central, eastern, and southern Africa over several millennia. By the medieval period the northern savanna was drawn into the orbit of the Sahelian states, including the Kanem and later Bornu empires around Lake Chad, while the central highlands and forest zones developed a mosaic of chieftaincies and kingdoms such as the Bamum, the Bamileke fondoms, the Tikar polities, and the coastal Duala trading communities.

European contact began in 1472, when Portuguese navigators reached the estuary of the Wouri River and named it Rio dos Camarões, "river of prawns," from which the modern name derives. For the next four centuries the coast was a node of Atlantic commerce, exporting ivory, palm oil, and enslaved people, while the interior remained outside European control. In the early nineteenth century the Fulani jihad of Usman dan Fodio extended the Sokoto Caliphate's authority over much of the north through the Adamawa Emirate. Formal colonisation arrived in 1884, when the German Empire signed treaties with Duala chiefs and proclaimed the protectorate of Kamerun, gradually pushing inland and consolidating a single colonial territory by the early twentieth century.

German rule ended during the First World War, when British and French forces occupied Kamerun in a campaign concluded in 1916. The territory was partitioned under League of Nations mandates in 1922, with France administering roughly four-fifths of the area as Cameroun and Britain governing two narrow strips, Northern and Southern Cameroons, attached administratively to Nigeria. After the Second World War both became United Nations trust territories. French Cameroun moved toward independence amid the armed insurgency of the Union des Populations du Cameroun, and achieved sovereignty on 1 January 1960 under President Ahmadou Ahidjo. A plebiscite in 1961 led Southern Cameroons to join the new state, forming the Federal Republic of Cameroon, while Northern Cameroons opted for Nigeria.

Ahidjo consolidated a centralised single-party regime, abolishing the federation in 1972 in favour of a unitary United Republic of Cameroon. He resigned in 1982 and was succeeded by his prime minister, Paul Biya, who renamed the country the Republic of Cameroon in 1984 and survived a failed coup the same year. Multiparty competition was reintroduced in 1990 under domestic and international pressure, and Biya won successive presidential elections from 1992 onward, with constitutional revisions in 1996 and 2008 reshaping institutions and removing term limits. The post-Cold War period also saw Cameroon settle the Bakassi peninsula dispute with Nigeria through the International Court of Justice, with the territory transferred in 2008.

Since the mid-2010s the country has confronted Boko Haram insurgency in the Far North and a separatist conflict in the two Anglophone regions, the Northwest and Southwest, where armed groups have sought independence as Ambazonia. Cameroon today is a unitary presidential republic with a bicameral parliament, a member of the African Union, the Commonwealth, and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, governed under the constitution of 1972 as amended.