Cameroon

Cameroon is often called Africa in miniature. Mount Cameroon, an active volcano, rises from the sea near Limbe, and Debundscha, at its seaward foot, is drenched for most of the year. The south is equatorial forest; the centre climbs onto the Adamawa Plateau; and the north opens into savannah and the Mandara Mountains before flattening towards Lake Chad. In August 1986 Lake Nyos, a crater lake in the western highlands, released a cloud of carbon dioxide that killed people and cattle below.

Linguists place the cradle of the Bantu languages in the grasslands of western Cameroon. In 1472 Portuguese sailors named the Wouri estuary Rio dos Camarões, the river of prawns, and the name passed to the whole country. Fulani led by Modibo Adama founded the emirate of Adamawa in the nineteenth century. Germany claimed Kamerun in 1884; French and British forces took it in 1916 and divided it. French Cameroun won independence in January 1960, and the southern British part joined it in 1961.

At Foumban, Sultan Njoya devised a script for the Bamum language around 1900. Makossa dance music went worldwide with Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa in 1972, and Roger Milla’s dance at the corner flag in the 1990 World Cup made the Indomitable Lions famous. Cocoa, coffee, bananas and timber come from the south, cotton from the north and oil from offshore, and the port of Douala handles much of the trade of Chad and the Central African Republic.