Cameroun¹

How is the land laid out?

Cameroon divides into three pieces. The southernmost consists of a small coastal plain and a forested interior plateau. In a broken line from the coast near Nigeria northeastward are mountains and massif, most spectacularly at the volcano with the nation's name, which tops 4000 meters. North of the massif the land falls toward Lake Tchad,² with forest fading to scrub and grassland. Some rivers flow north to the lake, such as the Lagone and Chari that form pieces of the northeast frontier. The Benoue³ and Cross systems flow westward to Nigeria draining the north side of the central massif, as well as the Adamaoua Mountains and the southwestern volcanos. Rivers like the Sanaga drain the south into the Gulf of Guinea. The southeast is drained by the Sangha system, flowing into the Central Africaine⁴ Republic and the Republic of the Congo.⁵

There is one UNESCO World Heritage Site: the Dja Faunal Reserve. Tourists visit Mile Six Beach, Mount Cameroun and Korup and Waza national parks.

Map

Who lives there?

More than one in five Cameroonians speak Beti⁶ as a first language and about seven percent Fulfulde.⁷ (Beti belongs to the Yaounde-Fang group which accounts for almost one in three Cameroonians. This group in turn is part of the Narrow Bantu A group which accounts for 42 percent of Cameroonians. Narrow Bantu A is part of the Southern Bantoid Group which accounts for nearly three in four Cameroonians.) There are five lingua francas: Français⁸ throughout all of the former French colony; English throughout the former English colony; and Kamtok, a pidgin English,⁹ spoken mostly where English is spoken but somewhat nationally; Fulfulde, with five million second language speakers; and Bulu, a form of Beti spoken in the center of the south by about one in twenty of the nation's people.

More than half of the country is Christian: one in three or so Roman Catholic, and the rest Protestant. Moslems are more than one in five, and the remaining 26 percent follow local religions.

Douala, and the capital, Yaounde are the only two cities with over a million people. Other cities of note include: Bamenda, Kribi and Limbe.

A major suburb of N'Djamena, Chad's capital, is located in the narrow neck of far northern Cameroon.

Kribi is a coastal resort, and tourists like Limbe for its botanical garden and Bamenda for its ring road.

Who was there before?

The Bantoid language group¹⁰ started in the area that is now southwestern Cameroon and southeastern Nigeria. The Cross River language group also arose in this area. The Bantoid group gave rise to the Grassfield language group and to Proto-Bantu by about 4000 years ago, both located in southwestern Cameroon. From that time to 300 C.E., these dialects spread along river valleys through the interior rainforests of central Africa, and numerous languages are their descendents: for example, the forms of Beti that have been spoken in inland Cameroon for over 500 years.

The relative strength of the various language shifted after Europeans arrived. Bulu was favored by American Presbyterian Christian missionaries, Fang by Catholics and Ewondo¹¹ by the German colonial administration.¹² Another Bantu language, Duala, was a very important lingua franca when the city of Douala was a major slave port. Swiss German missionaires continued to promote that language after the slave trade ended but the German colonial administrators unofficially favored pidgin English (Kamtok).

Two former lingua francas belong to the Adamawa-Ubangi language group. One was Mbum, until it was gradually replaced by Fulfulde in recent centuries; and another, Gbaya, primarily on both sides of what is now the border with the Central African Republic, but also in places further north where Gbaya-speaking slaves were transported.

European languages and religions arrived starting in the 19th century. Français attained its predominance after the defeat of Deutschland¹³ in World War I. Islam became important in the same century due to the missionary efforts of Adama, after whom the mountains are named.

Hills of northern Cameroun (Cameroon)

Around the Area

north
east, from the north
east, from the south
southeast
south, from the southwest
southwest
west

Footnotes

1. Cameroon in English, which is also an official language.
2. Chad in English. It was Africa's third largest lake before it started shrinking.
3. Benue in English.
4. African in English.
5. Brazzaville Congo.
6. Here I mean the collection of Fang, Ewonde, Bulu, Eton and Mengisa. These are sometimes considered separate languages, and Beti is sometimes merely a name for a dialect.
7. The language of the Fulani. First language speakers are mostly near the Adamaoua (Adamawa) Mountains.
8. French in English.
9. It has a growing number of first language speakers, especially in coastal cities; thus it is becoming a creole. There are about two million second language speakers.
10. Part of the bigger Benue-Congo group.
11. Yaounde in French; Jaunde in German.
12. A German (Deutsch) pidgin once existed as well.
13. Germany in English.