This is the script for my video posted on August 10, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Cameroon is often described as a former French colony with a substantial English-speaking minority. But that’s not completely true. It was a German colony before being split between France and Britain. And while the Anglophone divide has produced real conflict, it is a misconception that the fight between English and French speakers is the source of the country's problems. In fact, Cameroon is a country full of misconceptions. So how are Cameroon’s geopolitical dynamics misunderstood?
Cameroon is sometimes described as Africa in miniature because it contains most of the continent’s biomes, from equatorial rainforest in the south to active volcanos to the semi-arid Sahel in the far north to temperate plateaus to coastal lowlands. This terrain maps directly onto the country’s social and political fault lines.
Before colonial powers moved in, northern Cameroon was shaped by Islamic influence from the Kanem-Bornu empire and, by the early 19th century, a jihad conducted by Fulani clerics under the Sokoto Caliphate that created the Adamawa Emirate. The emirate’s traditional Lamibe rulers remain power brokers in the country today.
Meanwhile, the grasslands produced the centralized Bamoun Sultanate and the Bamileke chiefdoms, and the coast was dominated by ethnic Duala trading houses on the Wouri estuary, whose kings brokered with Europeans.
The European scramble for Africa was already underway by the mid 1880s. In July 1884, months before the Berlin Conference even convened, Germany signed treaties with the Duala kings, claimed the territory, and set about building a brutal plantation economy on forced labor.
But after Germany’s defeat in WWI, about four fifths of the territory was given to France, while a western sliver was given to Britain, both under League of Nations mandates and later UN trust territories. This created the Anglophone/Francophone divide we see today.
In 1948 though, the Union des Populations du Cameroun, or UPC, was formed to demand rapid independence and reunification. France banned it in 1955 and drove it underground, but this sparked an insurgency.
To respond, French forces used tactics they’d developed in French Indochina and Algeria like razing villages, forcibly resettling people, and aggressive aerial bombardment campaigns. The exact death toll is unknown and genuinely disputed, with estimates running from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand.
Despite all this, Cameroon gained independence in 1960 under a northern Fulani named Ahmadou Ahidjo who was backed by the French government. A UN-run plebiscite the following year saw British northerners vote to join Nigeria while British southerners went to Cameroon, with the expectation that they would be treated as equal partners in negotiating a genuinely federal constitution. Instead, Ahidjo brought forward a pre-drafted document for a centralized Francophone government.
Then in 1972, Ahidjo abolished the federation completely via referendum on an obviously illegitimate official result of 99.99% in favor, trapping Anglophone Cameroonians in a state built without their involvement.
Ahidjo handed power to his prime minister, Paul Biya, in 1982. This was Cameroon's only peaceful transfer of presidential power. But in 1984, the Republican Guard, which was made up largely of Ahidjo loyalists from the north, initiated a bloody coup attempt.
Biya crushed it and used it to shift the center of power from the Fulani north toward his own Beti community in the center and the south. That same year, he dropped the word United from the country's name, reverting to the Republic of Cameroon, the exact name the formerly French state had used at independence. To many Anglophones, that erased the union itself.
Meanwhile, since 2016, Anglophone Cameroonians have openly protested the imposition of Francophone civil law and language norms on common law courts and English-speaking schools. Government crackdowns, internet disruptions, and mass arrests radicalized the movement, and in 2017 Anglophone separatists declared the breakaway state of Ambazonia in the northwestern and southwestern regions. It didn’t take long for armed conflict to break out.
Nonetheless, the group’s leader and about 46 others were seized in Abuja in 2018 and handed over to Cameroon, where many were given life sentences. A Nigerian court later ruled the transfer an illegal rendition, not an extradition. Though the Cameroonian Supreme Court eventually overturned the life sentences, the damage was done. The event fractured the movement into competing factions, and conflict is at a stalemate today.
The country faces a demographic crunch as well. Its population of about 30 million has a median age of just 18, and about 42% of people are under the age of 15. Combined with rapid urbanization, that youth bulge carries serious economic risk unless Cameroon can generate jobs and schooling fast enough.
Since 2009, spillover from Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency in the far north has also spawned civilian vigilante communities and a multinational joint task force that Cameroon participates in, though the task force has faced internal issues and has struggled to counter militant forces.
The insurgency is inseparable from the ecological decline of Lake Chad, whose surface area fell by roughly 90% between the 1960s and the 1980s. It has partially stabilized since the 1990s, but that shrinkage had already destroyed fishing and farming livelihoods across the basin, leaving a lasting effect.
On top of its own roughly 1m displaced people, Cameroon hosts around 425k refugees, about two thirds of which are from the Central African Republic. Most of the rest are from Nigeria.
The CAR sits directly on Cameroon's eastern flank and hosts a substantial presence from Russia’s Africa Corps, which has evolved from the paramilitary Wagner Group, meaning that the Cameroonian government has to be incredibly wary of overflow from that side too.
Russia isn’t alone in its regional influence though. France remains a major economic and, until recently, military partner to Cameroon, and its recent acknowledgement of its historical repressive violence is an attempt to keep the relationship from rupturing the way it has in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, all of which expelled French forces.
China is Cameroon’s biggest creditor though, holding about 65% of the country’s bilateral debt and over 22% of its total external debt. This has kept the country afloat amid a declining oil industry. China also financed the construction of a new deep water port at Kribi, in collaboration with Biya’s regime.
The thing is, Biya was born in 1933, making him the world’s oldest head of state, but he refuses to leave power.
The presidential election in October 2025 was neither free nor fair and showed him winning with over 53% against his former ally Issa Tchiroma Bakary, but Tchiroma, who had defected, declared himself the winner, sparking massive protests and a lethal government crackdown. Tchiroma fled into northern Nigeria and then The Gambia.
Then in April 2026 the constitutional picture changed. The Cameroonian parliament overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment signed by Biya to create a new role of a vice president. Biya can appoint or dismiss this person at will, but the vice president would automatically finish his term if Biya died or became incapacitated. This replaced a system in which the Senate president could take over and organize fresh elections within 20 to 120 days of the same. Many have called this change a constitutional coup aiming at some kind of dynastic succession, possibly to Biya’s son Franck.
But just weeks later, Biya made his last public appearance on Cameroon’s National Day before departing for Switzerland, and he has not returned. The government insists he is alive and simply working remotely, and the vice president position remains empty, though a fake one was widely circulated in April claiming Biya’s son was appointed.
On 3 August 2026 from Geneva, Biya signed a major military reshuffle, promoting loyal generals seemingly to maintain power while he’s away.
Cameroon's problems are structural. Very different ethnic groups speaking different languages with different needs occupy the same country, and national cohesion was never fully consolidated at the constitutional level. Many analysts argue genuine federalism or deep decentralization is the most plausible way out. But Biya has resisted this, and separatists increasingly demand outright independence rather than federalism. Instead, Biya has built a fragile system of bargains with specific groups, and that system of personal rule, counterbalancing of elites, and frequent military reshuffles has made Cameroon genuinely resistant to the coups that have hit many other countries in the region. But it has also repeatedly deferred resolution of the foundational structural problems that prevent Cameroon from being truly prosperous.
Keep reading
- Why is Nigeria’s security so fragmented?
- Why is The Gambia surrounded by Senegal?
- Why does Uganda’s military decide who rules the country?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.