Cameroon
Capital: Yaoundé · Central Africa
'Africa in miniature' — Sahelian sultanates, Grassfields kingdoms with beaded thrones, coastal Sawa cultures and Baka forest knowledge in one country.
Ethnic communities
- Bamiléké & BamounGrassfields kingdoms; Bamoun script invented by Sultan Njoya
- Fulbe & KirdiNorthern sultanates (Adamawa) and mountain peoples of Mandara
- Beti-Pahuin (Fang-Beti)Forest lineage societies of the center-south
- Duala & SawaCoastal traders; Ngondo water festival
- BakaForest people with celebrated polyphonic music
More communities of Cameroon
- Bamiléké · Grassfields kingdoms of beaded thrones and enterprise
- Bamoun · Njoya's script-inventing sultanate at Foumban
- Fulbe (Adamawa) · Northern emirate herders (full profile: Fulani)
- Beti (Ewondo) · Center-south forest lineages of Yaoundé
- Bulu & Fang · Southern forest kin of mvet epic
- Duala · Coastal trade dynasties of the Ngondo festival
- Bassa · Forest farmers between coast and center
- Bakweri · Mount Cameroon's slope farmers
- Tikar · Plateau kingdoms famed in diaspora genealogy
- Nso, Kom & Bafut · Grassfields palace kingdoms of the northwest
- Kirdi peoples (Mafa, Kapsiki) · Mandara mountain terrace cultures
- Kotoko · Chad-basin city-states of Sao heritage
- Shuwa Arabs · Cattle Arabs of the far north
- Gbaya & Mbum · Adamawa plateau farming peoples
- Maka & Njem · Southeastern forest communities
Languages
Major languages: French, English, Fulfulde, Ewondo, Duala, Ghomala'
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu, Grassfields); Afro-Asiatic (Chadic); Nilo-Saharan
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Bamoun (Bamum) Kingdom
- • Bamiléké chefferies
- • Adamawa Emirate
- • Kotoko city-states
Heritage sites
- • Bamoun palace of Foumban
- • Grassfields royal architecture
- • Dja Faunal Reserve
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Cameroon
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Sportb. 1976
Françoise Mbango Etone
Triple jump
Cameroon's first Olympic champion in athletics, winning triple jump gold in Athens in 2004 and again in Beijing in 2008.
- Music & the arts1933–2020
Manu Dibango
Afro-jazz
Saxophonist whose 1972 Soul Makossa is credited as an ancestor of disco and one of the most sampled African records ever made.
- Sportb. 1952
Roger Milla
Football
Danced at the corner flag through Italia 90 as Cameroon became the first African side to reach a World Cup quarter-final, aged 38.
- Politics & liberation1913–1958
Ruben Um Nyobè
Independence
Secretary-general of the UPC who took Cameroon's case for independence to the United Nations. Killed by French forces in 1958.
- Sportb. 1981
Samuel Eto'o
Football
Four-time African Footballer of the Year, twice a Champions League winner and record scorer at the Africa Cup of Nations.
- Science, business & activism1926–2011
Victor Anomah Ngu
Oncology and immunology
Surgeon whose work on chemotherapy for Burkitt lymphoma produced some of the first documented cures of a human cancer by drugs alone.
Deep-dive community profiles
Baka
Forest hunter-gatherers of the western Congo basin — whose yelli and water-drumming polyphonies are among the world's most admired music, whose Jengi forest spirit governs the hunt, and whose land rights are among Africa's most contested.
Open deep profile →Bakossi
Farmers of the Bakossi mountains and the Muanenguba crater lakes in south-western Cameroon, whose forest holds more plant species than any comparable area in tropical Africa, and whose twin lakes are a shrine.
Open deep profile →Bakweri
The people of Mount Cameroon — farmers on the slopes of Africa's most active volcano, whose ancestral land became German plantations and then a state corporation, and whose century-long claim to it has never been settled.
Open deep profile →Bamileke
The dynamic chiefdom civilization of Cameroon's western Grassfields — beaded elephant masks, towering bamboo palaces, sacred forests and a famed entrepreneurial spirit rooted in tontine savings circles and ancestral skulls kept close to home.
Open deep profile →Bamoun (Bamum)
The kingdom that wrote itself — Sultan Njoya invented an original script, drew maps and chronicles, founded schools and a new religion, and built Foumban's palace into one of Africa's great courts, still reigning in its twentieth generation.
Open deep profile →Banen
Farmers of the Mbam valley in Cameroon's Littoral and Centre, whose territory the colonial state emptied in the 1950s for the Nachtigal and Mbam reserves, and who were among the communities most heavily involved in the UPC insurgency.
Open deep profile →Beti (Ewondo & Bulu)
The people of Cameroon's southern plateau and its capital — Ewondo, Bulu and Eton communities whose mvet epics, bikutsi rhythm and cocoa farms shaped the nation's centre, politics and popular music.
Open deep profile →Bisio (Bujeba)
A small forest people of the Río Muni interior — squeezed between the Fang who arrived from the north-east and the Ndowe on the coast, holding a language spoken by a few thousand and a body of forest knowledge that goes with it.
Open deep profile →Buduma (Yedina)
Island people of Lake Chad, herders of the amphibious kuri cattle and builders of papyrus boats, whose lake shrank by nine-tenths within a generation and whose islands became the base of an insurgency.
Open deep profile →Bulu
Beti-Fang forest people of Cameroon's south, cocoa growers whose language the American Presbyterian mission made the written vehicle of the whole region, and the community from which the country's first president came.
Open deep profile →Duala
The estuary traders who gave Cameroon its port and its name — middlemen kings of the Wouri whose Ngondo water-festival honours the Jengu spirits, and whose 1884 treaty and 1914 martyrdom shaped a nation's history.
Open deep profile →Efik
The traders of Old Calabar — a Cross River people whose Ekpe leopard society governed the port, whose nsibidi ideographs crossed the Atlantic into Cuba, and whose kings' letters are among West Africa's earliest surviving African-written records.
Open deep profile →Equatoguinean Exiles
The third of the country that fled — Equatoguineans who left during the Macías years, when schools closed, the word intellectual became an accusation and the president declared himself the country's only miracle, and whose descendants live in Spain, Gabon and Cameroon.
Open deep profile →Fang
The forest people of the mvet epic and byeri ancestor reliquaries — whose migrations across the equatorial rainforest, guardian sculptures that transfixed Picasso's generation, and harp-zither bards made them Central Africa's great epic civilization.
Open deep profile →Fulani (Fulbe)
The great pastoral nation of the Sahel — some 40 million people scattered from Senegal to Sudan, keepers of the pulaaku ethical code, founders of Islamic reform states, and among them the Wodaabe, whose Gerewol beauty festival is world-famous.
Open deep profile →Gbaya
The savanna-forest farmers of the CAR's west — whose Karnu prophet led the great Kongo-Wara rebellion against French rule, and whose hunting societies, initiation dances and sanza thumb-pianos hold the country's largest people together.
Open deep profile →Kanuri
The imperial people of the Lake Chad basin — heirs of Kanem-Bornu, a Muslim state that lasted a thousand years, whose sultans corresponded with Istanbul and whose scholars, saddled cavalry and desert trade routes linked the Sahara to the savanna.
Open deep profile →Kapsiki (Higi)
Farmers and smiths of the Mandara mountains' volcanic plugs, whose blacksmith caste holds funerary, medical and divinatory monopoly, and whose landscape of basalt spires is Cameroon's most photographed.
Open deep profile →Kare (Kari)
Savannah farmers of the Ouham and the Cameroonian border whose villages lay on the route of the nineteenth-century slave raids from Wadai and Bagirmi, and whose region became the French concession companies' cotton and rubber ground.
Open deep profile →Kotoko
City builders of the Chari and Logone floodplain, heirs to the Sao whose walled towns and terracotta heads are among the Chad basin's oldest urban record, and rulers of small sultanates that predate Bornu.
Open deep profile →Mafa
The terrace builders of the Mandara mountains — one of the montagnard peoples who refused Islam and the Fulani jihad, who turned bare rock into some of Africa's most intensive agriculture, and whose villages became a front line against Boko Haram.
Open deep profile →Maka (Makaa)
Forest farmers of Cameroon's east around Abong-Mbang, whose villages line the road to the Central African Republic, and whose forest is the country's largest timber concession zone and the home of the Baka.
Open deep profile →Massa (Masa)
Fishers and cattle keepers of the Logone's banks, whose guru-walla fattening seclusion is the most extreme in Africa and whose floodplain fishery is among the continent's most productive.
Open deep profile →Mbororo of the Central African Republic
The cattle nomads of the savanna — Fulani herders who moved into the Central African Republic in the twentieth century, whose herds were the country's largest export, and who were driven out or killed in tens of thousands after 2013.
Open deep profile →Mbum
Farmers and ironworkers of the Adamawa plateau's eastern edge, whose chiefdoms were broken by the nineteenth-century Fulani jihad and whose territory spans three countries at the point where the Chari and the Sanaga rise.
Open deep profile →Mundang
Farmers of the Mayo-Kebbi whose sacred kingship at Léré required the ruler to be hidden from ordinary sight, and whose country holds a lake with one of Africa's last populations of West African manatee.
Open deep profile →Shuwa Arabs (Baggara of the Chad basin)
Cattle Arabs of the Lake Chad basin whose ancestors crossed the Sahel from the Nile a thousand years ago, whose dialect is the westernmost Arabic in the world, and who make up a large part of Chad's population and its army.
Open deep profile →Tikar
The 'mother-people' of the Cameroon Grassfields — savanna migrants whose dynasties are claimed as founders by many Grassfields and Bamileke chiefdoms, keepers of the tumbu drum-dances, brass-casting and the sacred kingship of Bankim and Nditam.
Open deep profile →Tupuri
Cattle-keeping farmers of the Cameroon-Chad border plain whose gurna fattening retreat sends young men into seclusion to drink milk for months, and whose harvest dances draw thousands across an international boundary.
Open deep profile →Wodaabe
The cattle nomads of the southern Sahara's edge — a Fulani group who kept the older pastoral life when others settled, and whose Guerewol festival has men in ochre and white paint dancing for hours to be judged on beauty by women.
Open deep profile →