Cameroon

Cameroon exists because European diplomats drew a line through Africa in 1919—and because a 92-year-old president has ruled since 1982 without naming a successor. The country is a colonial chimera, stitched together from German territory divided between France and Britain after World War I, its Anglophone and Francophone populations now locked in a conflict that has killed over 6,500 since 2016.

Before Germany declared Kamerun a colony in 1884, the region contained dozens of independent kingdoms and chieftaincies. German administration unified these territories with a capital first at Buea, then Yaoundé, extracting timber and establishing cocoa plantations. World War I brought British invasion from Nigeria, and Germany's last fort surrendered in February 1916. At Versailles, Georges Picot—the same diplomat who partitioned the Middle East—drew an arbitrary line giving France 430,000 km² and Britain just 88,000 km², splitting ethnic communities like the Mbo and the Elung clans along what remains today as the Francophone-Anglophone divide.

French Cameroun gained independence on January 1, 1960. British Southern Cameroons faced a 1961 referendum offering only two choices: join Nigeria or join Cameroun. Total independence was not on the ballot. Southern Cameroons voted to join Cameroun, forming a federation that President Ahmadou Ahidjo replaced with a unitary state in 1972. His successor Paul Biya took power in 1982 and has never let go. In 2016, when Francophone-majority courts sent French-speaking judges to Anglophone regions that had retained British common law, lawyers and teachers protested. The government's violent suppression sparked the Ambazonia separatist movement. Nearly a decade later, 700,000 remain displaced.

Today Cameroon's economy runs on oil, cocoa, and timber—a resource trifecta that funds the patronage networks keeping Biya in power. GDP reached $51.3 billion in 2024 with growth around 4%, but oil production is declining while the country remains Africa's fifth-largest cocoa producer at 307,000 tons annually. Over 40% of the population works in agriculture, where elevated cocoa prices provide some relief. Fifteen new mining projects are planned through 2027, and the Nachtigal hydroelectric plant came online in early 2025, but these developments benefit Francophone regions disproportionately, deepening Anglophone grievances.

Biya, now 92, is running for an eighth term in October 2025 elections. He has no public succession plan, no vice president with real power, and a ruling party (CPDM) built entirely around personal loyalty. This is a biological system where the organism cannot reproduce—where all authority flows through a single aging node with no backup. The opposition demands expanded political freedoms and electoral transparency but faces systematic marginalization. International observers expect protests; the only question is whether security forces can contain them.

By 2026, Cameroon will likely face one of three scenarios: continued Biya rule with intensifying repression, a palace transition to a handpicked successor provoking succession disputes, or Biya's death triggering a power vacuum. The Anglophone conflict will simmer regardless, because it addresses a structural flaw from 1919 that no amount of military force can resolve. Like a chimera organism where genetically distinct tissues coexist uneasily, Cameroon's colonial partition created a country whose internal borders run through ethnic communities, legal systems, and languages—a wound that Versailles opened and no one has managed to close.