Yaoundé
Francophone capital centralising all power while Anglophone regions fight for autonomy — 900,000 displaced since 2016, a trophic cascade where centralisation destabilises the periphery.
Cameroon's Anglophone crisis has displaced over 900,000 people and killed thousands since 2016, and the violence is now reaching Yaounde. The Francophone capital — political seat of a country that is 80% French-speaking — concentrates power, resources, and federal investment while two English-speaking regions on the western border demand autonomy or independence.
The crisis is a direct product of political geography. Britain and France carved Cameroon into two colonial zones after World War I. At independence in 1960, French Cameroon became a republic; British Southern Cameroons joined it in 1961 as a federation. In 1972, President Ahmadou Ahidjo abolished the federal system and centralised all governance in Yaounde. English-speaking lawyers and teachers launched peaceful protests in 2016 when Francophone judges were posted to Anglophone courts. The government's military response transformed a professional grievance into an armed separatist movement.
Cameroon abolished its federal system in 1972, centralising everything in Francophone Yaounde — and the English-speaking regions spent 44 years absorbing the structural grievance before it exploded.
Yaounde's metro population exceeds 4.8 million, making it one of Central Africa's largest cities. The capital functions as a spider at the centre of a web: all administrative, military, and economic threads run through it, ensuring that the Anglophone periphery cannot develop independent institutional capacity. Federal ministries, diplomatic missions, and international organisations cluster in Yaounde, creating a resource concentration that the English-speaking regions view as extraction.
The biological mechanism is trophic cascades: centralising resources in one node destabilises the periphery. Each investment in Yaounde's infrastructure widens the development gap with the Anglophone regions, deepening the grievance that fuels the separatist movement, which in turn justifies military spending concentrated in the capital. The feedback loop is now self-sustaining.
President Paul Biya, in power since 1982, governs from Yaounde at age 91. The capital's stability depends on an individual, not an institution — a succession crisis waiting to interact with an unresolved civil conflict.