The territory of present-day Cameroon has been inhabited since ancient times by hunter-gatherers, among them the peoples we now know as the Baka and Bakola —sometimes called “Pygmies”—, whose descendants still live in the southern rainforests and are considered the oldest inhabitants of the region. Over thousands of years they were joined by waves of farmers and herders who gradually shaped the country's extraordinary human mosaic.
Cameroon holds a central place in one of the greatest demographic epics in African history: the Bantu expansion. Most linguists place the cradle of the Bantu languages precisely in the highlands on the border between present-day Cameroon and Nigeria. From there, some three or four thousand years ago, farming communities who had mastered iron began to migrate south and east, until they had settled much of central, eastern and southern Africa. It is hard to overstate what this means: many of the continent's Bantu peoples ultimately trace a distant origin to this corner of Africa.
Other peoples and other languages came later. In the centre and west, Bantu and semi-Bantu peoples of the grassfields settled; in the north, Sudanic, Chadic and Adamawa populations; and, much later, the Fulani (or Peul) herders of the Sahel. From that long layering came the Cameroon of more than two hundred and fifty communities and languages: probably one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet.
Northern Cameroon, in the orbit of Lake Chad, was for centuries part of the great history of the Sahel and its empires. There, around the first millennium, the enigmatic Sao civilisation flourished, a people of builders and craftspeople famous for their remarkable terracottas and bronze objects, whose descendants are usually linked to today's Kotoko on the shores of Lake Chad.
From the 9th century the region came under the influence of the Kanem empire, and later of its successor Kanem-Bornu, one of the longest-lasting states in African history, which controlled the area around Lake Chad for almost a thousand years. Kanem-Bornu brought Islam to northern Cameroon, tied it into the trans-Saharan trade routes for salt, copper, ivory and slaves, and set up a feudal system of government whose influence reached as far as the Adamawa savannahs.
The great turning point came in the early 19th century with the Fulani jihad. Inspired by the Islamic reform of the leader Usman dan Fodio in the neighbouring Sokoto Caliphate, Fulani horsemen led by Modibbo Adama conquered much of northern Cameroon and founded the Adamawa Emirate, with its capital at Yola. Adama divided the territory into lamidates —principalities ruled by a lamido— and spread Islam and a feudal order that survives, in its traditional form, to this day. Many non-Muslim mountain peoples, known collectively as Kirdi, resisted that expansion by taking refuge in the massifs, like the Mandara.
In the western highlands —the so-called grassfields, upland meadows dotted with hills— a constellation of kingdoms and chiefdoms (fondoms and chefferies) developed with enormous artistic and political refinement. Their carved wood, masks, thrones covered in coloured beads and the conical roofs of the royal courts are today among Africa's great cultural treasures.
The most famous is the Bamum kingdom, founded towards the end of the 14th century by the conqueror Nchare Yen, who established his capital at Foumban. Its most extraordinary figure was Sultan Ibrahim Njoya, who ruled from around 1889 to 1933. Njoya was a scholar-king: around 1895-1896 he invented his own writing system —the Bamum syllabary— which was used to record the kingdom's history, laws and medicine; he had a monumental palace built and even designed a syncretic religion. The French colonial administration, wary of his power, deposed and exiled him and banned the teaching of his script, which came close to being lost.
Alongside the Bamum, the Bamileke prospered: a group of nearly a hundred chiefdoms in the southern grassfields, known for their entrepreneurial culture and dense network of royal courts, such as those of Bafoussam, Bandjoun or Bandjoun. Further northwest, in the English-speaking highlands, kingdoms like Bafut kept their own dynasties of fons (sacred kings). These kingdoms were not islands: they traded with each other and with the north and the coast, and kept a strong degree of autonomy even under colonial rule, so their palaces are still alive as centres of traditional power.
The first European contact came by sea. Around 1472, the Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó (Fernando Poo) explored the estuary of the Wouri River, on the Atlantic coast, and was struck by the abundance of prawns —in fact, mud shrimp— teeming in its waters. He named the place Rio dos Camarões, “River of Prawns”. Every later version comes from that Portuguese name: Cameroon in English, Cameroun in French, Camerún in Spanish. Few countries in the world have such a colourful origin for their name.
Over the following centuries, the Cameroonian coast was drawn into Atlantic trade. Portuguese, Dutch, English and other European merchants set up trading posts and dealt with the coastal peoples, especially the Duala, who became powerful middlemen between the interior and the European ships. The main business, alongside ivory and forest products, was for a long time the slave trade: thousands of captives seized in the interior were taken to the coast and shipped to the Americas.
It is a past that must be named without euphemisms. Abolition and Britain's campaign against the slave trade in the 19th century gradually shifted that commerce towards the so-called “legitimate trade” in palm oil and other goods, but the plantation economy that followed would still rely, in other ways, on forced labour and deep inequality. Meanwhile, the coast also became the gateway for Christian missionaries, who founded stations and churches that would change the south of the country.
The European scramble for Africa reached Cameroon in 1884. On 12 July that year, in the middle of the colonial race, the German consul and explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed “protection” treaties with the Duala kings Bell and Akwa, on the Wouri estuary, just a few days before a British mission arrived with the same intentions. So the German protectorate of Kamerun was born, with its capital first at Douala and then, from 1901, at Buea, at the foot of Mount Cameroon.
German rule was intense and brutal. Berlin promoted large rubber, palm oil, cocoa and banana plantations on the fertile volcanic slopes of the southwest, laid the first railways into the interior and turned Douala into a modern port. All of this rested on forced labour, land seizures and military campaigns to subdue the peoples of the interior, such as the hard wars against the kingdom of Bafut (1901-1907). Resistance was widespread and was often paid for with lives: in 1914, the Duala king Rudolf Duala Manga Bell was hanged for opposing German plans to expropriate and relocate his people, and today he is remembered as a national hero.
The German colonial experiment ended abruptly with the First World War. Between 1914 and 1916, French, British and Belgian troops invaded Kamerun and defeated the small German garrison, which ended up retreating into neighbouring Spanish Guinea. In little more than three decades, Germany lost the only large colony it had held in this part of Africa.
After Germany's defeat, the fate of Kamerun lay in the hands of the victorious powers. In 1919, and then formally as League of Nations mandates in 1922, the territory was divided between France and the United Kingdom. It was a deeply unequal split: France kept about four-fifths of the country —including all the useful coastline, Douala and the railway network—, while the United Kingdom received two narrow strips along the border with Nigeria, which it ran as part of its Nigerian colony.
That division drew a cultural and administrative border that still marks Cameroon today. In French Cameroun, the French language, civil law in the Napoleonic tradition and a centralised system of direct rule were imposed. In the British Cameroons, English, common law and a model of indirect rule based on traditional chiefs took hold. Two European languages, two legal systems and two administrative cultures were laid over a single people.
Under the French mandate, the plantation and export economy deepened, with its share of forced labour, but education and an emerging urban elite also expanded. In the British part, more neglected and peripheral to Nigeria, a feeling of being a forgotten region grew over time. From that double colonial legacy would come, decades later, Cameroon's great dilemma: how to unite in a single nation two communities shaped by such different traditions.
The tide of decolonisation reached Cameroon amid violence. In French Cameroun, the nationalist movement of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC) demanded independence and reunification with the British part, and from the mid-1950s led an insurrection that France crushed in a brutal, little-known war that left tens of thousands dead and in which the UPC leader Ruben Um Nyobè was killed in 1958.
Despite everything, on 1 January 1960 French Cameroun became independent as the Republic of Cameroon, and in May Ahmadou Ahidjo, a Muslim politician from the north, took office as president. The following year, in February 1961, a UN-supervised plebiscite split the British Cameroons: the north voted to join Nigeria and the south (Southern Cameroons) chose to reunite with the former French Cameroun. So, on 1 October 1961, the Federal Republic of Cameroon was born, with two federated states, one French-speaking and one English-speaking.
Ahidjo steadily concentrated power: in 1966 he imposed a one-party state and, after the referendum of 20 May 1972, replaced the federation with a unitary state, the United Republic of Cameroon, wiping out much of Anglophone autonomy. In 1982 he resigned and handed power to his prime minister, Paul Biya, a Catholic from the south. Biya put down a coup attempt in 1984, that same year renamed the country the Republic of Cameroon —another gesture Anglophones read as the end of the project of a union between equals— and became one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world, in power for more than four decades.
Contemporary Cameroon still lives up to its nickname of “Africa in miniature”: it is a country of enormous natural and cultural wealth, with oil, cocoa, coffee and timber, legendary football —the Indomitable Lions— and a musical vitality that gave the world makossa and bikutsi. But it is also a country crossed by deep tensions, many of them inherited from its divided history.
The most painful is the Anglophone crisis. From 2016, lawyers, teachers and students in the Northwest and Southwest regions —the former Southern Cameroons— protested against what they saw as the growing marginalisation of their language, their education system and their common law legal tradition. The government's harsh crackdown radicalised the conflict: in 2017 separatist movements emerged that proclaimed the independence of a “Federal Republic of Ambazonia”, and since then the war between the army and the secessionist militias has caused thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of displaced people, with serious human rights abuses on both sides.
Other challenges add to that conflict and are worth naming soberly: in the Far North, the jihadist insurgency of Boko Haram, spilling over from Nigeria, has hit the population hard since the early 2010s; on the political front, Paul Biya's extremely long time in power fuels debate about succession and democratic opening. Even so, Cameroon remains one of Africa's most fascinating countries: a mosaic of kingdoms, languages and landscapes that sums up, in a single territory, almost everything the continent has to offer.
The 6 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Yaoundé began as a colonial outpost. In 1888-1889, German agents led by Georg Zenker founded a station among the Ewondo people, in the hills of the interior, for the ivory and rubber trade and as an agricultural base; the name “Yaoundé” is a European distortion of “Ewondo”. Its mild upland climate and central position helped it grow.
After Germany's defeat, the French made Yaoundé the administrative capital of French Cameroun in 1922, partly to move away from the more rebellious and hotter Douala. It has been the centre of power ever since: independence was declared there in 1960, and the government and institutions of the new nation settled there.
Today Yaoundé is a metropolis of several million people, calmer and greener than bustling Douala, spread over its famous seven hills. It is the country's political capital and home to its major institutions. Its National Museum, housed in the former presidential palace, sums up Cameroon's extraordinary cultural diversity, from the grassfields kingdoms to the peoples of the north and the rainforest.
Central Cameroon is the land of the Beti-Pahuin, and in particular of the Ewondo, a Bantu people of rainforest farmers and traders who settled in these hills before the Europeans arrived. Their language, Ewondo, works as a lingua franca across much of the region and gave the capital its name.
The Beti were organised into lineages and clans, without large centralised kingdoms like those of the west, but with a rich oral, musical and spiritual tradition. This region gave rise to bikutsi, a vibrant musical genre born from traditional Ewondo rhythms that is now heard all over the country. Paul Biya, the president who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, is also from here.
Catholicism, spread by missionaries from the late 19th century, took deep root among the Beti, and Yaoundé is home to important religious and educational institutions. A region of bureaucracy and universities, central Cameroon combines the weight of the state with the life of its markets and the culture of a people closely tied to the rainforest around it.
South of Yaoundé lies one of Africa's largest and best-preserved tropical rainforests: the Dja Faunal Reserve, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. The reserve is almost entirely surrounded and protected by the great loop of the Dja River, which acts as a natural boundary and has helped keep it practically untouched.
It is a biodiversity sanctuary: it is home to western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, forest elephants and an astonishing variety of birds and primates. It is one of the continent's last great blocks of primary rainforest and a key refuge for threatened species of the Congo Basin.
The Dja is also the territory of the Baka, one of the rainforest hunter-gatherer peoples who used to be called “Pygmies”. The Baka have a profound knowledge of the forest —its plants, its animals, its medicine— and a rich musical culture of vocal polyphony. As in so many central African rainforests, conserving the reserve goes hand in hand with the challenge of respecting the rights and way of life of these ancestral communities in the face of pressure from poaching and logging.
It all started here. It was in the estuary of the Wouri River that the Portuguese Fernão do Pó saw, around 1472, the prawns that gave the country its name. And it was on its banks that the Duala people, skilled Bantu traders, became the great middlemen between the interior and the European ships through centuries of trade in slaves, ivory and palm oil.
That is why Douala was the gateway to colonisation. It was there, in 1884, that Nachtigal signed the treaties with kings Bell and Akwa that founded German Kamerun, and there that the first colonial capital was established. The Germans turned the city into a modern port, but their expansion ran into local resistance: in 1914, King Rudolf Duala Manga Bell was hanged for opposing the expropriation of his people's land, and today he is a national hero.
Douala is now Cameroon's largest city and its economic capital: a chaotic, lively port on the banks of the Wouri, the commercial engine of the country and of much of central Africa, with overflowing markets and an intense music scene —the birthplace of makossa, the genre Manu Dibango took to the world—. More historic than monumental, it concentrates the energy and contradictions of contemporary Cameroon.
Further south, the coast turns into beach country. Kribi, with its golden sand beaches and coconut palms, is Cameroon's best-loved seaside destination. In the German era, this stretch of coast filled up with rubber, cocoa and palm plantations, and it was the setting for the harsh colonial economy of forced labour; remains of that infrastructure can still be seen.
Its most famous natural wonder is the Lobé Falls, a few kilometres to the south: one of the very few places in the world where a river flows straight into the ocean as a waterfall, tumbling onto the beach and into the sea. The Batanga and other coastal peoples live around here, and there are still Bagyeli (Bakola) communities, hunter-gatherers of the coastal forest related to the Baka.
In recent decades, Kribi has also become a strategic hub: this is where the great pipeline carrying oil from Chad across Cameroon ends, and a deep-water port has been built to make the city one of the country's main maritime terminals. Tourism, colonial history and large industrial projects share this southern coast.
Inland from Kribi, towards the border with Equatorial Guinea, lies Campo Ma'an National Park, a large block of coastal equatorial rainforest created in the early 2000s, partly as environmental compensation for the construction of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline.
The park protects an extremely rich ecosystem: lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, forest elephants, mandrills and a remarkable diversity of plants and birds. Because it is close to the coast and to Kribi, it is easier to reach than the remote Dja Reserve, and you can combine jungle walks with the beach on the same trip.
Like the whole forest zone of southern Cameroon, Campo Ma'an is both a biodiversity treasure and a territory under pressure: logging, poaching and large infrastructure projects threaten a fragile balance. Its management tries to reconcile conservation with the needs of local communities, including the Bagyeli peoples of the forest.
Mount Cameroon, which locals call Fako or Mongo ma Ndemi, “the mountain of greatness”, is the highest peak in West Africa, at around 4,040 metres, and one of the most active volcanoes on the continent: it has erupted several times in recent decades. It is an imposing mass that rises almost straight out of the Atlantic, catching the rains that make its slopes one of the wettest places on Earth.
It already impressed the ancient world: the Carthaginian Hanno the Navigator, on his voyage along the African coast around the 5th century BC, is believed to have sighted the volcano erupting and described it as a “Chariot of the Gods”, a column of fire reaching up to the sky. For the Bakweri people, who live on its slopes, the mountain is sacred and home to spirits, and it is honoured with traditional ceremonies.
Today Mount Cameroon is a major adventure destination: the climb, which takes two or three days, crosses tropical forest, high grasslands and black lava fields up to the summit. Every year it also hosts the famous “Race of Hope”, which goes up and down the mountain in a single day. The Southwest region, however, has been affected by the anglophone conflict, so it is worth checking the security situation before you travel.
At the foot of the volcano, more than a thousand metres up, lies Buea, a town with a cool climate that the Germans chose as the capital of colonial Kamerun in 1901, to escape the heat and diseases of the coast. There they built the governor's residence — the so-called Schloss, or “castle” — and European-style buildings that still stand today.
Buea was the German capital until 1909, when the seat of government moved back to Douala, and later, under the British mandate, it became the capital of the Southern Cameroons. That double heritage — first German colonial, then British — shapes its character. It is a university town and a historic centre of anglophone Cameroon.
Around Buea stretch the large plantations set up in the German era and later brought together under the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), one of the country's biggest employers, growing bananas, palm, tea and rubber on the fertile volcanic soil. A region of mountains, plantations and colonial memory, Buea is also one of the hotspots of the crisis that has affected the anglophone regions since 2016.
On the coast, at the foot of the volcano, is Limbe, a town of black volcanic sand beaches facing the Atlantic, with Mount Cameroon always in the background. It was founded in 1858 under the name Victoria by the British Baptist missionary Alfred Saker, who set up a Christian community there with freed former slaves, some of whom came from Fernando Poo. That missionary origin gave it an early Christian and English-speaking character.
During the German colonial period, the Limbe Botanic Garden was created in 1892, one of the oldest in Africa, designed to experiment with tropical crops for the plantations. It is still a green haven of exotic plants by the sea. The town keeps that air of a quiet, leafy port, quite different from the bustle of Douala.
Limbe is also home to the Limbe Wildlife Centre, a sanctuary that rescues and cares for gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills and other primates that have fallen victim to trafficking and hunting, and which has become a benchmark for conservation in Cameroon. Volcanic beaches, historic gardens and wildlife refuges make Limbe one of the gems of the Southwest, a region of great beauty that is now shaped by the security situation.
Cameroon's Far North is another world: the rainforest and the grassfields give way to the dry savannah of the Sahel, on the shores of the great Lake Chad. Maroua, its regional capital, is a city of mud-brick houses and wide tree-lined streets, known for its large leather craft market and its Sahelian way of life, very different from the south.
This is a meeting point of many peoples. Here the Fulani lamidos rule, heirs to the 19th-century jihad and the Adamawa Emirate, in a mostly Muslim north. Alongside them live many non-Islamised peoples, grouped under the generic name Kirdi, and descendants of the region's ancient populations, such as the Kotoko of the shores of Lake Chad, linked to the old Sao civilisation.
For a long time Maroua was the base for exploring the great attractions of the north: the savannah parks and the Mandara Mountains. But the region has been badly hit by the Boko Haram jihadist insurgency, which spilled over from neighbouring Nigeria from the early 2010s, and travel there is now advised against.
Waza National Park, created during the French colonial period, was for decades Cameroon's classic safari and one of the most important reserves in central Africa. Its Sahelian savannah is home to elephants, giraffes, antelopes, lions and a huge variety of birds, which gather around the few waterholes during the long dry season, offering a spectacle comparable to the great reserves of East Africa.
The Lake Chad region, where Waza lies, also carries deep historical weight: it was the heart of the Sao civilisation and of the great Sahelian empires of Kanem-Bornu, whose trade routes crossed these lands towards the Sahara. Wildlife and history go hand in hand at this far end of the country.
Like the rest of the Far North, Waza is now suffering the consequences of the insecurity linked to Boko Haram, which has affected tourism, the policing of the park and the local communities. The survival of its wildlife, also threatened by poaching and droughts, depends largely on the region becoming stable again.
In the far northwest of the country, along the border with Nigeria, rise the Mandara Mountains, a volcanic massif with a breathtaking landscape. Its most famous village, Rhumsiki, is surrounded by volcanic plugs and rock spires that burst out of the plain like a lunar landscape, making it one of the most photographed views in Africa.
These mountains are the historical refuge of the Kirdi peoples, such as the Kapsiki, who withdrew to the heights to escape Fulani raids from the lowlands and kept their own beliefs and ways of life. Rhumsiki is famous for its traditional crab sorcerer, who “reads” the future by interpreting how a crab moves sticks and stones inside a clay pot, a ritual practice that draws curious visitors from all over the world.
The Mandara Mountains are a patchwork of villages with terraced fields, traditional blacksmiths, and stone and mud-brick architecture adapted to the mountains. The region is very beautiful and of great ethnographic interest. However, it shares the difficult security situation of the Far North, so it is currently one of the areas travellers are advised to avoid.
Foumban is the capital of one of Africa's most remarkable kingdoms: the Bamum sultanate, founded towards the end of the 14th century by the conqueror Nchare Yen. For more than six centuries the same dynasty has reigned here, and the Royal Palace, with its museum of thrones, masks, drums and ceremonial objects, is one of the great windows onto traditional power in Cameroon.
The key figure is Sultan Ibrahim Njoya (who reigned from around 1889 to 1933), an extraordinary scholar-king. Around 1895-1896 Njoya invented his own writing system, the Bamum syllabary, to record the history, laws and medicine of his people; he had chronicles and maps drawn up, and even created a syncretic religion. The French colonial administration, wary of his prestige, deposed and exiled him and banned his script, which people in Foumban are now trying to revive.
Foumban is also a major craft centre: its famous “artisans' street” brings together woodcarvers, embroiderers and bronze casters who keep centuries-old techniques alive. A mostly Muslim, cultural and royal city, it is one of the essential stops for understanding the Cameroon of the kingdoms.
South of the Bamum lies the land of the Bamileke, one of the largest and most dynamic peoples in Cameroon, organised not into a single kingdom but into nearly a hundred chiefdoms, or chefferies, each with its own fon (king) and court. Bafoussam is the main city of this region of green hills and coffee plantations, and it is the base for visiting the royal courts of the west.
The Bamileke chefferies are true works of architectural art: palaces with ritual courtyards surrounded by bamboo houses with tall conical thatched roofs, decorated with carved pillars and masks. Bandjoun is one of the most impressive, with a museum of ceremonial objects that shows the cultural wealth of the grassfields. These courts are still living centres of traditional power, religion and local justice.
The Bamileke are also famous for their business culture and entrepreneurial spirit: their diaspora controls much of the trade in Douala, Yaoundé and beyond, which has at times stirred tensions and mistrust in the country's political history. Workers, traders and artists, the Bamileke are one of the pillars of Cameroon's economy and identity.
The grassfields of the west — high grasslands between mountains, with a cool climate and fertile soil — are one of the most culturally rich regions in Africa. Their kingdoms and chiefdoms produced a court art of masks, sculptures, thrones covered in coloured beads, bronze pipes and textiles that is now among the most admired on the continent.
This art was not decorative: every mask, every throne, every figure had a political and religious role, tied to secret societies, royal rituals and ancestor worship. Masked dances, such as the elephant or buffalo dances, expressed the power of the fon and the order of the kingdom. Many of these pieces ended up in European museums during the colonial era, and today they are the subject of restitution claims.
What stands out is that traditional power is still alive in the grassfields. The fons keep enormous moral and social prestige, settle disputes and embody the continuity of their peoples. A region of coffee, markets and palaces, western Cameroon shows that modern life and ancestral kingdoms can share the same land.
In the Northwest highlands, the kingdom (fondom) of Bafut is one of the most important and best preserved in Cameroon. Ruled by a fon, or sacred king, it keeps a Royal Palace with a sacred enclosure and traditional bamboo houses with conical roofs, the centre of the rituals and ceremonial life of its people.
Bafut fiercely resisted colonial conquest. Between 1901 and 1907, under Fon Abumbi I, it fought the so-called “Bafut Wars” against the Germans, who defeated him and sent him into exile; but since the puppet ruler they installed was not accepted, the Germans themselves had to reinstate the fon. After the First World War, Bafut came under British mandate.
The kingdom became known worldwide thanks to the naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell, who visited Bafut in 1949 and 1957 on his animal-collecting expeditions and portrayed Fon Achirimbi II with humour in books such as “The Bafut Beagles” and “A Zoo in My Luggage”. Today, however, the Northwest region is badly affected by the anglophone separatist conflict, and travel there is advised against.
Bamenda is the main city of the Northwest highlands and one of the great centres of English-speaking Cameroon. Set on a spectacular escarpment, for decades it was the gateway to the region's fondoms and to the scenic Ring Road.
Bamenda also carries huge political weight. Its anglophone tradition and its sense of being sidelined by the French-speaking central government gave rise to powerful opposition movements. It was in Bamenda, in 1990, that John Fru Ndi's Social Democratic Front (SDF) was founded, the main opposition party of the return to multiparty politics, on a day marked by repression.
That same grievance explains why Bamenda has been an epicentre of the anglophone crisis that broke out in 2016. Protests by lawyers and teachers, the harsh government response and the separatist insurgency that followed have hit the city and the whole Northwest region especially hard, and governments around the world now advise against travel there because of the insecurity.
The Ring Road is a scenic circuit of more than 350 kilometres through the Northwest highlands, past mountains, waterfalls, crater lakes and villages of traditional kingdoms. It crosses a landscape of great beauty, with fondoms, markets and spectacular volcanic scenery, and for a long time it was one of Cameroon's great adventure trips.
This volcanic region also hides a tragic story. In 1986, Lake Nyos, a crater lake loaded with carbon dioxide, suddenly released a gigantic cloud of gas that rolled down the valleys and suffocated more than 1,700 people and their livestock as they slept. It was one of the strangest and deadliest natural disasters of the 20th century, and today the lake has a degassing system to stop it from happening again.
Today, however, the Ring Road and the whole Northwest region are at the heart of the anglophone conflict. What was once a paradise for trekking and traditional culture is, for now, advised against for security reasons. Its beauty remains, but it is tied to the fate of a region still waiting for a peaceful way out of its crisis.
Hardly anything that happened to Cameroon happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
