Cameroon

Located on the Gulf of Guinea and bordered by the modern-day nations of Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon is a nation of nearly 250 ethnic groups, with an early history that reflects its position as a geographical and sociocultural transition zone between West and central Africa.

Volcanic mountains run north from the gulf coast, with the largest, Mount Cameroon, forming part of the coastline. Numerous rivers run through the area, crossing savannah and grasslands in the north and west. Pygmies were the earliest inhabitants of Cameroon, but Bantu agriculturalists moved into the region, displacing the hunter-gatherer Pygmies. These agriculturalists, such as the Bakweri, Duala, and Fang peoples, settled in the forested region in the southern part of the area, establishing patrilineal villages.

Regional differences developed within Cameroon reflecting the economic and social developments of the larger regions it bordered. Influenced in the south by the Christian empires involved in the transatlantic slave trade and in the north by the trans-Saharan slave trade, Islam, and the savannah empires, Cameroon became an integral link between west and central Africa. gold, salt and slaves formed the basis of trade north from Cameroon across the Sahara to North Africa. An estimated 10,000 slaves crossed the desert each year, mostly from Cameroon. From the 10th to the 15th centuries, the Sao kingdom, located in Cameroon south of Lake Chad, became wealthy from the trans-Saharan slave trade. Despite its early introduction to the area (around the 10th century), Islam did not become an important force until the 1500s. The invasion of the Massa people and the rise of the Kotoko kingdom, which replaced the Sao, brought wider acceptance of the religion.

With the coming of Europeans in 1472, the people of southern Cameroon began participating directly in the transatlantic trade in slaves. In that year Fernao do Po arrived at Mbini Island, just off the coast of the Cameroon mainland. The Portuguese presence in Cameroon not only gave the area its name (Cameroon comes from the Portuguese name for one of the region’s rivers, Rio dos CamerSes, which means “River of Prawns”) but also resulted in important changes to the region’s economy and sociopolitical structure. By the 16th century Cameroon became a major source of slaves for the Americas; coastal peoples including the Bimbia and Duala acted as middlemen, transporting captives from the interior to the Cameroonian coast. These captives were then shipped to Calabar, the closest European settlement and a slavetrading center. In exchange for the slaves, the Bimbia and Duala middlemen received cloth, liquor, firearms, and other goods. Although the Portuguese initially dominated the trade from Cameroon, control of this lucrative business fell into hands of the Dutch, English, French, and finally Americans.

Further reading: Edwin Ardener, Kingdom on Mount Cameroon: Studies in the History of the Cameroon Coast, 1500-1970 (Providence, R. I.: Berghahn Books, 1996); Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland c. 1600-c. 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Tambi Eyongetah and Robert Brain, A History of the Cameroon (London: Longman, 1974); Eric Young, “Cameroon,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Basic Civi-tas Books, 1999), 353-357.

—Lisa M. Brady