Nature must have designed the uniquely situated area in central Africa that became known as Cameroon even before the western colonial powers conquered Africa and sought to create larger entities from the ethnic groups and tribes of the continent. The world knew the area as the German colony of Kamerun for more than three decades until its partition by Britain and France into British Cameroons and French Cameroun. That was after the victorious European powers wrestled the colony from the hands of Germany during the First World War.
For thousands of years, the land mass experienced groves of migrating tribes and ethnic groups that wandered across the African continent. However, Cameroon got its diversity and unusual mix of ethnic groups that persist today from the migrations of the last millennium.
It is from the southern half of Cameroon that Africa’s largest ethno-linguistic group called Bantu, otherwise known as Niger-Congo-B, spread to eastern and southern Africa.
Northern Cameroon is the western fringe of the withering Nilo-Saharan populations from The Sudans and Ethiopia. It also became the base of early settled Niger-Congo-A populations.
Over the years, the Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo-A ethnic groups of the North were subjected to expansion from Afro-Asiatic speaking Shua Arabs, Tuaregs and numerous Chadic groups from West Africa and North Africa. Doomed to perpetual distrust and misunderstanding in a stretch of land that starts as a plain and turns into a plateau in its southern stretch called the Adamawa, these populations of the North have finally learned to live together.
Beyond this Adamawa plateau region is a portion of Central Cameroon called the Western High Plateau. For centuries, this hilly region of highland savannah was the borderland of the Northwestern Bantus, comprising at the time scattered and sparsely populated settlements of small Bantu villages braving the chilly climate of the mountainous terrain.
The Central Highlands that constitute the Adamawa Plateau and the Western High Plateau was in a state of turmoil in the eighteenth century. The disastrous sweep of Sene-Gambian-speaking Fulani warriors brought about by Ousman Dan Fodio’s jihad to spread Islam in what became Northern Nigeria and Northern Cameroon destabilized the indigenous populations of the North by forcing the different ethnic groups there to either resist the invaders and their religion or capitulate to their might. The Bamileké people were one of the groups that chose to fight.
Following years of resisting the Fulani warriors and witnessing the scorch of their homelands in the Adamawa region, the Bamileké people buckled and moved to the South in search of a new homeland.
Disciples of Fortune
by Janvier Chouteu-Chando
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