The Cameroon ‘Anglophone Question’ in International Law

Abstract

The Republic of Cameroon sprang from a partial reconstitution of the German protectorate of Kamerun created in 1884 and dissolved with the defeat of the Germans at the end of World War I. The Treaty of Versailles split the territory into two halves. The larger one went to France and was rechristened French Cameroon, and the smaller one was taken over by Great Britain to be known as the British Cameroons, made up of the Southern and Northern Cameroons and run as an integral part of the Federation of Nigeria. Both became League of Nations mandates from 1920 and were transformed into UN trust territories in 1945. The aim was to prepare them for independence. However, forty years of a separate existence broke the unity of the territory. It was no longer the inhabitants of the German protectorate of Kamerun that called for independence in the 1960s, but Frenchand English-speaking Cameroonians. While there were those that advocated independence as part of the Federation of Nigeria on the English-speaking side, there were equally French-speaking Cameroonians who were eager to avoid the complications of coexisting with a minority, if the British Cameroonians returned to the fold after four decades of life out of the motherland. From these conflicting views developed a third opinion, the Kamerun idea advocated by nationalist intellectuals on both sides of the colonial divide. It stood for the restoration of the territory on the boundaries of the defunct German protectorate. The argument was that a Cameroon nationhood had been hewn out of the German presence from 1884 to 1920 and not even the forty years of separation instituted by the Treaty of Versailles interfered with this state of affairs. The ‘Kamerun people’ remained unmarred. The bonds developed from the German protectorate survived the interlude of the partition between Britain and France. There was even a fourth view that the territory of British Cameroons