The Context of Television Broadcasting in Cameroon

Abstract

The Republic of Cameroon, a West African nation of about 10 million ethnically, linguistically, and geographically diverse people who occupy about 465,000 square kilometers of land, had some very good reasons for delaying the development of a television system until 1985 even though some of her African neighbors had been operating such a system for about 25 years. The Cameroon population is made up of about 200 ethnic groups who speak about 24 different languages or dialects. The population is unevenly distributed with population densities that range from 74 inhabitants per square kilometer in the West Province to 3 inhabitants per square kilometer in the East Province. The country's seven major ethnic groups correspond approximately to the country's seven administrative regions. The only African country to have been colonized by three different imperial powers (Germany, Great Britain, and France), Cameroon is also the only African country with English and French as official languages of education, government, and commerce, thus reflecting the two dominant administrative and cultural colonial heritages. Geographically, Cameroon is divided into five geoclimatic regions: the southern marshes and mangrove forests, the savannah, the steppe, and the western mountainous areas that border Nigeria. Although Cameroon shares two dominant characteristics of contemporary African political systems, some have argued that