Officially French and English, governed from inland

Cameroon has two official languages and treats them as equal: French and English. The capital still does not stand in both traditions at once on the map. It stands in Yaoundé, inland, far from the port of Douala.

The country reaches from the Gulf of Guinea to Lake Chad. It borders Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. On 475,442 square kilometres live 29,879,337 people. The constitution names a unitary state, not a federation. The two languages come from two colonial histories, from France and from the United Kingdom. The state kept both and placed the capital inland.

Two languages, one unitary state

The constitution sets French and English as official languages of the same status. That is the result of 1961, when British Southern Cameroons joined the Republic of Cameroon. British Northern Cameroons joined Nigeria in the same year. The state today therefore does not contain two language halves of equal size. It contains a French-marked majority and an English-marked west, the Northwest and Southwest regions, with their own school and legal tradition from the British administration.

The state today is unitary. The equal rank of the languages is in the constitution, and the political form is still not federal. In the Northwest and Southwest regions the question of what place English and the local law have in the unitary state has become an armed conflict. The United Nations reports on it. Casualty figures do not belong in this sentence. The sentence is a different one: two official languages describe Cameroon. They have not ended the dispute over English in the west.

Yaoundé, not the port

Douala is the port on the Atlantic, the city of ships and trade. Yaoundé is the capital, inland, on the plateau. The state did not place the political centre on the coast where the country opens onto the Gulf of Guinea. Like other capitals that step away from the port, Yaoundé separates the decision from the quay. The difference is language: the port and the capital both lie in the French-speaking part. The English-speaking west has neither Douala nor Yaoundé.

The Central African CFA franc, issued by the Banque des États de l'Afrique Centrale, is the currency of the whole territory, in the port as in Yaoundé and in the English-speaking regions. It is not the same franc as the West African one. The coin does not unite the country linguistically. It unites it at the till. A person paying in Douala and a person paying in Bamenda use the same money and not the same everyday official language. The constitution says both languages are equal. The map of the cities says where the institutions sit.

Two official languages describe the state. They do not end the dispute over English.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

From the Gulf of Guinea to Lake Chad

In the south-west lies the Atlantic coast, in the north the shore of Lake Chad. Between them are forest, highland and the drier plains on the edge of the Sahel. Nigeria is the large neighbour to the west, Chad the neighbour on the lake, the Central African Republic and the Republic of the Congo lie to the east and south-east, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea to the south. A state that has a coast and a lake shore at once is long. The capital in the middle is the answer to that length, not an accident of the colonial map alone.

The length does not turn the languages into coastal folklore. English sits in the west, on the border with Nigeria. French sits in Yaoundé, in Douala and in the rest of the country. The unitary state claims both and governs from Yaoundé. It is a long country with two official languages and a capital that did not want to be the port.

To read Cameroon is to keep Yaoundé and Douala apart and not to forget the west. French and English are officially equal. The institutions sit inland, the port on the coast, the dispute in the Northwest and the Southwest. From Lake Chad to the Gulf this is one state, and it is not a state with a single language.