Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, many of the problems and civil strives that nations undergo can in some way be attributed to the arbitrary nation forming that happened as a result of the the Scramble for Africa. Cameroon is an excellent example of this. Having been a German colony, it was divided between the British and the French after the First World War and the Traty of Versailles, and as such developed two distinct limguistic traditions and cultures, before being fused back together in the 1960s during Africa’s torrent of independence declarations.
Cameroon is also representative of another Africa-wide trend, a President serving far longer than was initially intended. Paul Biya, a French speaker, has been serving as the chief executive of Cameroon since 1982, and he recently was re-elected in an election marred by electoral fraud and inconsistencies. Biya’s tenure has exacerbated the divide between French speakers and the minority of English speakers concentrated in the western part of Cameroon, as Biya has made a practice of overlooking English speakers for more and more positions within the civil service. Even worse, he continues to dispatch French language bureaucrats to the English speaking areas, further inconveniencing them and inflaming an already bad situation.
The Anglophone Cameroonians are at the breaking point and some have already declared themselves a new nation, Ambazonia. Cameroon is teetering dangerously on the line of falling into a civil war, and being an ethnically driven war the chance for ethnic cleansing is not to be disregarded. A civil war would also be disasterous as the country’s far northern territories are frequently home to radical Islamic terrorist groups such as Boko Haram, which would no doubt take the opportunity provided by a weakening of the central government to expand further.
Africa going forward will need to solve the issues left by the lines drawn through, between, and around various ethnic groups during the colonial era. How this will be done remains to be seen.