Cameroon

Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa bordered by Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, with a coastline on the Gulf of Guinea, a population of nearly 31 million speaking 250 native languages alongside official English and French, and Yaounde as its capital. Early inhabitants included the Sao civilization around Lake Chad and Baka hunter-gatherers in the southeastern rainforest; Portuguese explorers reached the coast in the fifteenth century, and Cameroon became a German colony known as Kamerun in 1884, then was divided after the First World War between France and the United Kingdom as League of Nations mandates until independence in 1960 and 1961 respectively, when the French-administered Republic of Cameroun under President Ahmadou Ahidjo was joined in 1961 by the southern part of British Cameroons to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon. The federation was abandoned in 1972 and the country renamed the Republic of Cameroon in 1984 under President Paul Biya, who has led the country since 1982 as one of the world's longest-serving non-royal leaders, governing as a unitary presidential republic through his Cameroon People's Democratic Movement, a de facto one-party state. Tensions in the English-speaking territories over decentralization escalated into open warfare from 2017 as the Ambazonia separatist conflict; Cameroon, often called Africa in miniature for its geological, linguistic and cultural diversity, is a member of the African Union, the United Nations, the Commonwealth of Nations and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.