After the First World War the territory was divided into British-administered and French-administered parts. In the early 1960s the French part became independent and part of the British territory joined it after a plebiscite. The result is two official languages and two legal systems: most of the country under French-style civil law, the North-West and South-West regions under English-style common law.

From 2016 tensions in the two English-speaking regions escalated into a prolonged armed conflict causing casualties and displacing very many people. Among the causes raised from the outset was the posting of civil-law-trained judges and teachers into common-law institutions.

Yemen merged symmetrically on paper and had a civil war in 1994. Tanzania merged asymmetrically, letting Zanzibar keep its own state, and has lasted sixty years. Cameroon merged then centralised progressively and has had conflict since 2016. Merging territory is easy; merging institutions is where it breaks — the deciding factor is not the line on the map but whether people keep their courts, schools and legal way of life.

Many people buy a nationality or residence status and assume the legal system is a single uniform block. Which system interprets your contract, which court has jurisdiction, which tradition your lawyer was trained in — those three questions can have different answers by region.

Yes. Canada has Québec under civil law within a common-law country, the United Kingdom has Scotland with its own system, India has different personal status regimes by religion. The difference is that in those places the duality is recognised and protected, whereas in Cameroon progressive centralisation is producing conflict. The practical question anywhere: does this country run more than one legal system, and which region are my assets in.

No. Those naturalising must renounce their prior nationality and Cameroonians acquiring another nationality may lose Cameroonian citizenship. Relaxing this has been raised repeatedly, but check the current statute.

Because a single country contains nearly the continent's full range of terrain and climate: Atlantic coast, tropical rainforest, highlands, savanna and semi-arid land toward Lake Chad in the far north. Mount Cameroon is among Africa's largest active volcanoes.

Oil and gas, cocoa, coffee, timber, cotton, aluminium and agriculture. Douala's port is the sea outlet for Chad and the Central African Republic, so corridor infrastructure matters beyond Cameroon. The Central African CFA franc carries the same trade-off as in Côte d'Ivoire: exchange rate stability in exchange for no independent monetary policy.