CAMEROON – AFRICA IN MINATURE

1. CULTURE & LANGUAGES: Only officially bilingual country in Africa – French and English, the two key of the international languages.

Despite this international endowment, Cameroon also boasts 230 languages. These include 55 Afro-Asiatic languages, two Nilo-Saharan languages, and 173 Niger-Congo languages. This latter group is divided into one West Atlantic language (Fulfulde), 32 Adamawa-Ubangui languages, and 142 Benue-Congo languages (130 of which are Bantu languages). This manifests in a very vibrant culture expressed in many forms including a large and extremely diverse food menu, and musical and dance forms.

2. SPORTS – Football; four times winners of the African Nations Cup – 1984, 1988, 2000, 2002, and gave Roger Mila to the world at the 1990 world cup – the first African team to make the quarter finals of the world cup; Cameroon competed at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. The men’s football team won the nation’s first ever Olympic gold medal.

3. GEOGRAPHY & WILD LIFE – Flora and Fauna; Cameroon encapsulates all the flora and fauna types of Africa, with desert to the north, savanna and rolling grassland hills to the mid region, thick tropical rain forest further down, and unique golden beaches, and black sand volcanic beach.

It harbours one of the last vestiges of genuine rainforest in Africa – Korup National Park, where an episode of Tarzan was filmed, and was visited by Prince Charles and Lady D Cameroon also has the tallest mountain in Central and West Africa – Mount Fako at 4072m situated by the town of Buea

Cameroon boasts the big five; buffalo, lion, elephant, rhinoceros and leopard. It also has gorilla, giraffe, crocodile, primates, etc, rare birds – including the bald picathartes, and the largest bull frog in the world called the Goliath Frog (Conraua goliath)

4. FOOD; Cameroon has more variety of food than any other African nation. It is one of a handful of countries globally where you are either planting or harvesting something twelve months in the year non-stop. The famous slang is that ‘Chop Dey’ meaning there is food in abundance. The roast fish speciality ‘poison braissee’ (monica) served with fried plantains, is well known.

5. INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES: Availability of numerous natural resources (oil, gas, bauxite, gold,…) and agricultural products (coffee, cocoa, cotton, bananas, pineapple, rubber, palm oil, etc …) and a bilingual human resource pool boasting one of the largest educated and bilingual youth population in the world. Cameroon is connected to The Commonwealth of Nations, The Francophonie, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Group 77, Non-Aligned Movement, African Union, Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) – 200m people, and the Economic & Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) – 37m people.

SOURCE

*Cameroon Forum is a civil society organisation which seeks to integrate the diverse portfolio of Cameroonian professionals,

associations, businesses and related institutions, towards a greater social, economic and cultural integration of Cameroonians into

UK society. The ultimate goal being to foster good, diverse and rich bilateral relations between Cameroon and the UK.

http://www.cameroon-forum.org