Cameroon: National Day
Cameroon celebrates its National Day on 20 May. However, the situation’s a little more complex than that.
Historically, Cameroon was a German colony (Kamerun) from 1884 to 1919. The peace settlement after the First World War divided the territory in two, giving the northern part next to Nigeria to the United Kingdom to administer as a League of Nations mandate territory and the (larger) southern part to France on the same basis. Both became independent in the early 1960s, the French Cameroun just over a year earlier than the British Cameroons, and after slightly more than a decade of federation became a unitary state on 20 May 1972 – commemorated in the National Day.
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