Living in CAMEROON | How People Live in Africa’s Most Unbelievable Country | TRAVEL 4K

Wake up in this country at sunrise and the wind on your face is dry. It comes off the edge of the Sahara. Get in a car and drive south. By evening, the air clings to your skin and you stand under a rainforest older than the Amazon. Same country, same day. The world calls this place Africa in miniature and that is not a slogan, that is a geography report. 17% bigger than California. 250 ethnic groups. 279 languages. Two official languages that are English and French. It holds a volcano that somebody named 25 centuries ago. The Chariot of the Gods. The rarest great ape alive, about 250 of them. A king who invented a whole writing system for his people from nothing. A waterfall that empties straight into the Atlantic. And a few seconds of music, born on a riverbank here, that ended up on the best-selling album in history. Let's start where everything in this country starts, with a border that swallowed a whole continent. Picture the drive. The drive is the whole story. You start in the far north, near Lake Chad, where the Sahel begins. Thorn trees, dust and light so flat, everything looks further away than it is. Then the land lifts into grass, plateau green, rolling cattle everywhere. Keep going and the west throws up volcanic highlands where coffee grows above 4,000 feet. Keep going and the trees close over the road. That is the Congo Basin Rainforest. And then the road runs out at black volcanic sand and the Atlantic Ocean. Five climate zones, one set of borders. That is why the nickname stuck. Cameroon covers about 183,000 square miles, think California plus Maryland on top. It touches six countries and geographers call it the Hinge of Africa, where West Africa meets Central Africa. And in the southwest corner, the land rises to 13,255 feet. That is Mount Cameroon, the highest peak in West and Central Africa, almost 5,000 feet taller than Mount St. Helens. And it is not sleeping. It is one of the most active volcanoes on the continent, with eruptions as recent as 2,000. Sit at the base of that volcano at Dibuncha Point, and you are in one of the wettest spots on Earth, roughly 394 inches of rain a year. Seattle gets about 38, so Dibuncha takes everything Seattle gets and does it 10 times over. But here is the part that matters to you. North and South have opposite dry seasons, which means there is never a bad time to come, only the question of which half of the country you want. And the name. In 1472, a Portuguese crew sailed up a river, here saw more shrimp than they could count, and wrote down Rio dos Camarões, River of Prawns. That turned into Cameroon, the only country on Earth named after a shellfish. Before we step through the door into the rest of this journey, tell me where in the world you are watching from and what time it is right now where you are. Drop it in the comments below. Then come with me. A country that contains a whole continent contains the people too. 250 ethnic groups live here, and 279 indigenous languages, the ninth most linguistically diverse country in the world. English and French are both official and equal because Britain and France split this territory after Germany lost it in 1918. Underneath both, everybody speaks pigeon the glue that lets an Anglophone farmer and a Francophone trader close a deal in 30 seconds. So how do 250 groups share one passport? They have a phrase, on est ensemble, we, we are together. People use it as hello, goodbye, sorry, and congratulations. There is a second one, Asia, no English translation. You say it to someone carrying something heavy. It means I see you and I am with you. One story explains this country's stubbornness. 1990, a 38-year-old striker named Roger Miller had already retired when his president phoned and asked him to come back. In Italy, off the bench, he scored four goals. Cameroon beat the defending world champions and became the first African team ever to reach a World Cup quarterfinal. His dance at the corner flag became the way the whole planet celebrates a goal. Four years later in the United States, at 42, he scored again. Oldest goalscorer in World Cup history, the record still stands. From the stadium, let's walk to the palace. Modern Cameroon has a government. It also has more than a hundred kings. In the Northwest, traditional kingdoms called fondoms are still running. The ruler is a Fon and he is not a ceremonial figure. He settles disputes, presides over festivals, and speaks to the ancestors on behalf of everyone. Walk into the palace at Bafout and there are rules shoes off and you never turn your back when you leave. Then there are the spirits. Mami Wata is the water woman, beautiful, powerful, and depending on who you ask, not entirely safe. People believe she lives under a waterfall on the coast. Hold that thought. Deep in the Southeast forest, the Baka Ono Jengi, the spirit of the forest itself, who carries messages between people and the supreme being. And what surprises visitors most, Christianity, Islam, and older beliefs often coexist inside the same family at the same dinner table and nobody finds it strange. Speaking of that forest, it is hiding somebody. In the mountains along the Cameroon-Nigeria border, there is a gorilla that almost nobody has ever seen. It is the cross-river gorilla. Males reach 440 pounds and there are somewhere between 250 and 300 of them left, which makes this the rarest great ape on the planet. Not one of the rarest, the rarest. Most gorillas quietly avoid people. These ones throw things, grass sticks and mud, to drive humans off. That behavior is not recorded in any other gorilla subspecies. It is what happens when your forest sits right against somebody's farm. They are also profoundly alone. Their nearest relatives live 186 miles away, cut off during a dry stretch of the Pleistocene. And here is the part I love. Nobody saved them with a fence. 16 eco-guards patrol the MB mountains a week at a stretch, all of them local, and that forest is managed jointly by 9 villagers. The strategy was simple and human pay the people who know the forest best to protect it. One more resident because this forest does nothing by halves. The Goliath frog a foot long without the legs up to 7.3 pounds. Heavier than your cat and the largest frog in the world. It builds nests by rolling away half-pound rocks to clear a private pool beside a stream, then stands guard. And it does not croak. It whistles. Now let's go eat. If you eat one thing here eat Endole the national dish from Douala. Bitter leaves boiled several times to tame them. Ground, peanuts, dried shrimp and smoked fish, cooked into something rich and nutty and slightly sharp. You eat it with Bobolo fermented cassava wrapped in leaves. A generous plate runs 6 to 10 dollars. Then there is Poulet DG Poulet Directeur General Director General's Chicken. It got the name in the 80s because only the big bosses could afford the ingredients. Chicken peppers, carrots and plantain in spicy tomato sauce. Everybody eats it now. The name just stuck as a joke. In the northwest they make Achu, a soup that is bright yellow from red palm oil. The Basa people make Embongo Chobi, a stew that is deep black because the spices are roasted until they char. You can sit at one table and be served both. One detail I really like the Habanero almost always arrives on the side. Heat here is your decision, not the cook's. Let's step out of the kitchen and into the street. Douala, 6 in the morning. The city sits on the mouth of the Wuri River and the heat is already waiting. It runs on a two-word philosophy people say out loud, no sissier, don't be afraid. But first you have to learn how to move. The real vehicle here is the Benskin, the motorbike taxi. When traffic seizes up and it does the whole city switches to two wheels and a yellow taxi does not work the way you think, you do not hire the car. You shout your destination through the window and if the driver nods, you get in with three strangers already sitting there. You eat at a tornadoes-a-sidewalk kitchen with plastic chairs facing the street, three to five dollars a plate. Inland Yaoundé sits on seven hills at 2,500 feet, so it is cooler. Douala is the loud heart, Yaoundé is the quiet head and in the 70s nearly every neighborhood in Douala had its own band. Remember that one. Now drive three hours out of the city and the clock changes units. Up in the Mandara Mountains, Kapsiki villages of two to six thousand are built from volcanic stone growing sorghum on cut terraces. Out front, women turn corn cobs drying on mats until the whole yard is a sheet of gold. Nobody keeps a market open every day. Each village holds its market on one fixed day and the traders travel the loop. The whole region works like one slow shared body. At sundown, the palm wine goes around not in glasses. The container passes by age hand to hand and in the grass fields thatched houses circle a carved compound with the phone's palace right in the middle of the village, not on a hill, in the middle. Here is the difference that stayed with me. In Douala, people ask what you do. In the village, people ask whose child you are. Two questions, two value systems, one passport. And plenty of Cameroonians live both the city, 11 months a year, a village courtyard at Christmas. Quick question before we cross back over the river. Tomorrow morning, would you rather wake up in the city or in the village, type Benskin for the city palm wine for the village, and subscribe either way, the biggest thing in this country is still ahead of us. Around 500 years before Christ, a Carthaginian navigator named Hanno was sailing down the West African coast when he saw a mountain burning in the dark. He wrote it into his log as Theon Ochima, the chariot of the gods. Scholars believe he was looking at Mount Cameroon, which may make this one of the earliest recorded names in sub-Saharan African history. It has earned it. You can climb it, two days from the town of Bouaia, and the climb is the reason to go. You start in rainforest, so Hamad your shirt gives up, in the first hour, come out into high grassland, where the wind, finally reaches you, and then the green, just, stops. The last stretch, is bare, lava field. Black sharp silent. Four vegetation zones in 48 hours. You are walking the whole country vertically. And once a year, in February, people race it. Up the volcano, and back down, around 23 miles, close to 10,000 feet, of climbing winners, finishing in 4 to 5 hours. They call it the race of hope, and it is one of the hardest races in Africa. Here is the part that gets me. The winners are usually not imported professionals. They are people from Bouaia, and the villages on the mountain's flank, who grew up walking that gradient to school, and to the market. They do not train for the mountain, they were raised by it. And when you reach the summit, turn around. From the highest point in the region, you are looking straight down at the Atlantic. So let's go down there. Four miles south of Kribi the Lobe river, ends its life, doing something almost no river on earth does. It does not join another river, or slide out through an estuary. It falls 65 feet, across a face 330 feet wide, directly into the Atlantic Ocean. You would take a wooden pirogue out, and the boatman gets close enough, that the spray lands on your arms. And here is the detail people do not expect. At low tide, the fresh water and the salt water separate, divided by a thin strip of sand. You can stand on the line river, on one side of your feet, ocean on the other. Locals will tell you Mami Wata lives down there. After 10 minutes at the base of those falls, you stop arguing. Kribi itself is golden sand and grilled prawns. Drive up the coast to Limbe, and the sand turns black volcanic grain, directly beneath the mountain we just climbed. This coastline holds one more story, heavier and far more surprising. Start in 1394. A Tikhar prince named Ensher Yen founded a kingdom at Fumban. It is still there. 19 rulers in unbroken succession, right up to today, a dynasty that has outlasted most of the royal houses of Europe. Now jump to 1896. Sultan Ibrahim Njoya took the throne at 11 years old. He grew up watching his people's history disappear because there was no way to write it down. So he did the thing nobody does. He invented a writing system, from scratch. He called it A-Ka-Yu-Ku, after its first four characters, and refined it down to around 73 signs. No teacher, no template, nothing to borrow from. And he did not stop at the script. 15 books, including romance novels, an encyclopedia of traditional medicine, and a machine to grind corn, which now sits behind glass in a museum. That museum is in his palace. Njoya finished it in 1917, and the Sultan of the Bamun still lives there. The current ruler is his great-grandson. In 2024, he opened a new museum of the Bamun kings with more than 3,000 objects and explained the point in one sentence to show that Africa is not an importer of ideas. And then there is Bimbia, a small port near Limba, where more than 114 slave ships departed. For a long time, almost nobody talked about it. What changed was DNA testing in the United States. African-Americans running ancestry tests kept getting the same answer, Tikar Bamilekebassa, Cameroon, among them the mayor of Denver. In 2016, the U.S. Ambassador's Fund committed $1.14 million to preserving the site, and when those groups arrive, the chief of Bimbia meets them at the water, pours a libation, and blesses them home. And the people who make that trip describe it not as a departure point, but as a return. Now go as far north as the road takes you. The Mandara Mountains look like nothing else in Africa. Hundreds of volcanic plugs, the hardened throats of dead volcanoes stand straight out of the like stone pyramids. The tallest is Kapsiki Peak, 4,016 feet of vertical rock. At its base sits Rumziki, a village of fewer than 5,000, its stone houses blending so completely into the slope that from a distance you will miss them. And Rumziki has a specialist. He is a blacksmith, and he reeds crabs. He puts a land crab in a clay pot ringed with small sticks, covers it weights, then reeds the pattern the sticks are left in. People come at first light from all around about the harvest, a marriage, someone who is sick. Up here blacksmiths are their own social class. They work iron reed the future and handle the funerals. One man, three jobs, all essential. Back south into Korup, a rainforest over 60 million years old, older than the Amazon. When forests across Africa shrank during the ice ages, this one held on, which is why it is packed with things that exist nowhere else. Put Korup together with the Cross River region and you get 17 primate species, close to a third of every primate species in Africa, in one corner of one country. The animal you hope to hear under that canopy is the African forest elephant, smaller than the savannah elephant, straighter tusks, quieter than you would believe. They are the gardeners here spreading seeds of hundreds of tree species, which means this forest was largely planted by elephants. Further southeast, the Dijar Faunal Reserve is a UNESCO site, 90% still undisturbed, almost completely encircled by a bend in the river. Then go north to Waza Open Savannah, elephant's giraffe's antelope, same passport, two ecosystems with nothing to do with each other. Remember those neighborhood bands in Douala, this is what they made. Makossa was born on the banks of the Wuri. In 1972, a saxophonist named Manu Dibango recorded Sol Makossa, released as the B-side of a football anthem. The B-side. That B-side detonated in the New York underground disco scene in 1973. A decade later, that same chanted refrain turned up on the opening track of the best-selling album in recorded history. Dibango filed suit in 2009 and the case was settled out of court. The riff has been reused across three generations since. Dibango became the first African musician to land a top 40 hit in the United States. He toured America for two years and played the Apollo. He also mentored Richard Boner today, one of the most respected jazz musicians alive living in New York. And Makossa is not the only sound. We could see a 6-8 rhythm from the betty around Yaoundé is the country's other pulse. But the strangest instrument in Cameroon is not in a nightclub, it is a river. In the southeastern forest live the Baka. They build domed leaf shelters called Mongulu in a few hours and take them down when the forest calls them elsewhere. Their society has no chiefs and no hierarchy. Decisions belong to everybody. And then there is Likwindi. Women and girls stand, waist-deep in the river cup, their hands and strike the surface, trapping air underneath, so every hit lands like a drum. Each person holds a different rhythm. Layer them and you get a full piece of music with no instrument in sight. Here is what makes it beautiful. That sound cannot exist underwater. It needs the boundary between water and air to strike against. The instrument is not the hands. The instrument is the surface of the river. Baka polyphonic singing is recognized by UNESCO and researchers note Europe did not reach this level of vocal complexity until the 14th century, from drums made of water to drums made of bronze. Every two years at the end of November, Fumban fills up for Ngun, giant metal drums, processions, royal dress, horsemen reenacting battles from six centuries ago. It is loud and spectacular and none of that is the main event. The main event is this. At the center of Ngun, the people are entitled to stand up and question the king in public about the last two years, out loud, in front of everybody. Researchers call it one of the oldest surviving accountability rituals on Earth. And here is the number that makes it real. The edition held in December of 2024 was the 548th. It has run continuously since before most modern countries existed. UNESCO listed it as intangible cultural heritage in 2023. Then, in the first two weeks of December, the coast takes its turn. Ngondo is the water festival of the Sawa people on the Wuri estuary in Douala. Canoe races, wrestling, dancing, but the heart of it happens under the surface. A chosen man goes down into the river to meet the djengu, the water spirits, and by tradition, he comes back up carrying a message for the year ahead with his clothes completely dry. It was stopped in 1981, brought back in 1991, and returned bigger than it left. Which means the two biggest celebrations in Cameroon both land in December, right when most of you have time off. Here is the practical stuff. When to go. December, January, and February are the sweet spot dry, 79 to 84 degrees Fahrenheit, and both major festivals are running. Come in February for the Race of Hope. November through April is the dry season in the North Waza and Rumsiki. June through September is the dry window in the South. And remember, the rule from the beginning, half of this country is always in good weather. What it costs. Budget travel runs $30 to $50 a day, mid-range $80 to $120. Street food is $3 to $5 a plate. A restaurant meal, $10 to $15. A local beer, about a dollar. The train between Douala and Yaoundé is $10 to $17, one of the best value rides in Central Africa. Flights from the U.S. start north of $900, so book 45 to 60 days out. Park entry is $5 to $20, and a guide is mandatory in most parks. Paperwork. Cameroon runs an Avisa. You apply for online, usually processed, in about three business days, typically $100 to $200. Your passport needs six months of validity. Yellow fever vaccination is required, and they check it at the airport. Apply only through the official portal. A few rules that will save you trouble. Do not photograph airports bridges, military sites, or government buildings. Agree your taxi fare before you get in. Carry cash. Most local restaurants and markets do not take cards. And check current travel advisories, and use a local guide for remote regions. Here is what stays with you after you leave. Black sand at the foot of a volcano. A sailor named 25 centuries ago. A yard of gold corn drying in front of a house built from the mountain it sits on. A king's handwriting in an alphabet he invented himself, because he refused to let his people be forgotten. A chief pouring water on the ground to welcome home the descendants of people who left in chains. And a river played like a drum by women who never needed an instrument. You can drive from desert to rainforest here between breakfast and dinner. But that is not what this place teaches you. What it teaches you is that you never had to choose. City or village. English or French. Ancient or modern. Cameroon holds all of it at once inside one set of borders and asks what took you so long. If this one moved you, my Côte d'Ivoire video is the next stamp in the passport. Go and get it. Thank you for staying with me all the way to the end of this one. Subscribe and we will cross another border together soon. Honest Ensemble. We are together.