Cameroon

Cameroon is often called Africa in miniature for its geography, and the religious map follows the same compression. The south and west are Christian, divided between Catholic missions and the Presbyterian and Baptist traditions that came through Douala and the coast, with Baptist work beginning under Jamaican and British missionaries in the 1840s. The north is Muslim, and its authority structures date from the Fulani jihad of Usman dan Fodio in the early nineteenth century, which established emirates here as it did across northern Nigeria. The lamidats, the Fulani chiefdoms, still combine political and religious office.

Traditional religion is practised widely and openly rather than covertly, and in the western highlands it is inseparable from chieftaincy. Among the Bamileke and the Bamum the fon or sultan is a ritual figure, the skulls of ancestors are kept and fed, and the secret societies attached to the palace hold specific ceremonial functions. Some of those societies are closed and their business is not published; the atlas records that they exist and are closed rather than describing what is done in them.

The country has been under two sustained pressures. Boko Haram has attacked the Far North since 2014, striking mosques as well as churches, since its targets include Muslims who reject it. The anglophone conflict in the northwest and southwest since 2016 has damaged church institutions, closed mission schools and hospitals, and displaced clergy, with religious leaders on several occasions the only parties talking to both sides.

Ibrahim Njoya, sultan of the Bamum at Foumban from the 1880s until the French deposed him in 1931, is one of the few rulers anywhere to have invented a writing system and then used it to record his own religion.

The script came first. Beginning in the 1890s Njoya devised a set of signs for the Bamum language and revised it repeatedly over some three decades, moving from a largely pictographic system of several hundred characters toward a syllabary of fewer than a hundred. He established schools to teach it, had a printing capacity developed, and used it for a legal code, a pharmacopoeia, a map of his kingdom and a history of the Bamum people and their dynasty. That history is a primary source written from inside an African kingdom in its own script, which is rare.

The religion is the less known part. Njoya moved between Bamum traditional practice, Islam, which had reached the court through Fulani contact, and the Christianity of the German missionaries who arrived under colonial rule. Rather than choosing, he attempted a synthesis, composing a religious text of his own that drew on all three and instituting it at court. It did not outlast him as a movement.

The French removed him to Yaounde in 1931 and he died there in 1933. His script fell out of general use, the palace archive survived, and there has been a sustained revival effort in recent decades, with the manuscripts digitised, the script taught again in Foumban and the Bamum palace museum operating as its centre.

Bamum practice today combines Islam, which most of the population now follows, with the ritual obligations of the palace, which continue.