Bamenda

The Bamenda highlands were settled by grassfields peoples who organised themselves into fondoms — kingdoms ruled by a fon with sacred authority, regulatory societies and titled notables. Mankon, Nkwen, Bafut and their neighbours were established well before the colonial period, trading, raiding and intermarrying across the valley, and the city that exists today was built on their lands.

German forces reached the highlands at the end of the 19th century, fighting a series of campaigns against Bafut and Mankon, and established a station on the escarpment above the valley in the early 20th century because the higher ground was cooler and healthier. After the First World War the territory passed to Britain, which administered the Southern Cameroons as part of Nigeria and made Bamenda a provincial headquarters; English schooling, common law and the Baptist and Presbyterian missions took root, and the settlement spread down the cliff onto the valley floor.

When Southern Cameroons voted in 1961 to join newly independent Cameroon, Bamenda became the main city of the English-speaking north-west. It was a centre of opposition politics from 1990, when the Social Democratic Front was launched here at a rally after which six people were killed by security forces. Grievances over the marginalisation of English-language law and education brought lawyers' and teachers' strikes in 2016, followed by protests and a crackdown; from 2017 an armed separatist conflict has been fought across the Northwest and Southwest regions, with Bamenda at its centre.

Bamenda is the main city of the grassfields. The fondoms that make up the city — Mankon, Nkwen, Nsongwa and others — keep palaces, councils of notables and masked regulatory societies whose appearances at funerals, enthronements and annual dances are the high points of the year. Carved stools and doorposts, beaded thrones and masks, indigo ndop cloth and elephant masquerade costumes belong to a court art shared across the highlands.

Language marks the city out. Cameroonian Pidgin English is the everyday speech of markets, taxis and bars; English is used in school, church and court; and grassfields languages such as Mankon and Nkwen are spoken at home. Presbyterian, Baptist and Catholic churches, all rooted in 19th- and 20th-century missions, anchor social life, and choirs and church associations are important networks.

Funerals — usually celebrations of a long life, with all-night wakes, dancing and the return of family members from the coast and abroad — are the city's biggest social events. Football, music and comedy in Pidgin thrive among a young population, and Bamenda has a long reputation for political outspokenness. Since 2017 much of this public life has been curtailed by lockdowns, curfews and displacement, and many ceremonies now happen in smaller and quieter form.

The city has a population of about 600,000, which makes it one of Cameroon's larger cities, and it has absorbed many people displaced from the surrounding countryside as well as losing others to Douala, Yaoundé and abroad.

The economy rests on trade, farming and public services. The highlands around the city are among the most intensively farmed land in Cameroon, producing maize, beans, potatoes, vegetables and arabica coffee, and Bamenda's traders move that produce to the coastal cities. Commercial Avenue holds the banks, shops and transport agencies; the regional administration, hospitals, schools and the university employ many others; and small workshops, tailoring and motorcycle taxis absorb much of the rest.

Everyday life is shaped by the conflict. Lockdowns called for particular days close shops and empty the streets, curfews shorten the evening, schools have lost years of teaching, and checkpoints slow every journey. Families rely heavily on remittances from relatives abroad. Between these disruptions the ordinary rhythm persists: markets in the morning, taxis grinding up the escarpment, football on open ground in the afternoon and grills lit along the main roads at dusk.

Achu is the dish of the Northwest and of Bamenda in particular: cocoyam pounded until smooth, shaped into a mound with a hollow in the centre and eaten by hand with a yellow soup, a spicy sauce of palm oil emulsified with limestone water and flavoured with bush spices, beef, cow skin and dried fish. It is the food of ceremonies as well as of ordinary days.

The everyday staple is corn fufu with njama njama, stewed huckleberry greens, a combination sold in every eating house. Around it are beans with fried plantain for breakfast, rice with groundnut or tomato sauce, kati kati — chicken grilled over wood and served in palm oil — and pepper soup. The highland farms supply potatoes, carrots, cabbage, beans and avocados, and cattle from the Mbororo herds on the surrounding hills provide beef.

Street food is straightforward: soya skewers dusted with spiced groundnut, roast fish with pepper sauce, roast plantain and maize, puff-puff and groundnuts sold in twists of paper. Palm wine is the traditional drink, brought in from the lower valleys, and locally brewed corn beer appears at ceremonies; arabica coffee grown in the highlands is more often exported than drunk at home.