This book addresses Cameroons culture, education and language policies since independence, scholarship on and vigorous debate about them, their bearings on different visions of national development, and their place in the political struggle between autocracy and democracy since 1990. A synoptic view of half a centurys key experiences, issues and fault lines emerges.

This book provides an in-depth study of the nature and pattern of educational development in Cameroon from 1844 to the post-independence period. Drawing upon a wide range of sources including hitherto unused archival material and formal interviews with people involved in Cameroon’s pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial educational traditions, the result is an elegantly written history enlivened by illustrative texts and archival pictures.