The Cameroon-Nigerian Boundary
The country bordering on the Nigerian boundary from Yola to Obokum on the Cross River, a distance of 360 miles, and the peoples inhabiting the several districts it passes through, have been admirably dealt with by Captain W. V. Nugent, R.A. Captain Nugent, who had been a member of the Commission under Colonel Whitlock which surveyed this area between 1907 and 1909, was sent out in August, 1912, to mark the boundary between the Cameroon and the Nigerias along the line which had been previously settled approximately on the map at a conference between the British and German Governments. The British Commissioner and his assistants met Lieut. Detzner, the German Commissioner, on October 8th, 1912, and the work of demarcation continued without interruption for six months, during which time 116 pillars were placed in position. Both Commissioners wrote accounts of this Anglo-German Frontier Demarcation Expedition, but, while Lieut. Detzner’s official article on the subject, published in Deutsches Kolonialblatt (1913) is a dull, pedantic and unsatisfactory document, the paper read by Captain Nugent before the Royal Geographical Society in March, 1914, is compact of information and extremely interesting, and it is from his descriptions that I have derived the following details and extracts.
The frontier line divides the mountains, torrential streams and sparsely-inhabited areas of the Cameroons form the wide fertile plains, great navigable waterways and densely populated districts on the Nigerian side of the border. The fact that Benue River and its three great southern tributaries, the Teraba, Donga and Katsena Rivers, all rise on the plateaux of the Central Cameroon, and only become navigable for canoes upon entering Nigerian territory, explain the unequal distribution of man over the country; for, while the savage pagan tribes have withdrawn to the almost inaccessible hilltops, the more civilised agricultural and trading peoples have kept to the well-watered plains.