Contested
On 11 and 12 February 1961, a UN-supervised plebiscite separately asked voters in Northern Cameroons and Southern Cameroons to choose union with the Federation of Nigeria or with the Republic of Cameroon. The North chose Nigeria (59.97 percent) while the South chose Cameroon (70.50 percent); the former joined Nigeria on 1 June 1961 and the latter became West Cameroon on 1 October 1961.
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This topic has more than one reading. Camerpedia presents them all, on equal footing, without favouring any one of them.
Interpretation of the vote is disputed: for some, it was a regular exercise in self-determination organised under United Nations supervision; for others, notably Anglophone Cameroonian voices, the absence of a separate independence option for Southern Cameroons flawed the choice put to voters.
Part of the Anglophone Cameroonian press and public opinion argues that the 1961 ballot did not offer Southern Cameroons a separate independence option, unlike other British trust territories consulted around the same time. For this view, that omission shaped a choice that should have been more open, and today feeds the claims of the Anglophone movement.
According to UNESCO's General History of Africa, the February 1961 plebiscite belongs to the United Nations' broader practice of consulting the populations of trust territories before trusteeship ended, comparable to other self-determination votes organised in Africa in the same period. The two parts of the British Cameroons voted separately between two options clearly set out by the United Nations.
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