Lost history · 1884–2008
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For over a century Bakassi was run from Calabar. Then a court in The Hague ruled it belonged to Cameroon. In August 2008 Nigeria handed over the last of it, and many of its fishermen had to start again somewhere else.
Bakassi is a peninsula at the far eastern end of the Gulf of Guinea. It sits between the Cross River estuary, close to Calabar, and the Rio del Rey estuary to the east. It is not one solid piece of land but a cluster of low islands, mostly covered in mangrove, about 665 square kilometres in all. Nobody agrees on how many people live there. Estimates run from 150,000 to 300,000.
What makes Bakassi special is the sea around it. Here the warm Guinea Current, flowing east, runs into the cold Benguela Current coming up from the south. In Efik they have names: Aya Efiat for the warm one and Aya Ubenekang for the cold one. Where the two meet, they throw up huge foaming breakers that keep rolling towards the shore. The result is shoals packed with fish, shrimp and other sea life. It is one of the richest fishing grounds around, and most people on the peninsula live from it.
People often call Bakassi "oil-rich". That is not quite true. No oil deposits worth producing commercially have been found there, although at least eight multinational oil companies have explored the peninsula and its waters, drawn by the big finds elsewhere in Nigeria. In 2012 a Chinese oil firm announced new oil and gas discoveries in the area. The oil talk gave Bakassi a value in the eyes of governments far beyond its fish.
The people of Bakassi are mainly Oron people, with others from Cross River and Akwa Ibom, communities tied to Calabar and the Nigerian coast by language, trade and family. For most of the twentieth century, nobody in Calabar would have thought of Bakassi as anywhere but home.
That is what makes the rest of the story so strange. A place run from Calabar for over a hundred years ended up, by a court's decision, inside another country.
The roots of the problem go back to the Scramble for Africa. On 10 September 1884, Queen Victoria's government signed a Treaty of Protection with the King and Chiefs of Akwa Akpa, the town Europeans called Old Calabar. That treaty let Britain control the whole territory around Calabar, Bakassi included. In practice Bakassi became part of what turned into Nigeria, though the border was never properly marked.
But Britain was not alone in the region. Germany held Kamerun next door, and in 1913 Britain and Germany signed a treaty dividing their spheres of control. Cameroon would later point to that 1913 agreement as proof that Bakassi was on its side of the line.
In 1961 the Southern Cameroons voted to leave Nigeria and join Cameroon. Bakassi, though, stayed under Calabar's administration. Then, in the 1970s, came two more agreements: the Yaoundé II Declaration of 4 April 1971 and the Maroua Declaration of 1 June 1975. They drew a maritime line through the Cross River estuary, to the west of the peninsula, which implied Bakassi was Cameroonian. Nigeria never ratified the Maroua agreement. Cameroon treated it as valid anyway.
Tension built. In 1981 the two countries came close to war over Bakassi and an area around Lake Chad, at the other end of their long shared border. More armed clashes followed in the early 1990s. On 29 March 1994, Cameroon took the case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
It was a hugely complicated case. The judges had to dig through more than a century of diplomatic papers. Nigeria leaned on Anglo-German letters from 1885 and on the 1884 treaty with the Calabar chiefs. Cameroon leaned on the 1913 treaty and the 1970s declarations. On 10 October 2002, the court gave its answer. Based mainly on the Anglo-German agreements, it found that Bakassi belonged to Cameroon. Nigeria was told to hand it over, but the people living there did not have to move or change nationality.
Nigeria was furious. Chief Richard Akinjide, a former Attorney-General who had been part of Nigeria's legal team, called the ruling "50% international law and 50% international politics" and "a complete fraud". For a while Nigeria simply kept its troops in place.
The United Nations backed the court, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan stepped in to mediate. On 13 June 2006, in talks he led in New York, President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Paul Biya settled the matter. Nigeria agreed to pull out its troops within 60 days and leave Bakassi fully to Cameroon within two years. Many on the peninsula opposed being handed over, and in July 2006 some groups even declared a "Democratic Republic of Bakassi".
The handover went ahead. Nigeria began withdrawing some 3,000 troops from 1 August 2006, and on 14 August the northern part of the peninsula was formally handed over. In November 2007 the Nigerian Senate declared the withdrawal illegal, but the government did nothing about it. On 14 August 2008, exactly two years after the first transfer, the last of Bakassi went to Cameroon.
For many fishermen, that meant leaving. They were first resettled in a place called New Bakassi, which they said was already occupied and fit only for farmers, not people who lived from the sea. They were moved again to Akpabuyo, and eventually founded a new community called Dayspring.
There is one odd footnote. Nigeria's 1999 Constitution still lists Bakassi among the country's 774 local governments. On paper, in Nigeria's own founding law, the peninsula is still home.
