Ahmadou Ahidjo

Ahmadou Ahidjo was a Cameroonian politician who served as the first President of Cameroon from independence in 1960 until his resignation in 1982.

He was born on 24 August 1924 in Garoua, in the northern part of the French Cameroun mandate, to a Fulani village chief father and a Peul mother. He was raised as a Muslim in a region whose Islamic and Sahelian culture differed sharply from the Christian and animist south.

He attended the École Primaire Supérieure in Yaoundé and trained as a radio operator with the colonial postal service, working in Mokolo, Bertoua, and Ngaoundéré. Entering politics in the late 1940s, he was elected to the territorial assembly of Cameroun in 1947 and to the French Union assembly in Paris in 1953.

Ahidjo became Prime Minister of French Cameroun in 1958 and led the territory to independence on 1 January 1960, becoming its first president. He oversaw the 1961 reunification with the former British Southern Cameroons, built a one-party state under the Cameroon National Union, and pursued cautious economic development before handing power to Paul Biya in November 1982. He went into exile in Senegal and France and died in Dakar on 30 November 1989.

His name Ahmadou is a West African form of the Arabic name Ahmad, derived from the root ḥ-m-d meaning "to praise," and shared with one of the names of the Prophet Muhammad. Ahmadou is a masculine given name common in Muslim communities of the Sahel and West Africa.