Ahmadou Ahidjo

He was married to Germaine Ahidjo.

He died of a heart attack on November 30, 1989, in Dakar Senegal.

There is a stadium named after him in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon

He was born on August 24, 1924 in the village of Nassarao near Garoua in Cameroon. His father was a Fulani village chief but his mother was a Fulani slave.

Ahidjo's mother, who was Muslim, sent him to Quranic school. When he failed an important school exam at the age of 14, he quit school and started working as a veterinary assistant.

At the age of 15, he enrolled at the Ecole Priamaire Superieure, an elite school in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon..

After graduating from the school at age of 18, Ahidjo joined the postal service where he worked as a radio and telegraph operator. His job required him to travel extensively throughout the country, as a result of which he made important contacts in key cities.

In 1947, at the tender age of 22, he entered politics and was elected to the Cameroon territorial assembly.

From 1953–1956, he served in Paris as Cameroon's representative in the Assembly of the French Union.

He served as Deputy Prime Minister and minister of the interior in the first Cameroon government in 1957.

In 1958, when the Prime Minister André-Marie Mbida's government fell, he formed his own party, the Cameroonian Union (CU), and became the new Prime Minister.

Over a span of three decades, Ahmadou Ahidjo successfully ruled a vast multi-ethnic, multi-racial patchwork of different tribes. He led Cameroon’s transition from a French colonial territory to a fully independent nation.