ABSTRACT
With its wide latitudinal (2-13°N over 1500 km) and meridional (9-16°E over 800 km) extension, Cameroon by its triangular shape, holds a unique position in Africa. Its location above the Congo Craton and opening to the Atlantic Ocean gives it a special, morphologically pivotal, position on the African continent. Cameroon has many mountains and basins, and among these last, are included, in the north, the endorheic basin of Lake Chad and the Doba Trough; in the west, the Cretaceous Benue Trough; in the southeast the Congo basin; in the south-west, the Mamfe basin in the Douala coastal basin. Indeed, all the geodynamic events that marked the African continent (since the break-up of Gondwana to the Present) are recorded in Cameroon. Globally, it summarizes the main morphological features of Africa. This country also intersects the main morphoand bio-climatic tropical areas, and the dynamics of landscapes follow these contours. Thus, the basins and pediplains, bristling with inselbergs and dominated by massive concave shaped slopes observed in the Sahel region of the North, contrast with large polyconvex shaped features, marked by forest degradation, in the southern Cameroon plateau overhanging the Atlantic coastal plain. Between these two entities, mountain ranges emerged built up by the endogenous processes (volcanism). These landscapes are limited by steep tectonic and lithological escarpments. They are essentially cut in the Precambrian basement, and were the result of a long development marked by planation surfaces, derived from an alternating process of backwearing and downwearing. In fact, the geological diversity explains the morphological structure of the country and, therefore, understanding of Cameroonian landscape dynamics has come from a thorough grasp of these features by pedologists, geologists and geophysicists. For soil scientists, correlations in soil studies conducted in West Africa by Grandin (1976) and Boulangé (1984), produced the first hypothesis developed for their study are based, in part, on the presence and age of a bauxite cuirass.
