On a Sunday morning along North Frederick Avenue, the parking lot of an African market fills with families in their church best, the trunk of a sedan opening to reveal a cooler of bitterleaf and a bag of garri carried home for the week. This is one of the quieter facts of the Washington suburbs: the Cameroonians in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the wider Montgomery County around it, form one of the largest Cameroonian communities in the United States. They are nurses and pharmacists, asylum seekers and engineers, many of them English speakers fleeing a war most of their American neighbours have never heard of.
The Place
Gaithersburg sits in upper Montgomery County, about twenty miles north-west of Washington, straddling Interstate 270 as it climbs toward Frederick. It began in 1765 as a farming settlement called Log Town and stayed rural until a B&O Railroad stop arrived in 1872. The real change came after the 1970s, when the corridor between the capital and the federal research campuses filled with subdivisions, office parks and biotech laboratories.
Today the west side of the city holds its wealthier, planned neighbourhoods: the award-winning Kentlands, designed in the late 1980s by the new-urbanist planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and the Washingtonian Center, better known as the Rio, a lakeside ring of shops and restaurants. It is also one of the most internationally minded places in America. Roughly 39 per cent of Gaithersburg residents are foreign born, more than double the national rate, and a WalletHub study once ranked it the second most diverse city in the country.
That diversity is layered. The same city that hosts a large Cameroonian community is also home to the Indians in Gaithersburg, to Hispanic families who make up the single largest ethnic group, and to East African and Caribbean households drawn by the same federal and biotech economy. Gaithersburg is less a melting pot than a set of overlapping homelands sharing one ZIP code.
How It Became Cameroonian
The Cameroonian story in Maryland is older than the recent headlines suggest, and it splits into clear chapters.
The professionals, 1960s onward
The first Cameroonians to settle in the United States arrived in the 1960s, chasing the higher education that was scarce at home. They came as students and stayed as professionals. The pattern set then has held ever since: most Cameroonian immigrants who reached America were licensed people, doctors, engineers, nurses, pharmacists and computer programmers. In the Washington region, with its hospitals, universities and federal agencies, that profile found its natural home.
The refugees of the 1990s
During the 1990s a second wave arrived under a different pressure. Political turmoil at home pushed many Cameroonians out as refugees and asylum seekers, and the metropolitan Washington area, already holding a foothold of earlier arrivals, drew them in. Montgomery County and neighbouring Prince George’s County were becoming one of the most significant hubs for African diaspora communities anywhere in the United States, and Cameroonians were a central part of that.
The Anglophone Crisis and the recent surge
The largest and most recent chapter began far away, in the English-speaking corner of a French-majority country. On 11 October 2016, lawyers in Bamenda, in Cameroon’s Northwest Region, went on strike, joined by teachers across the Northwest and Southwest, to defend the common-law system and English-language schooling of the Anglophone minority. The protests in Bamenda, Buea and Limbe were peaceful at first. The government’s response was not.
Within a week more than a hundred demonstrators had been arrested and people had died. The repression hardened opinion toward secession, and in late 2017 the standoff escalated into an armed conflict between the Cameroonian military and separatist fighters seeking an independent Ambazonia. By the time the world counted the cost, more than half a million people had been internally displaced and tens of thousands had fled abroad.
Many of them came to Maryland. The number of Cameroonians living in the state rose by roughly 10,000 between 2017 and 2023, and the most recent Census Bureau figures put the Cameroonian population of Maryland above 29,000, the largest of any state in the country. Within that, Prince George’s County ranks first in the nation for Cameroonian residents and Montgomery County, which contains Gaithersburg, ranks second. A great many of the newest arrivals were Anglophones from the very towns where the strikes began, people for whom English was already a first language and Maryland a place where relatives had already settled.
Their legal footing was fragile. The federal government granted Cameroonians Temporary Protected Status in 2022 and renewed it in October 2023, shielding people who could not safely return. At its height some 5,200 Cameroonians in the United States held that status. Its termination, announced for August 2025, left many Maryland families in fear, a reminder that for the most recent wave, home in Gaithersburg has often been provisional.
The Landmarks
All African Food Store, 18525 North Frederick Avenue, Gaithersburg. A neighbourhood grocer where the freezers hold the ingredients of home: smoked fish, cocoyam, bitterleaf and the spices for an Achu or an Eru. For families from the Northwest and Southwest, a shop like this is where a homesick week gets repaired, and where word of a christening or a memorial passes from cart to cart.
Rainbow African Restaurant, Gaithersburg. Open since 2003, it is one of the longer-standing West and Central African kitchens in the area, the kind of room where a plate of jollof and a familiar accent across the table can stand in for a country left behind. It belongs to the small constellation of African restaurants that the Cameroonian community has folded into its weekend life.
Savanna International Market, Gaithersburg area. One of several African groceries that have multiplied along the Frederick Road corridor as the community grew. These markets function as informal town squares, the place to find a phone card to Bamenda or a leaflet for an upcoming cultural night.
St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, 11701 Clopper Road, Gaithersburg. A long-established Catholic parish in the heart of Gaithersburg. Catholicism runs deep in Anglophone Cameroon, whose Archdiocese of Bamenda anchors religious life back home, and the county’s many Catholic churches have become gathering points for Cameroonian families on Sundays.
The Cameroonian Catholic Community of the DMV. A diocesan ministry that began about a decade ago when the Maryland community first gathered at Church of the Resurrection parish in nearby Burtonsville. It carries the English-language hymns and devotions of home into Maryland sanctuaries, knitting scattered families across Montgomery and Prince George’s counties into one congregation.
The Washingtonian Center, the Rio, Gaithersburg. The city’s lakeside shopping and dining district is where the second generation, the children of nurses and engineers, meets friends and marks birthdays. It is the ordinary American backdrop against which a particular heritage is quietly maintained.
The African Affairs Advisory Group, Montgomery County. A formal liaison between the county’s African communities and its government, it is part of why the region has become such a magnet. Through partners such as the All Cameroonian Cultural and Development Foundation, it helps plan the African Heritage celebrations where Cameroonian music, dress and food take their place each year.
Where They Came From
The deepest roots of Gaithersburg’s Cameroonian community run to the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest Regions, to towns like Bamenda, Buea and Limbe. These are the Anglophone areas whose distinct legal and educational traditions, inherited from British colonial rule, set them apart from the French-speaking majority and lie at the heart of the conflict that drove so many abroad.
That linguistic inheritance shaped where people landed. Arriving already fluent in English, Anglophone Cameroonians slotted into the Washington region’s professional economy with comparatively little friction, and they followed family and church ties that pointed, again and again, to Maryland. The earlier arrivals of the 1960s and 1990s had built the bridgehead. The Anglophone Crisis sent a generation across it.
The francophone south and east of Cameroon are present too, in smaller numbers, but the centre of gravity in Gaithersburg leans Anglophone. The result is a community whose accents and church traditions trace a line back to British-influenced western Cameroon, and whose professional habits, the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist, echo the same instincts that drew earlier educated migrants to the well-off suburbs north of the capital. It is a pattern visible across affluent Montgomery County, from the Greeks in Bethesda to the African newcomers further up Route 355.
Gaithersburg Today
Gaithersburg today is a city where more than half of residents speak a language other than English at home, where the African market and the biotech campus sit a short drive apart, and where Cameroonian families have become a settled thread of suburban life. The Cameroonians in Gaithersburg are caregivers and behavioural-health workers, nurses and small-business owners, raising children who will grow up American with an ear for Pidgin and a taste for Eru.
It is also a community living under strain. The ending of Temporary Protected Status has unsettled thousands of Maryland Cameroonians, including many in Montgomery County, and immigrant-rights groups such as CASA have gone to court on their behalf. For families who fled a war, the fear of being sent back to it has not left the kitchen table.
Still, the institutions endure. The churches keep their Sunday rhythms, the cultural foundation keeps its calendar, the markets keep their freezers stocked. Gaithersburg is not the kind of place that names a quarter after the people who fill it. The Cameroonian presence here is woven in rather than announced, which is its own form of permanence. Among Maryland’s other African and immigrant communities, from the Ethiopians in Silver Spring to the Nigerians in Bowie, the Cameroonians of Gaithersburg hold a particular place, English-speaking exiles who found, in the diverse suburbs north of Washington, a country that could hold their language and their grief at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Cameroonians live in Gaithersburg and Montgomery County?
The Cameroonians in Gaithersburg are part of Montgomery County, which the Census American Community Survey ranks second in the nation for Cameroonian population, with about 5,400 Cameroonian immigrants. Maryland overall holds more than 29,000 Cameroonians, the largest of any state.
Why did so many Cameroonians settle in Maryland?
Cameroonians first came to the Washington area in the 1960s for higher education and as professionals, then as refugees in the 1990s. The recent surge was driven by the Anglophone Crisis, and family and church ties kept directing new arrivals to Maryland.
What is the Anglophone Crisis that brought recent arrivals?
It is an armed conflict that grew out of October 2016 protests by English-speaking lawyers and teachers in Cameroon’s Northwest and Southwest Regions. After a violent government crackdown, it escalated into war by late 2017, displacing more than 500,000 people and pushing tens of thousands abroad.
Where in Cameroon do most Gaithersburg families come from?
Many trace their roots to the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest Regions, including towns such as Bamenda, Buea and Limbe. Their shared English language helped them integrate into the Washington region’s professional economy.
Are the Cameroonians in Gaithersburg English speakers?
A large share are Anglophones from western Cameroon, where English is a first language alongside Cameroonian Pidgin. That fluency is one reason the Cameroonians in Gaithersburg settled so readily into Maryland’s hospitals, agencies and businesses.
What happened with Temporary Protected Status for Cameroonians?
The United States granted Cameroonians Temporary Protected Status in 2022 and renewed it in 2023, covering about 5,200 people. Its termination, announced for August 2025, left many Maryland families anxious about being returned to an active conflict.
If your family’s story passed through Gaithersburg, or any of the places Cameroonians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the hills of Bamenda and the streets of Buea, to a Sunday Mass and a market freezer along Frederick Avenue, to wherever you are now.