Kamerun—together with the German colony of Togo, westward along the African coast—had been occupied by the British and French early in WWI and were formally divvied up between them at Geneva in July 1922. This obverse appears on both the French Cameroun and Togo coin series of 1924-26, and except for the place names, the reverses are also the same.
Life for this 1924 2-franc piece was tough in the beginning and it just didn’t get better. The indigenous population had liked and trusted the German silver marks of pre-WWI Kameroun, and though for a time French silver softened the loss of the German marks, the debased postwar francs caused real trouble.
WWII and further uncertainties regarding French coinage finished the job. Folks feared they would be caught in some sort of change-over and their coins would no longer be good.
In her book Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, Janet Lee Roitman writes of the long-running coinage difficulties evident in French Cameroun by 1937, and that this “was reiterated in 1951…‘The Chief Administrator of the Region of Margui-Wandala complains that the cellars of the offices at Mokolo and Mora are glutted with metal money…the natives not wanting it anymore…there is no use recirculating it.’”
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