1000 Francs St. Blessed Matrona

Matrona of Moscow — born blind in 1885, canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2004 — is among the most venerated saints in contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, with her relics at the Pokrovsky Convent drawing longer queues than Lenin's tomb on many days. Cameroon has no ecclesiastical or historical connection to her whatsoever. The issue belongs to a well-documented pattern in which the Yaoundé government licenses its minting authority to European distributors producing collector coins targeting niche devotional markets, primarily in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The actual minting was almost certainly contracted through a European private mint rather than the Cameroonian state.