Kamerun

Overview

Kamerun was a Central African colony of the German Empire from 1884 to 1916, centered on today's Republic of Cameroon but at its height also including northern Gabon and Congo, western Central African Republic, southwestern Chad, and northeastern Nigeria. (The table's 1868–1870 dates and tiny area refer to the pre-colonial German presence: Hamburg's C. Woermann company established the first German trading post in the Duala area of the Kamerun (Wouri) River delta in 1868, followed by Jantzen & Thormählen in 1874.)

History

German merchants built banana and other plantations around Duala and ran scheduled steamship lines to Hamburg, while the region remained under informal British commercial influence. In 1884, Adolph Woermann, as spokesman for the West African trading houses, petitioned Berlin for imperial protection; Chancellor Otto von Bismarck—long a colonial skeptic—relented under commercial pressure and Scramble-for-Africa prestige politics. Gustav Nachtigal arrived in July 1884 and signed treaties with Duala chiefs; the Protectorate of Kamerun was proclaimed on 17 August 1884. Administration was initially chartered to the trading companies, but their failures forced direct imperial government.

The 1890–1906 expansionary era was defined by Governor Jesko von Puttkamer (1895–1906), whose brutal campaigns against the Bali and other peoples, use of armed proxy chiefdoms, massacres (notably at Nachtigal Falls), mutilations, and "man tithes" of forced plantation labor earned the German colonies the nickname "Flogging Colonies." The economy rested on plantations (bananas, rubber, cocoa, palm products) and trade; two railways were built from Duala inland (to the Manenguba mountains and to Makak on the Nyong), along with postal, telegraph, and river networks. The indigenous slave trade was formally banned in 1902, though slave raiding in the north was tolerated in practice. In 1911 the Agadir Crisis settlement (Treaty of Fez) added Neukamerun, vast territories ceded from French Equatorial Africa, swelling the colony to about 790,000 km² with some 4.6 million people by 1912. German was the official language alongside Hausa, Fula, Duala, Basaa, Beti, and many others; Christian missions were active but indigenous religions remained dominant.

Decline and legacy

In World War I, British, French, and Belgian forces invaded in 1914 and overran the colony in the Kamerun campaign by 1916 (the last German forces under Governor Karl Ebermaier fled to neutral Spanish Guinea). Versailles split Kamerun into British and French League of Nations mandates; French Cameroun and part of British Cameroons reunified as independent Cameroon in 1960–61. German plantation owners even bought back estates in the 1920s–30s. The colonial borders and the Anglophone-Francophone divide they created still shape Cameroon's politics, including its ongoing Anglophone crisis.