The German-Duala treaty or the pretext for the annexation of a long-coveted Territory

Par malumiereetmonsalut Le 30/11/2024 à 00:00 0

History

Attack on the village of Lock Priso by the Germans in December 1884. Image: wikimedia.org

Analyze/Among the multiple economic potentials that a country can have, access to the sea is one of the main essential assets. Even today, several countries which do not have access to the sea choose on the basis of the good political and diplomatic relations they maintain with the Cameroonian State, to receive their cargoes of goods at the port of Duala in Cameroon for subsequently transport them mainly by road, in their respective Territories.

But if the Littoral region remains one of the gateways to the Cameroonian Territory, particularly via its maritime facade to the West on the Atlantic Ocean, for a new territory or a new discovery which attracts desires, a gateway to the entry is only the starting point of a long expedition not only to learn about the space, but also to appropriate it through the production of usable works such as “La Moisel” or the maps developed by the German cartographer Max Moisel (1869-1920) at the beginning of the 20th century, which sufficiently prove that the delimitation of a Territory as well as the census of the elements of topography, hydrography, climatology, as well as socio-economic considerations are the culmination of long-term work which will always be useful.

What is “beautiful” always attracts desires. Those who set out to conquer new spaces hope to find the means not only to expand their cultures, but also to do profitable business for their respective States. But to achieve this, inspection or exploration work which cannot be initiated without the approval or authorization of the occupants of the most accessible point at first sight namely the territory where finds the banks of the Wouri must first be carried out.

From Rio dos Camerões to Kamerun

Since the 15th century, if we must only limit ourselves to this period of history, Cameroon as a Territory has always known external presences. In 1472, the crew of the Portuguese explorer Fernando Pò arrived in the territory of the Wouri estuary and named this territory Rio Dos Camerões, that is to say, shrimp river because they would have there found an impressive quantity of shrimps that there is always, but certainly not like at that time.

Several foreign countries cohabited in this territory with enormous potential, namely the current Littoral region which was the gateway, and where the commercial agreements were very satisfactory to the point of further inciting the curiosity of those who were driven by a desire to expand further in order to take full advantage of the potential that this Territory abounds in. But for this they needed the agreement of the natives or better yet the pretext of the agreement of the natives to better extend their hegemony over a space that they coveted for a very long time.

The opportunity to achieve this objective presented itself when for “security reasons”, the leaders of the left bank of the Wouri needed an agreement with a foreign power or as some researchers say, “a military and commercial shield” against their brothers on the right bank of the river, namely Bonabéri called at that time Hickory town, which had as King and head of the Canton Bele Bele, King Lock Priso also called Kum'a Mbappe Bell who refused to be the one of the main signatories of the Germano-Duala treaty. It was in the face of the silence or perhaps a little too excessive silence of British that they chose to turn to another country notably Germany with whom they concluded on July 12, 1884 not an annexation treaty, but rather a commercial treaty or an extension of the agreement between Chief Akwa and the Woermann firm on the protection of the firm's property on the lands of the principal parties concerned. The German-Duala treaty or treaty of 1884 was therefore signed on July 12, 1884 between two German commercial firms and Kings Doumbe Lobe Bell and Akwa Dika Mpondo of the Cameroonian coast or more precisely of the left bank of the Wouri.

This legal text, both ambitious and ambiguous due to its inadequacies or quite simply its lack of clarity stipulates among other things that: the leaders or principals involved in this commercial affair abandon or better yet, transfer their rights of sovereignty over the territory Cameroonian, as well as legislation and administration to Edouard Schmidt of the Woermann firm, and Johanness Voss acting on behalf of the Jantzen and Thormälhen firm, both in Hamburg Germany. However with several reservations: "the territory must not be ceded to a third person, trade treaties concluded with other governments must remain valid, the land cultivated by the natives and the sites on which the villages are located must remain the property of the current owners and their descendants, taxes must continue to be paid to kings and chiefs", and finally, ancestral ways of acting that are passed down from generation to generation must be pespected. It was therefore a commercial treaty between a portion of territory and foreign firms under the obscure cover of an imperial power whose real intentions were not only to trade, but above all to annex a Territory occupied by lower class individuals. Furthermore, the signing of this treaty takes place in the context of the holding of a legendary conference in Berlin between 1884 and 1885, which traced the borders of countries and even those of external dependencies occupied by inferior beings.

Of the territorial delimitation of powers and the annexation

It was the Berlin conference which granted territories like Rio dos Camerões which became Kamerun after the Germans had raised their flag on the Joss plateau which is located in the district commune of Duala 1st, to mark their sovereignty over a territory also coveted by the French and the British and where chiefs and kings only had rudimentary sovereignty which granted them decision-making power subject to the international protectorate regime. However, the treaty clearly specifies which territory it is: the territory called Cameroon located along the Cameroon River between the rivers of Bimbia in the North which had an old slave port and which gives access to the Littoral regions and the South-West in particular the current commune of the 3rd district of the city of Limbe in the department of Fako, and kwakwa to the South in the Littoral region for the second extremity which delimits the territory in question. It was therefore only a portion of territory just like the territory of small-Batanga located in the Littoral region between the LOTE river (between the Nyong and Sanaga rivers) and the Lokunjé river in the current South region which has also had to sign a treaty of the same nature with the Germans in July 1884.

It is therefore important to distinguish between landowners and civilized nations. The land holder at the local level does not own the entire Territory. There was a territorial delimitation of powers. These treaties could therefore not concern the entire country; and even if we must take into account the hypothesis according to which the Germans were unaware of the fact that this territory was larger than they would have imagined, we must not hide our faces by refusing to admit that it was suspicious ignorance which took the pretext of a set of treaties concluded with leaders of portions of territory to take possession of an entire Territory with great disregard for the reality of the presence of other peoples on territories taken illegally. Furthermore, three years after the signing of the treaty, the German side violated one of the clauses of the convention, namely: the payment of taxes to the chiefs which was paid for the last time in July 1887; the German side therefore did not respect the legal promise which consisted of paying the tax continuously since they still carried out a commercial activity on the territory. We were no longer moving on an annexation of the Territory but the Territory had already been annexed since in June 1895, the governor of Cameroon Jesco Von Puttkamer prohibited the natives from carrying out any trade on the Sanaga which was the access route to the Bassas and Yaoundés countries while the treaty stipulated to protect “the treaties of friendship and commerce which have been concluded with other foreign governments.” In addition, the Second Reich or the empire founded by Bismark in 1871 and which lasted until 1918 with the end of the First World War, promulgated in June 1896, an imperial ordinance establishing the notion of vacant and ownerless land to identify occupied territories which already had landowners. This decision provoked acts of protest in 1910 and the Germans forcibly expropriated the residents of the Joss plateau. The natives led by Rudolph Duala Manga Bell protested and he was deprived of his functions as king of the Bell clan of the Douala people and then assassinated a few days later on August 8, 1914 in Duala.

The pretext of trade was used to annex an entire Territory. Even if some Duala chiefs had to transfer their sovereignty rights, this only concerned the lands where they were chiefs. The chiefs did not sell their territory. They ceded part of their sovereignty to have something in return, but the other party took this as an opportunity to annex an entire Territory inhabited by individuals incapable according to them, of self-governance in addition to having necessarily in need of a protecting power which would in any case have forcibly annexed this Territory given the status of African territories at that time. We had to wait until the end of the Berlin conference to realize that the real goal sought was not only commercial but above all a desire to annex a Territory inhabited by "barbarians" who certainly have rights but who do not represent nothing compared to those of a country recognized as a great power on the international scene and which was ready to do anything to appropriate a Territory that he had coveted for a very long time.

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