ABSTRACT
Cameroon’s preindependence contact with the outside world, particularly with Europe, has been varied. Its earliest contact with Europe was when the Portuguese first explored the coastal/Atlantic portions of the territory in the 1500s. The name Cameroon, a Portuguese word for shrimp or prawn, came from this initial contact when the Portuguese explorer Fernando Po used it to refer to the territories flanked by the River Wouri in present-day Littoral Region. The Portuguese called this river Rio does Cameroes, or river of prawns, in reference to the abundance of prawns found in it.1 The Portuguese did not establish permanent stations in the territory, which was officially occupied and eventually colonized by the Germans in 1884 following the partition of African territory that resulted from the Berlin Colonial Conference of 1884-85.2
The colonial history of Cameroon began on July 12, 1884, with the German annexation of the costal portions of the territory. Before this date, Europeans knew little about Cameroon and almost nothing about the grasslands of Bamenda. German annexation of Cameroon came on the heels of a series of negotiated treaties with chiefs in the coastal settlement of the Douala region, who had finally acquiesced to the idea of a German protectorate in order to protect the “profits coming from their middle-man’s trade.”3 German colonization of Cameroon lasted from 1884 to 1916. The Germans were defeated and evicted from the territory in 1916 by the combined troops of Britain and France during the First World War. On April 18, 1916, Cameroon was provisionally divided between British and French spheres. After a failed experiment where Britain and France attempted to administer the territory jointly as a condominium, Cameroon was officially partitioned between the two; the partition was eventually confirmed by the Milner-Simon Agreement of 1919.4 In the partition, Britain took one-fifth of the territory, composed of two
Figure 2.3 The North-West Region
small parcels of land – Southern and Northern Cameroons – which they administered as part of their Nigerian colony. As already stipulated, the remaining portion, East Cameroon, went to the French and was administered as part of their Equatorial African territory. In 1922, “His Britannic Majesty received a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the area which had been occupied by British troops.”5 The territory was supposed to be administered as a League of Nations Mandate from June 28, 1919, and as a United Nations (UN) Trust Territory after 1945 and not in accordance with the arrangements that actually took place.
