From German Kamerun to the Franco-British mandates

On 12 July 1884, explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed treaties with Duala kings Bell and Akwa placing the coast under German protectorate: Kamerun was born. In thirty years, the German administration built roads and railways and imposed a plantation economy on the volcanic lands of Mount Cameroon — at the cost of forced labour and harshly repressed resistance.

The First World War tipped the territory: in 1916, with the Germans defeated, Kamerun was divided between France (the eastern four-fifths) and Britain (two western strips administered from Nigeria). The League of Nations formalised the partition with mandates in 1922.

This dual trusteeship durably shaped the country: two official languages, two school and legal systems, two administrative memories. It also fuelled the nationalist movements that, from the 1940s, demanded reunification and independence.

Under French mandate, the territory underwent "development": the railway was extended and cocoa, coffee and banana plantations spread — but so did forced labour, the poll tax and the indigénat code that weighed heavily on the population. On the British side, indirect rule leaned on the traditional chiefs and tied the region economically to neighbouring Nigeria.

It was in this crucible that, after 1945, the first political and trade-union organisations were born. The Union of the Peoples of Cameroon, founded in 1948, openly demanded immediate reunification and independence — a claim that would lead to its banning and to clandestinity, a prelude to the confrontations of the years that followed.