4 - Mythic transformation and historical continuity: Duala middlemen and German colonial rule, 1884–1914

Summary

There is no period of the Duala past so fully documented in both written records and oral memory as the thirty years during which Germany occupied the Cameroon Littoral. Yet, for reasons closely connected to the existence of such materials, both European and African historical imagination have endowed the events and personalities of this relatively recent era with an aura of mythic heroism and tragedy far beyond that ascribed to more distant precolonial times.

The established accounts of the German–Duala encounter are constructed around not one but three, somewhat contradictory, myths. The first is a Faustian myth of the German Sonderweg (exceptional historical path), rooted in the role of Germany as the dynamic yet dark center of modern European development and underscored by the exceptionality of an African colonial experience distinguished from the “ordinary” rule of Britain and France. Secondly, there is the myth of extreme colonial oppression, based upon the catastrophic climax of German rule in Douala in which the leading local chief, Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, was executed for high treason. Finally there is the Golden Age myth, cultivated among the Duala with adult experience spanning the German and subsequent French mandate periods, which contrasts the prominence and prosperity achieved during the former era with the relative obscurity that followed.