Kamerun in the First World War

In 1914 Kamerun was one of Germany’s largest colonies in Africa, stretching from the Gulf of Guinea to Lake Chad. From August 1914 to February 1916 it was conquered by British troops from Nigeria, French troops from French Equatorial Africa and a detachment from the Belgian Congo, while a small German colonial army defended it. The campaign ended with the Germans crossing into neutral Spanish Guinea and with the country divided between France and Britain. The British official history points out that the Allies conquered a territory about one and a half times the size of the German Empire.

The colony in 1914

The Germans took over the coast of Kamerun in the 1880s. In 1911, after the Second Moroccan Crisis, France ceded to them, in an agreement of 4 November, about 275,000 km² of the French Congo, enlarging the colony by more than half. From then on Spanish mainland Guinea, Muni, was an enclave surrounded on the landward side by German territory. The main port and largest town was Duala at the mouth of the Wouri, and in 1913 a wireless station linked with the station at Kamina in Togo was built there.

According to British intelligence, at the outbreak of war the German Schutztruppe numbered about 200 German officers and NCOs and 1,650 African soldiers in twelve companies, and the armed police about 30 Germans and 1,500 Africans. Most of them were Hausa and Yaunde. About 3,400 men was little for so vast a country, but they had plenty of machine guns and ammunition. In August 1914 the authorities, fearing a rising, hanged for high treason the Duala king Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, who had for years opposed the removal of his people from the riverside. British publications of the war years also wrote of mass killings among the Duala.

Duala and the coast (1914)

On 25 August 1914 three British columns from Nigeria crossed the border, and the French from Chad attacked the fort at Kousséri. The first attacks failed: the attack on Mora was beaten off, and at Garua the commander of the expedition was killed. The Allies shifted their effort to the coast. General Charles Dobell took command of the Anglo-French expedition, and throughout September warships cleared the Wouri estuary of mines and sunken ships. On 27 September the Germans surrendered Duala without a fight. More than 400 Germans were taken prisoner, but Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Zimmermann withdrew his main force inland, towards Yaoundé.

War in the interior (1914–1916)

In October the Allies took Yabassi and Edea on the Sanaga, and in January 1915 the French beat off a German attack on Edea. In the spring of 1915 the first march on Yaoundé bogged down in the forest and ended in retreat, costing the Allies more than 300 killed and wounded. In the north things went better: in June Garua surrendered, and in November General Frederick Cunliffe’s Nigerians took Banyo mountain. From April a blockade of the coast was meant to cut the Germans off from supplies smuggled through Spanish Guinea. The British official history admits that many people of the plateau and the north showed great loyalty to their German masters.

The second march on Yaoundé, ordered in September 1915, converged from several directions: Dobell’s British and French from the west, the columns of General Joseph Aymerich from French Equatorial Africa and a detachment from the Belgian Congo from the east, and Cunliffe’s troops from the north. On 1 January 1916 the British entered an empty Yaoundé. Governor Karl Ebermaier and Zimmermann, short of ammunition, led their troops south, and by 15 February the last units had crossed into Muni. The Spanish interned about 975 Germans and about 14,000 Africans, including about 6,000 soldiers. On 18 February the garrison of the mountain above Mora surrendered, the last German post in the colony.

Partition (1916)

Dobell administered the conquered country on behalf of both allies, which the French distrusted. At the beginning of March 1916 London and Paris agreed on a provisional partition. France took almost the whole colony, with Duala, the railway and most of the central plateau, and Britain a narrow strip along the Nigerian border, with Mount Cameroon, Buea and Victoria. On 16 March Dobell’s army began to disperse.

Battle losses were small compared with the European fronts, but fighting in the equatorial forest and on the savannah, amid disease and without roads, was exhausting. The losses of Aymerich’s French and Belgian troops alone came, according to the official history, to 118 Europeans and 1,684 Africans. The British Prime Minister called the campaign one of the most satisfactory and complete episodes of the war. The 1916 line, though meant to be provisional, survived the peace conference, and in 1922 the French and British parts of the country became League of Nations mandates.