Provisional partition of Kamerun

A British chronology of the war records under 3 March 1916 that the governments of France and Great Britain concluded an agreement on the provisional administration of conquered Kamerun. The exact date is uncertain, because the partition was agreed in several steps. Historians who have studied the British archives point to talks in London with the participation of the French diplomat François Georges-Picot, held from 23 February. According to some studies the dividing line was drawn on the map on 4 March, and the negotiations were concluded on 6 March. The formal convention on the administration of the conquered territory, as the British official history of the war at sea (Newbolt, Naval Operations) states, was signed only on 29 March.

The trouble with joint administration

From the capture of Duala in September 1914 the conquered territories had been administered on behalf of both allies by the British General Charles Dobell, commander of the expedition. From the start this arrangement aroused the distrust of the French, who felt that their contribution to the conquest of the colony was undervalued. Talks on joint administration, a condominium, dragged on throughout 1915 without result. After the occupation of Jaunde in January 1916 the matter became urgent. In the British Colonial Office it was thought that a condominium would not work, and in February Paris announced that General Joseph Aymerich, commander of the French forces, would come to Duala on 1 March to govern the country jointly with the British “on an equal footing”. The British preferred a clear partition.

The available accounts suggest that the line was drawn in haste. Picot was given a map and drew a border on it in pencil from north to south. The colony was divided in unequal proportions. France took the lands east of the line, that is almost the whole country, with the port of Duala, the railway and most of the central plateau. Great Britain received a narrow strip along the border with Nigeria, with Mount Cameroon, Buea and Victoria. The British Admiralty wanted to keep Duala as a base, and the Colonial Office hoped that Nigeria would get all the lands of the emirate of Yola. According to historians, London gave way because it valued good relations with its ally and had its eye on other German colonies. British ships and troops nevertheless retained the right to make free use of the port of Duala for the duration of the war.

A provisional border that lasted

Both sides stipulated that the partition was provisional and did not prejudge the fate of the colony after the war. In Kamerun the pattern of Togoland was thus repeated, which the Allies had divided into occupation zones as early as August 1914, immediately after the capitulation of the Germans there. In Kamerun the fighting had lasted a year and a half and ended only with the capitulation of Mora on 18 February 1916. In mid-March Dobell’s army began to disperse, and from April the French part of the country was run by Aymerich as commissioner. The British zone was in practice incorporated into the administrative system of neighbouring Nigeria.

The border agreed in 1916 cut, without regard to tribal or administrative divisions, across the lands of various peoples, for example the Bamileke. In 1919 the British Colonial Secretary, Lord Milner, wrote that it was “in every respect unacceptable”. Nevertheless, at the Paris Peace Conference it was adopted with minor corrections, and in 1922 the two parts became mandated territories of the League of Nations: French Cameroon and British Cameroons.