Skirmish at Tepe. The French enter Kamerun from Chad

On 25 August 1914 the fighting spread to the northern borderlands of German Kamerun. The British clashed with the Germans at Tepe on the Benue river, and French troops from Chad crossed the colony’s border. A British chronology of the war mentions both events in the same breath, but they were two separate actions, fought several hundred kilometres apart.

Tepe

Tepe was a German border post on the Benue, on the road from British Nigeria to the fortress of Garua. On the same day that the British columns crossed the border of Kamerun (see British cross the border of Kamerun from Nigeria), a mounted detachment from Colonel Maclear’s column came upon the German garrison of the post. After a short, sharp exchange of fire the Germans withdrew and the British occupied Tepe. Losses on both sides were slight.

This was the first skirmish between the British and the Germans in Kamerun. The success, however, proved short-lived. A few days later Maclear’s column attacked Garua and suffered a heavy defeat.

The French from Chad

On the same day the French commander of the troops in Chad, Colonel Largeau, made the first attempt to attack the German fort at Kousséri. The post lay on the Chari river, opposite French Fort-Lamy, today’s N’Djamena. According to a French report of 1915, the attack failed because torrential rain had turned the ground into swamp. According to some accounts, the small German garrison successfully drove off the French with machine-gun fire.

The French returned to Kousséri in September, this time with mountain guns. On 25 September the Germans abandoned the fort and withdrew to Mount Mora. Earlier, from the beginning of August, French troops from French Equatorial Africa had been attacking Kamerun from the east and south, in territories that France had ceded to Germany in 1911.