5 - German Economic Re-appropriation of the British Southern Cameroons’ Territory, 1924–46

Abstract

In 1916 the British took over part of former German Kamerun after the capitulation of the Germans to the joint Anglo-French contingent at the end of the First World War in Cameroon. The defeat of the Germans gave the British political control over their sphere of the territory but left an unclear scenario as far as the management of the plantations, the nerve-centre of the German economy, was concerned. Despite initially efforts at appropriating and restricting German ownership of the plantations, problems of technical and managerial knowledge, cost and disinterest caused the British administration to allow German presence and participation in the Southern Cameroon economy. This article examines the circumstances leading to the interruption and then resurgence of German economic control in British Southern Cameroons. It maintains that the overwhelming economic presence of German planters from 1924 to the end of the Second World War in 1945 emanated from a combination of auspicious conditions and British diplomacy to forgive and appease Germany in the interwar period. German implication in Second World War, however, gave the British reasons to re-appropriate the plantations and federate into the Cameroons Development Corporation (CDC) in 1946 for the primary benefit of the inhabitants.