Dozens of people in western Cameroon were killed after gunmen stormed a village in the town of Mamfe, in the English-speaking region of the country, where rebels seeking to create a breakaway state and government forces are battling for control.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wkZrKUDaJI
German administrationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Region_(Cameroon)
The area had only indirect contact with European powers (mostly due to slave raids by tribes further south) before the German annexation of the Cameroons in 1884. The first Europeans to enter the territory were representatives of the Basel Mission in 1897. The Germans themselves did not move into the territory until 1899 (though they had signed treaties with Bamileke leaders as early as 1884). Governor Jesko Von Puttkamer established the Gesellschaft Nordwest-Kamerun to monopolise trade in the area, and he established the divisional capital at Dschang in 1903. The area's cool temperatures drew many German settlers, and the colonisers established great coffee plantations, which they forced the natives to work. Larger plantations were established further south, and many Bamileke were forced or encouraged to move out of their traditional territories to work them. The Germans also set up a puppet over-chief for all the Bamileke, who had never before considered themselves a single group. Catholic missionaries reached the grasslands area in 1910. By 1912, most of the Bamileke had converted to Christianity.
Sultan Njoya welcomed the first German emissary to the Bamum kingdom in 1902 after hearing of the ruthless treatment given rebellious tribes further to the northwest. He even lent military support for the German campaign against the Nso near Bamenda in 1906. The Bamum soldiers, eager for revenge for an earlier defeat to the Nso in 1888, committed such atrocities that the Germans sent them back. Njoya also ordered the building of a palace at Foumban in 1917, which he modeled after that of the German governor.
French administration
Bamileke and Bamum territory fell to the French in 1916 after the Germans' defeat in World War I. The territory became part of the Baré-Foumban-Nkongsamba administrative area, and the capital was moved to Foumban. Dschang served as the seat of a French-run school for the sons of chiefs, which the French used to indoctrinate as well as instruct. The French maintained German plantations and labour sources, and new operations sprung up, such as a palm plantation at Dschang. The new colonial overlords made improvements to the region's infrastructure, as well, especially to the road network.
The French continued Germany's policy of propping up sympathetic chiefs and deposing recalcitrant ones. They sought some sort of administrative centre amid the Bamileke domains, and in 1926, Fotso II of the Bandjoun people offered the site of Bafoussam, neighbouring his domains but not actually part of them. Mambou, chief of the area, opposed the colonials, but he was defeated, and the foundations of modern Bafoussam were laid. The Bamum did not escape the French sphere, either, as sultan Ibrahim Njoya was deposed in 1931 due to his pro-German views. Njoya died in a Yaoundé prison two years later.
After World War II, the West was a centre of political pressure and protest against colonial rule. Other groups came into being to combat these (usually with France's blessing), including the Union Bamiléké in 1948. In 1956, France granted self-rule to its colony, and the West proved one of Cameroon's more politically influential areas due to groups such as Paysans Independants and the Assemblée Traditionnale Bamoun. The population boomed between 1958 and 1965, a period of high urbanisation in Cameroon.
In 1958, Ahmadou Ahidjo became prime minister of French Cameroon with a pro-independence platform. The powerful Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) party, including many Bamileke, considered him a French puppet and opposed him. On 27 June 1959, several Bamileke areas were struck in what were later labeled terrorist strikes. Ahidjo declared martial law. His later attitudes toward the Bamileke likely were strongly influenced by their opposition to him.[5]
Post-independence
Under Ahidjo, the current West Province was known as the Administrative Inspectorate of the West. He named Bafoussam the capital and set the province's current boundaries after union of British and French Cameroon in 1972.
Ahidjo's battles with the UPC continued past Cameroon's independence on 1 January 1960. He outlawed the party's "terrorist" wing on 30 October 1963, leading to more strikes in Bamileke population centres and subsequent military retribution.
What support Ahidjo did enjoy among the Bamileke largely came from his pro-business policies. When the president resigned in 1982, his replacement, Paul Biya, sent his representative, Moussa Yaya, to reassure the West's businessmen that he would not prove unfriendly to their interests. Yaya mistrusted Biya, however, and only exacerbated Bamileke reservations. The Bamum, as well, were reluctant to see Cameroon's presidency change from a Muslim to a Christian. Much Bamileke and Bamum resentment for the Biya administration dates to this period.
In 2008, the President of the Republic of Cameroon, Paul Biya, signed decrees abolishing "Provinces" and replacing them with "Regions". Hence, all of the country's ten provinces are now known as Regions.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier apologised for colonial-era killings in Tanzania during Germany’s rule and vowed to raise awareness of the atrocities in his country, in a step towards “communal healing” of the bloody past.
“I would like to ask for forgiveness for what Germans did to your ancestors here,” Steinmeier said during a visit to the Maji Maji Museum in the southern Tanzanian city of Songea. “I want to assure you that we Germans will search with you for answers to the unanswered questions that give you no peace.”
Tanzania suffered under German colonial rule for decades before and after the start of the 20th century, and saw one of the region’s deadliest uprisings from 1905 to 1907.
During the revolt — known as the Maji Maji Rebellion — between 200,000 and 300,000 Indigenous people were murdered, as German troops systematically wiped out villages and fields, experts say.
In 2017, Tanzania’s then-government said it was mulling legal action to seek compensation from Germany for the people who were starved, tortured, and killed by its forces.
Steinmeier said Germany would also work to find and return the skull of an executed colonial era leader — Chief Songea Mbano — and others whose remains were plundered and brought to Berlin more than a century ago.
Addressing colonial crimes
Germany’s mass killings of Nigeria’s Indigenous Herero and Nama people in the early 1900s has been referred to by many historians as the first genocide of the 20th century.
In 2021, Germany announced an agreement with Namibia that would formally recognise its colonial-era massacres as genocide and provide redress to impacted communities, without offering formal reparations.
Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History has been conducting research on around 1,100 skulls that were looted from historic German East Africa and brought to Germany.
In Defense of German Colonialism: And How Its Critics Empowered Nazis, Communists, and the Enemies of the West
Sinophobia in National Socialist Germany should be interpreted as a carryover from the German colonial era, specifically the attitudes of Wilhelm II (whom Hitler hated)...
The Hun speech was delivered by German emperor Wilhelm II on 27 July 1900 in Bremerhaven, on the occasion of the farewell of parts of the German East Asian Expeditionary Corps (Ostasiatisches Expeditionskorps). The expeditionary corps were sent to Imperial China to quell the Boxer Rebellion.
...
Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their king Etzel made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, so may the name Germany be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German!
Wilhelm invented and spread fears of a yellow peril trying to interest other European rulers in the perils they faced by invading China; few other leaders paid attention.[40][clarification needed] Wilhelm used the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War to try to incite fear in the west of the yellow peril that they faced by a resurgent Japan, which Wilhelm claimed would ally with China to overrun the west. Under Wilhelm, Germany invested in strengthening its colonies in Africa and the Pacific, but few became profitable and all were lost during the First World War. In South West Africa (now Namibia), a native revolt against German rule led to the Herero and Namaqua genocide
Wilhelm was also appalled at the Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938, saying "I have just made my views clear to Auwi [August Wilhelm, Wilhelm's fourth son] in the presence of his brothers. He had the nerve to say that he agreed with the Jewish pogroms and understood why they had come about. When I told him that any decent man would describe these actions as gangsterisms, he appeared totally indifferent. He is completely lost to our family".[93] Wilhelm also stated, "For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German."[94]
Adolf Hitler praised Chinese culture and considered Chinese people to be “Honorary Aryans”.[2]
I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own
...
I am sure that the Japanese, the Chinese and the peoples of Islam will always be closer to us than, for example, France
Initial persecutions
Initially the everyday life of Chinese people in Germany was unaffected by the Nazi government and Adolf Hitler praised Chinese culture and considered Chinese people to be “Honorary Aryans”.[2]
Later, Chinese people in Germany, some of whom adhered to a right-wing ideology, were targeted for persecution or ethnic cleansing by the Nazi government. Although most of them were not politically active, the government conducted surveillance on them. Under these circumstances, life became increasingly difficult for Chinese civilians in Germany. Beginning in 1936, Gestapo, local police and custom officers enforced unethical regulations in Hamburg's Chinatown. On January 25, 1938, the Center for Chinese (Zentralstelle für Chinese) was founded under the control of Reinhard Heydrich, which was dedicated to controlling the size of the Chinese population.[3]
Most members of Germany's Chinese population chose to return to mainland China, but some of them chose to fight in the Spanish Civil War. According to a report composed by the Overseas Community Affairs Council, the Chinese population in Germany was reduced to 1938 before the beginning of the Second World War.[1]
During the war
After the Chinese government declared war on Nazi Germany following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Gestapo launched mass arrests of Chinese Germans and Chinese nationals across Germany,[4] concentrating them in the Arbeitserziehungslager Langer Morgen ("Langer Morgen Labor Camp") in Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg, and used them as slave laborers; many were tortured, bullied, assaulted, or worked to death by the Gestapo.[5]
In the early 1920s Chinese sailors took up abode in St. Pauli's Schmuckstraße and the adjacent streets. They opened restaurants, shops and laundries that were attached to the maritime world. The locals labelled it the "Chinese quarter", although only a few hundred Chinese people lived here.
When the Nazis took over in 1933, the Chinese residents of St. Pauli were at first not directly affected. However, when the foreign exchange regulations were toughened in 1936 and following the declaration of war by the Chinese Republic on 9 December 1941, the Chinese population was increasingly persecuted. On 13 May 1944, the Gestapo, under the direction of Erich Hanisch, arrested 129 Chinese nationals as part of the "Chinese Action". They were imprisoned and physically abused for months in the Gestapo prison in Fuhlsbuttel and later in the "Work Education Camp Wilhelmsburg". At least 17 Chinese citizens were killed as direct result of the torture methods employed by the Gestapo and the exhaustive forced labour in Wilhelmsburg. The National Socialist were thus able to erase the "Chinese quarter" from the map.
In front of the building in Schmuckstraße 9, a so-called, "Stolperstein" (stumbling stone) commemorates Woo Lie Kien, the proprietor of a restaurant in the building who died in November 1944 due to the injuries he sustained at the hands of the Gestapo.
St. Pauli-Archiv e. V.
www.st-pauli-archiv.de
The German colonial empire (German: Deutsches Kolonialreich) constituted the overseas colonies, dependencies and territories of Imperial Germany. Unified in the early 1870s, the chancellor of this time period was Otto von Bismarck. Short-lived attempts of colonization by individual German states had occurred in preceding centuries, but crucial colonial efforts only began in 1884 with the Scramble for Africa. Claiming much of the left-over uncolonized areas of Africa, Germany built the third-largest colonial empire at the time, after the British and French.[2] The German Colonial Empire encompassed parts of several African countries, including parts of present-day Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, New Guinea, and numerous other West Pacific / Micronesian islands.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire
Germany lost control of its colonial empire when the First World War began in 1914, in which all of its colonies were invaded by the Allies during the first weeks of the war. However, a few colonial military units held out in remote areas for a while longer: German South West Africa surrendered in 1915, Kamerun in 1916 and German East Africa in 1918.
Germany's colonial empire was officially confiscated with the Treaty of Versailles after Germany's defeat in the war and each colony became a League of Nations mandate under the supervision (but not ownership) of one of the victorious powers. The German colonial empire ceased to exist in 1919.[3] Plans to regain their lost colonial possessions persisted through the Second World War, with many at the time suspecting that this was a goal of the Third Reich all along.[4] Really???
Due to the short period in which Germany had colonies, in contrast to Great Britain, France and other European countries, the colonial experience is almost respected by German narratives today[citation needed], despite its ongoing socioeconomic legacy (including the presence of close to a million Afro-Germans) and the historical impact of events such as the Herero and Namaqua genocide perpetrated by the German Colonial Empire, the first genocide of the 20th century.[5]
The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred. — Adolf Hitler, The Political Testament Of Adolf Hitler: Recorded By Martin Bormann
Home
Search
Login
Register