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Albert Frederick Calvert

The Cameroons

Published by Good Press, 2021

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4066338058423

Table of Contents

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PREFACE.

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ALTHOUGH the designs, which German philosophers conceived and German statesmen and strategists spent thirty years in perfecting, for the conquest of our Cape territories and the creation of a Greater Germany extending from the Mediterranean to Table Bay, are best illustrated and exposed by the defiantly defensive policy they pursued in South-West Africa, the rise, development and fall of the German Colonial Empire is more completely epitomised in the chapter dealing with the Cameroons.

The establishment of the German East African protectorate forms a story that is intensely interesting, inasmuch as it reveals the duplicity of Teutonic methods in their relations with native races, European rivals and their own agents. Bismarck, the last barbarian of genius, repudiated Dr. Karl Peters when, equipped with private capital and acting on his own initiative, he was acquiring in the hinterland of Zanzibar a well-watered, fertile province equal in extent to South Germany, and obtaining from the Sultan the concession for the ports of Dar-es-Salaam and Pangani. It was necessary in 1884 for Germany to assure England that the Imperial Government had no intention of securing possessions in a region which was admittedly within Britain’s sphere of influence, and Bismarck pursued Dr. Peters to Africa with an official intimation that the State would not grant him protection for the lives of his party, or for any possessions he might acquire opposite Zanzibar. But when the intrepid Teuton, as the representative of the German East Africa Company, had accomplished the spade work and returned to Berlin, the Government continued negotiations with the Sultan through their Consul-General at Zanzibar. The formal ratification of the treaties made in the name of the Company, was followed by a revolt of the Arabs, and when the Company’s representatives had been allowed to be murdered or put to flight, Bismarck was able to declare that the situation that had arisen was beyond the control of private enterprise, and an expedition, under Major von Wissman, was accordingly despatched to East Africa to suppress the slave traffic which still flourished in that region. For the furtherance of such a humane and civilising purpose, the co-operation of the British fleet was readily enlisted, and with this support and the energetic measures taken by von Wissman’s army of ex-British native soldiers, the disaffected populace was eventually “pacified,” even if the slave traffic was not suppressed. The Company’s claims to the territorial concessions granted under the treaties having been made good—Great Britain could not, in politeness, protest against the acquisition of Mount Kilimanjaro, since the amiable Kaiser had expressed a sentimental wish that the highest peak in Africa might be within the sphere of German kultur!—the Reichstag voted ten and a half million marks for the maintenance and development of these newly acquired territories. Then, and not until then, did England realise that with the connivance of Downing Street and the assistance of British men-of-war, this rich and important territory, with an area of 384,000 square miles, had become a Protectorate of Germany. Having duped England, punished the natives, and established their rule, it was only necessary to recall Dr. Peters and hand him over to the tender mercies of his official and political enemies, to make this chapter of the history of German empire building characteristic in its completeness.

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