Читать книгу The Cameroons онлайн

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In some ways the story of Germany’s annexation of the Cameroon provinces, and her subsequent extension of that area, is the most interesting of all, because if she secured her footing in East Africa by subterfuge, and in South-West Africa by the exercise of sharp practice supplemented by a certain display of bold decision, she edged her way into the Gulf of Guinea by virtue of no other quality than that of sheer bluff, but, having consolidated herself in the positions she had thus gained in West Africa, she allowed the world to understand that she was determined to expand her sphere of influence, if necessary, by recourse to arms. In 1885 Germany legalised her occupation of the Cameroons by placating France with an exchange of unimportant territories, and renouncing in favour of Britain her nominal claims to St. Lucia and to Forcados, at the mouth of the Niger River.

Having thus solidified their position, and secured themselves against what Passarge calls “the intrigues and provocations of the English,” the German administrators proceeded to Germanize their new province and systematically to develop its tropical resources. Although they established customs houses, courts of justice and post-offices, and constructed about 125 miles of a projected railway system of 285 miles, and, between 1898 and 1911, increased the total trade of the colony by nearly forty million marks, the colony did not prove a departmental or material success. The staffs of the Experimental Institute of Agriculture at Victoria and the Department of Agriculture at Buea, devoted their energies to the scientific raising of tropical economic plants, to experiments in plantation culture, and to the training of young natives in the virtues of Teutonic industry and organisation, while, by Government Proclamation, all native children were compelled to attend the Government schools, acquire an intelligent knowledge of the language and history of Germany, and practice the art of singing German patriotic songs. Despite this paternal concern for the agricultural and educational well-being of the natives, the application of German methods proved a disappointment. The children at the end of their school course considered themselves too superior to undertake manual labour, while the men, resenting the German indifference to their national feeling and inherited methods of work, developed the spirit of native unrest. A lack of sympathetic understanding of the natives was attended by culpably injudicious treatment of them by the German officials, and the relations between the authorities and the aborigines led to the frequent employment of the Imperial troops, while the inadequacy of means of internal communication rendered the progress of “one of the most productive countries in the world” both slow and difficult.