THE BRITISH CONTROL OF THE GERMAN PLANTATIONS IN THE CAMEROONS PROVINCE OF NIGERIA DURING WORLD WAR II, 1939-1945

Abstract

The Cameroons was originally a German colony starting from 1884. However, during the First World War (1914-1918), the combined British and French forces invaded the territory, defeated the German troops and divided the colony into British and French spheres. In 1919, the League of Nations upheld this arrangement and entrusted the Cameroons to Britain and France as Mandate Territory. Thus, from 1919 to 1961, the British sphere of the Cameroons was governed as a part of the Southern Provinces of Nigeria. As a former German colony, it harboured substantial amount of German subjects and properties. These properties included plantations, legal estates, factories, companies, missions and privately-owned properties. Available studies on the colonial Nigerian history have omitted the Cameroons Province, most especially the German subjects and properties in the territory. The result of this omission has been the lop-sidedness in the historiography of the place of Cameroons in the Nigerian history during World War II. This study, therefore, corrects this lop-sidedness in the historiography of colonial Nigeria by examining the control and management of the German properties in the Cameroons by the British colonial authorities in Nigeria during World War II (1939-1945), with a special concentration on the Plantations. Archival materials provided data for this historical reconstruction. The history of the German plantations in West Africa is the history of possession, dispossession and repossession, as well as mutation and transpositions.