Soldiers of their Own: Honor, Violence, Resistance and Conscription in Colonial Cameroon during the First World War

The dissertation reconstructs two sidelined aspects of the Cameroon campaign of the Great War; it examines the campaign in its own right, and it provides a peopled account of the campaign by evaluating both the collective and individual performances and experiences of West African soldiers in the campaign. Existing accounts of the African campaigns, treating them as ‘sideshows,' and leaving African soldiers nameless and faceless, have been effective erasures of Africans and their history. “Soldiers of their Own” investigates named Africans who fought in the Cameroon campaign: why, how, and where they fought. Germany colonized Cameroon in 1884, and until the outbreak of war in 1914, unleashed spectacles of colonial violence. Colonial violence, gendered in nature, mainly targeted women, in addition to men and children. The violence was internalized by Cameroonians, who then responded with wars of resistance. When the 1914 war broke out, both the Allies who invaded Cameroon and the Germans mobilized and recruited Africans for military services. Africans were attracted by some material and intangible factors to fight in the campaign, but the majority were conscripted. Among the many factors responsible for German defeat was the increasing support that Cameroonians gave to the Allies. The social costs of fighting the Great War in Cameroon included the intentional killing of civilians by the occupying German army and their African soldiers, as well as the unprecedented refugee crisis that wartime activities generated. War atrocities in Cameroon must be understood within the context of the ones elsewhere in Europe, and in line with the military cultures of the Allies and the Germans which led to their conflicting interpretations of the international laws of war. Although Africans fought and determined the outcomes of the Cameroon campaign on the battlefield, their attempts to influence the form of the partition of their post-war territory came to naught, as Britain and France undertook an arbitrary and self-serving interest partition of post-war Cameroon. Once again, the war had provided an opportunity for the second European partition of Africa, in much the same way as the first partition.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135824/1/njung_1.pd