Charles Atangana
Charles Atangana was the paramount chief of the Ewondo and Bane ethnic groups during much of the colonial period in Cameroon. His loyalty and acquiescence to the German Empire was unquestioning, and he even accompanied the Germans on their escape from Africa in World War I. After his death in 1943, he was largely forgotten. Since Cameroon’s independence in 1960, Cameroonian scholars have rediscovered his story.
About Charles Atangana in brief
Charles Atangana was the paramount chief of the Ewondo and Bane ethnic groups during much of the colonial period in Cameroon. His loyalty and acquiescence to the German Empire was unquestioning, and he even accompanied the Germans on their escape from Africa in World War I. He never advocated resistance to the European powers, preferring to embrace the Europeans as a means of personal enrichment and in the service of African interests. After his death in 1943, he was largely forgotten. However, since Cameroon’s independence in 1960, Cameroonian scholars have rediscovered his story. He was born between 1876 and 1885 in Mvolyé, a small village in what is today Yaoundé, Cameroon. He is the eleventh of twelve children born to Essomba AtangANA, a headman of the Mvog Atemenge sublineage of the Ewondo ethnic group. His parents gave him the drum name “He who is known by the nations”. He was also known by his birth name, Ntsama, and his German name, Karl. His father died when he was about six years old. Little is known about his childhood, but he would have learned to fish, hunt, and trap, and would have memorised his family’s genealogy and folk wisdom. He would have been one of thousands of minor Beti leaders living between the Sanaga and Nyong rivers, each charged with providing for his compound and the extended family and slaves who lived there.
The Germans claimed Beti lands as part of their Kamerun colony in 1884, and by February 1889 they had established a permanent base in the area, which they named Jaunde after the local people. After the defeat of Omgba Bissogo in 1895 and others like it, Ewondos’ resistance waned. The German Empire randomly appointed chiefs and mayors to serve under them, and took local youths to perform menial tasks; Atangane was among them, sent by his uncle to be a houseboy. He learned German language, history, and geography; mathematics; and Roman Catholicism. In 1900, the German forces at Victoria appointed him interpreter for 500 Bulu hostages who were being kept as being labour. The colonisers sent him to Buea to work as an office clerk. He later married a woman from a little village called Mekumba, and had two children: Jean Ndengina and Edzimbi Katerina. At the end of his schooling in Kribi he met a woman called Marie Biloa Biloa, who was a little older and living as a German functionary, kept as a wife by a German woman. She would eventually become his wife and they had a daughter, Jean N dengina, who would eventually bear him two children. He died in 1943 at the age of 80, and was buried in the village of Mekumbi, in the Cameroonian town of Bueu.
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This page is based on the article Charles Atangana published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
