SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is the history of British and French imposition of the Anglo-French inter-Cameroons boundary and the effects on the divided people from 1916 to 1961. The focus is on border administration and the response of the separated border groups notably the Balong, Bakossi, Duala, Balondo, Bakweri and the Mbo. The work opens with post-war Anglo-French negotiations and the partition of the territory. These negotiations resulted to an unequal division of Cameroon between the British (1/5) and the French (4/5). After the partition on paper, the actual work of survey and demarcation began in 1937 from the coast and proceeded inland. The work came to a halt with the outbreak of the Second World War. Establishing and settling their administration on an old German base was not an easy task for either administration, especially in a territory where there was a Germanophone educated group reluctant to sever links with the former colonial power. More complicated was the administration of separated ethnic groups who seized every opportunity to send an avalanche of petitions and complaints to first the League of Nations and later to the United Nations in protest of the boundary. While border people resisted the boundary, others who were smarter saw the boundary as a zone of limitless opportunities, which they did not hesitate to exploit. It was in the early 1960s that following the plebiscite results in Southern Cameroons, the Trusteeship regime ended and the territory achieved independence on October 1, 1961 by reuniting with an independent French Cameroon. Reunification changed the status of the boundary from an international to an interstate boundary yet the ghost of the defunct boundary has ever since continued to haunt Cameroon.