Charles Atangana
[2] He was the eleventh of twelve children born to Essomba Atangana, a headman of the Mvog Atemenge sublineage of the Ewondo ethnic group.
[2] They had 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.
[4] The Germans randomly appointed chiefs and mayors to serve under them, and took local youths to perform menial tasks;[5] Atangana was among them, sent by his uncle to be a houseboy.
[5] Station commander Hans Dominik sent four such individuals to attend the mission school of the German Pallottine Fathers in Kribi, a settlement on the coast.
[5] Father Heinrich Vieter especially liked the boy,[8] and Atangana became the first Ewondo baptised a Roman Catholic;[4] he took the Christian name Karl.
[4] In August 1900, the commander of German forces at Victoria (present-day Limbe) appointed Atangana interpreter for 500 Bulu hostages, who were being pressed into labour.
[10] In 1901 he secured land for the Pallottine Fathers to build a mission in Jaunde, thus opening East and South Kamerun to Catholic proselytisation.
can only reply in demanding the upholding of custom, which requires the widow to be the property of the heir until her liberation, which can only take effect after the return of her bridewealth.
[11]Early in 1902, the colonial government appointed him their representative to the Ewondo people, and interpreter and clerk for the Germans posted in Jaunde.
[13] Atangana proved an astute diplomat, in one case negotiating with a group of rebellious Manguissa and thus averting a confrontation between the tribesmen and the Germans.
[4] The Germans largely kept themselves segregated from their African subjects, but Dominik and Atangana defied these standards and grew close, even dining together in the same tent on occasion.
That same year, Atangana returned to Jaunde and received an administrative post, perhaps as head of the Ewondo-Bane court, which presided over civil disputes and small claims and was the conduit through which the Germans transmitted communiqués (and gauged the response to them).
He wrote, A number of persons who associated themselves with Europeans and proved themselves useful to white people achieved positions in the native society through fraud and extortion.
He persuaded the Germans to carry out infrastructure improvements such as the building of roads, schools, health clinics, and churches; and he defended his subjects from colonial reprisals.
They held out in Jaunde until 1 January 1916, when troops of the British Army captured the town,[29] and the German soldiers and missionaries fled into the forest.
The Spanish government of Álvaro Figueroa Torres gave the Beti land to settle and agreed to transport the Germans to the nearby island of Fernando Po.
Atangana tried to secure an alliance with him by sending his 20-year-old, German-educated daughter, Katerina, to marry him, but she eventually fled from the much older Atemengue and back to her father.
[36] He received a seat on the Council of Notables, a body the French had introduced to act as liaisons to their subjects and advisors to the administration.
"[41] As a colonial administrator, Atangana was expected to collect taxes, help the French introduce cocoa and coffee plantations, and mobilise chiefs to secure the labour to work these estates.
[43] He reorganised the chiefs and their duties and tried to Westernise his subjects by encouraging them to wear European-style clothing, use new building methods and house styles, and work to improve roads.
[38] To counter these minor rebellions, chiefs could punish their subjects with 15 days in jail or 100 franc fines without due process of law.
Atangana also received 2% of all taxes collected by lower chiefs, pay for his legal role, and stipends for organising road construction.
[44] Oral informants have reported that as early as 1924, he owned enormous plantations with as much as 1 km2 of cocoa, 1.1 km2 of palms, 5 km2 of food crops, and 500 head of livestock.
In 1929, he wrote a work on traditional Beti society in which he tried to hide his unremarkable childhood by taking the title of "King" and claiming descent from a fictitious line of Ewondo royalty.
[50] Collecting taxes and finding labour grew increasingly difficult as the decade progressed, thanks to greater access to paying employment in Yaoundé and on the plantations.
[51] Atangana's 1938 proposal for the reorganisation of Yaoundé's administration shows the frustration he experienced at that time: the local people do not know what endurance means .
[52]He further complained, "Notables, with their diminished influence, are almost inert in relation to the growing number of their recalcitrant subjects" and suggested that a chief could hardly control more than 5,000 people.
[55] He remarried on 6 January 1940 to Julienne or Yuliana Ngonoa, a young Beti woman of the Mvog Manga sublineage from the village Nkolafamba.
[56] Atangana seems to have adhered to Catholic strictures against polygamy, despite the fact that other Beti chiefs at the time had several hundred wives.
Production centred on enriching the chiefs, wooing of foreign investment, and the apparatus of colonial administration, and building only that infrastructure that would aid in the transport and export of cash crops.
