The Loyalty of Sons and Slaves: European Companies, African Laborers, and Systems of Patronage in Early Colonial Cameroon, 1884–1914

The history of African dockers, miners, transport and plantation workers is a widely discussed subject in African as well as global labor history, with scholars showing that African workers often embraced European forms of employment while remaining deeply connected to their own communities and culture. However, while many studies center on large scale employment in the Interwar period, there is little understanding in the existing literature about how smaller colonial trading companies were able to create the temporal or sometimes lifelong loyalty of their African laborers and employees in the early colonial period, when the colonial labor demands hit most African communities for the first time.

My paper addresses the ties of loyalty between European rubber exporting companies and their African staff in the German colony of Cameroon before the First World War, by exploring the space between formal employment and clientelism where many voluntary European-African labor relations were based. To this end, I will deploy a microhistorical approach, using internal documents of German, British and Belgian colonial companies active in Cameroon, as well as private papers, letters, diaries, memoirs, and novels of their directors, managers, and European as well as African employees. Hereby, I want to analyze how ties of loyalty were created and maintained, how they were demonstrated, and how long they lasted. I argue that large parts of voluntary European-African labor relations in early colonial Cameroon were based on personal systems of patronage, with African ideas about labor, family, gender, and power playing important roles and defining the extend and limits of loyalty.

By examining loyalty relations between colonial companies and their African staff, it is possible to deepen our understanding of how colonial rule worked on the ground, beyond the sector of the colonial state.