Colonial Kinship in a Postcolonial World? An Exploration of Relationships between Cameroon and East and West Germany during the 1960s

In this paper I will look at how notions of kinship, both real and imagined, impacted how some Cameroonians defined their post-1945 relationship with divided Germany. World War I brought an end to Germany’s colonial control over Cameroon, which thereafter became a mandate governed by France and Great Britain. Nevertheless, the bonds to imperial-era Germany cultivated by specific upper class Cameroonian families were not severed, and they continued to see themselves as German subjects decades after Germany departed. The Bell family is a primary example. The Bells were Cameroonian royalty – specifically the royalty of the Duala people – with a connection to Germany that stretched back to the late nineteenth century. Starting in the 1880s, the Bells had sent their sons to study in Berlin and other German cities. Some of them had elected to stay, marrying German women and establishing Afro-German families. Their history has been documented in Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft’s book, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of an African Diaspora, 1880-1960. Although the book technically goes through the early postwar era, there is very little about the Bells from this period. Most of the family had been forced to flee Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and resettled in France. Documentation of a Bell presence in postwar Germany is thus thin. My research, however, suggests that the Bells and other wealthy Cameroonian families called on their history with Germany to make explicit demands on the East and West German states after Cameroonian independence in 1960. These demands, which included calls for protection against the French and pleas for medical assistance, were rooted in their understanding of German obligations to Cameroon as a former part of the German Empire.