Abstract
The study examines Germano-Anglo colonial towns in Cameroon to determine factors accounting for the scarcity of infrastructure as well as streets and places with Eurocentric names. Using primary and secondary data, it demonstrates that the lack of infrastructure in the polity is a function of negligence by colonial and post-colonial authorities. With few pieces of public infrastructure, the authorities have had few streets and places to attribute names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries. These findings contribute to knowledge of the relative impact of endogenous and exogenous factors on toponymic traditions as well as inter-country differentials in African countries’ development profiles.
Keywords
Introduction
One rarely discussed outcome of the First World War, which began in 1914 and ended in 1918 (The History Channel, 2021), is the fact that Germany was dispossessed of all its colonies in Africa. This dispossession occurred rather too early in some cases. For instance, by 1916, barely two years into the war, British, French and Belgian troops had succeeded in ousting the Germans from Kamerun (Encyclopedia Britanica, 2021). Subsequent to this, the League of Nations divided the colony into two parts of 4/5th and 1/5th, and designated them Mandate territories. It placed the larger part under the colonial control of France and the smaller one under Britain. The smaller portion, which evolved to become present-day Anglophone Cameroon, constitutes the empirical referent of the study reported in this paper. The area comprises the strip of land along the eastern border of Nigeria and stretches eastward to River Mungo, the western frontier of colonial French Cameroun.
Thus, while the European colonial era in most of Africa lasted from 1884 to the 1960s, the German colonial moment in Kamerun was brief, and ran from 1884 to 1916. Therefore, the European colonial project in Africa outlasted Germany’s presence as a colonial power in Kamerun by almost half a century (1916–1960s). Although there is no shortage of works on Germany’s relatively brief tenure as a colonial power in Africa (see e.g., Linden, 2016; Osteraas, 1974), little research has been conducted on its infrastructure-building activities in the region. Consequently, the following question remains largely unaddressed. What happened with respect to human settlement development in general, and infrastructure building in particular, in the erstwhile German-controlled territories during the almost half-a-century period they were “orphaned” as colonies? Another important but largely ignored question has to do specifically with the creation and life of the towns that served as centres of colonial government administration in these colonies.
The importance of addressing these questions cannot be exaggerated. Answers to the questions can help explain inter-country and intra-country differentials in national and regional development profiles in Africa. However, the questions can only be meaningfully addressed on a sector-by-sector basis. Cognizant of this, the study reported in this paper examines the questions in the context of urban infrastructure and spatial development as well as toponymic practices. The territory comprising the study’s empirical referent is Germano-Anglo Cameroon. It is geographically delineated above and became a Mandate Territory of the League of Nations and placed under the colonial control of Britain when the Germans lost control of Kamerun in the First World War. It later became a Trust territory of the United Nations (UN) in 1946, and presently comprises two of Cameroon’s 10 administrative regions.
The focus is on the towns that served as colonial administrative centres, including Buea, Victoria (present-day Limbe), Kumba, Mamfe and Bamenda. The main aim is to promote understanding of their creation and evolution with emphasis on the factors that have influenced their toponymic practices. A conspicuous aspect of the toponymy of these towns is its non-conformity with conventional knowledge. The names of a significant number of streets and places in colonial towns in Africa are typically drawn from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries. This is not the case with Germano-Anglo towns in Cameroon. Why is this so? One of the two main objectives of the study reported in this paper is to address this perennial question. The other is to identify and retrace the evolution of colonial towns in this polity.
The paper takes off in the next section by sketching a vivid background picture of the polity. Then, it briefly reviews the literature on toponymic inscription with emphasis on the toponymic tradition in Africa. Next, it examines infrastructure building and place naming practices in the focal Germano-Anglo colonial towns in their pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial contexts. The corpus of the paper contains a nuanced analysis and incisive discussion of the evolution of these towns and factors at the root of toponymic practices therein. The paper ends with some concluding remarks.
Background: Germano-Anglo colonial administrative towns in Cameroon
Anglophone Cameroon, the empirical referent of this study, experienced Germano-Anglo colonialism. It currently constitutes two of post-colonial Cameroon’s 10 administrative regions. The two contiguous regions are the Northwest (NW) and Southwest (SW). These regions, as shown in Table 1, contain 14 major towns, that is, towns with a population of at least 20,000. They originated as part of Kamerun, one of the few territories that Germany briefly controlled during the earlier phase of the European colonial era in Africa. Upon formalizing its colonial dominion over Kamerun in 1884, the German imperial government proceeded to divide the territory into manageable administrative districts (berzirks). Within this framework, it divided the area currently occupied by the NW and SW regions of present-day Cameroon into four administrative districts. Beginning from the Atlantic Coast and heading inland as shown in Figure 1, these included Victoria, Johann Albrecht Shohe (present-day Meme with headquarters in Kumba), Ossidinge (present-day Manyu with headquarters in Mamfe) and Bamenda. Upon assuming control of the area after the First World War, the British colonial government maintained this administrative configuration, but renamed Johann Albrecht as Kumba and relocated Ossidinge’s administrative functions to Mamfe. Victoria, Kumba, Mamfe and Bamenda doubled as the names of colonial administrative divisions and their respective headquarters (HQs). Buea served as the pioneer colonial capital of German Kamerun until 1902, and was the capital of British Southern Cameroons until 1961. This is when it became the capital of West Cameroon during the short-lived (1961–1972) federated state of post-colonial Cameroon. Thereafter, it served as the HQ of the Southwest Province, which was later renamed the Southwest Region.
Major towns in Anglophone Cameroon.
Source: Authors’ compilation.
Administrative division, Germano-Anglo Cameroon soon after the First World War.
The German colonial era in Kamerun ended abruptly in 1916 as an outcome of the First World War. Germany lost its African colonies upon emerging as the vanquished in the war. By the end of their colonial tenure in Kamerun, German colonial authorities had completed very few infrastructure projects in the area under study here. As many of the figures presented in this paper show, although few, the pieces of infrastructure were developed with great care as they remain part of the country’s contemporary built environment. The infrastructure include a handful of colonial government offices and residential units for European colonial government employees in the administrative centres. In some of these, such as Mamfe, the units were of temporary locally available building materials such as wood and thatch. In addition, German colonial authorities are credited with constructing a narrow dirt road that meandered through dense forests, hilly and rugged terrain from Victoria on the Atlantic coast through Kumba and Mamfe to Bamenda in the hinterland. This project was completed in 1911, seven years before the end of the First World War. They also built a very small system of narrow-gauge railway lines linking palm and rubber plantations around Mount Fako to the seaports in Tiko and Bota in Victoria Division.
Britain and France, who controlled colonies respectively to the west and east of Kamerun, masterminded and executed the First World War battles that ousted Germany as a colonial power from the region. This earned the pair (France and Britain) the privilege to be designated by the League of Nations as Trustees of Kamerun at in 1916. This designation was formalized by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which became effective on 28 June 1919. With the exception of some portions that evolved to become part of Chad, the Central African Republic and Gabon, the lion’s share of Kamerun was divided into two unequal parts of 4/5th and 1/5th and assigned to France and Britain respectively.
Paradoxically, Britain displayed little enthusiasm towards claiming additional territories in Africa; rather, she was more interested in reinforcing her grip, and capitalizing, on the territories she had already amassed on the continent. This explains, at least in part, her decision to divide her own portion of the territory into two parts, namely British Northern and British Southern Cameroons, and to administer them through Nigeria. Situated to the west of both British Cameroons, Nigeria was Britain’s largest colony in West Africa. The reluctance to directly administer Southern Cameroons was not the only manifestation of the British colonial government’s disinterest in the territory. In 1916, when the topic of Britain and France assuming control over Kamerun was first tabled, officials at the British War Office (BWO) had indicated that they wanted no part of the territory. Instead, these officials preferred having France control the whole territory if Britain could be permitted to claim Togo and Dahomey (Budi, 2019). The preference of the BWO officials was never effectively communicated to their French allies, and consequently never realized.
Its lukewarm attitude towards controlling Southern Cameroons notwithstanding, the British colonial government administered the territory from 1916 to 1961. The administrative divisions of the territory remained unchanged from the German colonial era until 1949 (see Figure 1). This is when British colonial authorities reformatted the administrative structure of the territory to include two additional divisions, Nkambe and Wum, which were carved out of Bamenda Division. Under this reconfiguration, Buea was designated the capital of Southern Cameroons, which contained six administrative divisions, including Victoria, Kumba, Mamfe, Bamenda, Nkambe and Wum (see Table 1). Thus, these latter two became major towns during the post-German colonial era, and therefore do not qualify as Germano-Anglo colonial government centres, hence their exclusion from in-depth analysis here.
Southern Cameroon’s two neighbours, French Cameroun to the east and Nigeria to the west, gained independence on 1 January and 1 October 1960 respectively. The two British-controlled territories, that is, Southern Cameroons and Northern Cameroons, were given the option in a United Nations-organized plebiscite on 1 Octobe 1961 to attain independence by joining one of their newly-independent neighbours: Nigeria to the west or French Cameroun to the east. The process ended with Southern Cameroons joining French Cameroun while Northern Cameroons joined Nigeria.
A major outcome of the afore-characterized process was the creation of a bilingual (French and English) Federal Republic of Cameroon. This federation comprised East or Francophone Cameroon (former French Cameroun) and West or Anglophone Cameroon (erstwhile British Southern Cameroons). As a political half of this polity, Anglophone or West Cameroon had greater autonomy in governance matter within the federated government structure. However, this arrangement lasted for barely a decade when in its bid to accelerate the process of assimilating the country’s Anglophone minorities, the Francophone-dominated government abruptly replaced the federated system with a unitary structure in 1972. Twelve years later in 1984, as an effort to further accelerate the assimilation process and attain the arguably elusive goal of a “one-and-indivisible-Cameroon,” a presidential decree changed the country’s formal appellation from The United Republic of Cameroon to simply Cameroon. Under this highly centralized structure, Anglophone Cameroon was effectively only two of the country’s 10 administrative regions instead of the political half that it was under the federated configuration.
The African toponymic inscription tradition
The literature on toponymic inscription practices in Africa is relatively thin (Bigon and Njoh, 2015; Myers, 2009; Njoh, 2010), while that on the African diaspora is even thinner (Fitzpatrick, 2012). Most work on the subject tends to concentrate on developed countries (see, e.g., Alderman, 2000; Alderman and Inwood, 2013; Berg and Kearns, 1996; Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009; Forest et al., 2004; Hoelscher, 2003; Zelinski, 1989). Consequently, little is known about the toponymic experiences of Africa. This is more so with respect to pre-colonial Africa whose rich naming tradition is conspicuously absent from the relevant literature. Recent works on this experience such as the meticulously edited volume by Bigon (2016) have largely focused on the continent’s colonial and post-colonial periods. The work of Njoh (2017), a comparative analysis of the influences of French and British colonialism respectively on Dakar, Senegal and Nairobi, Kenya, is illustrative. The relevant literature is fairly unified in identifying the following factors as those most likely to be at the root of street and place names in Africa.
Efforts to commemorate unique and notable circumstances;
Efforts to articulate power and supremacy;
An attempt to promote preferred ideologies;
Initiatives to politically manipulate a people;
Efforts by a people to assert or reclaim their identity.
Commemorating unique and notable circumstances
The tradition of naming is indigenous to all societies in the world. Therefore, the prevalence of foreign street and place names in any given place must not be misconstrued as indicative of a lack of indigenous names. Rather, such prevalence, especially in the case of Africa, constitutes a manifestation of the ethnocentric proclivities of Western change agents. To be sure, any object—such as a thing or a place—in Africa to which a colonial authority or Western change agent ever attributed a Eurocentric name was already known by a native appellation to members of the indigenous population. This assertion echoes the sentiment of Njoh (2017), who made the following observation. When European colonial authorities drew names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries to attribute to things and places in Africa, it “was never because of the absence of African indigenous dictionaries for place and object names.” To bolster this point, Njoh drew on the case of the English explorer John Hanning Speke’s (re)naming of the East African-based Lake Nyanza after Queen Victoria in 1858.
This is despite the fact that indigenous groups of the region, including Kinyarwand-, Luo- and Luganda-speaking people had known the lake for millennia as Nyanza, Nam Lolwe and Nalubaale, respectively. (Njoh, 2017: 1175)
If nothing else, this lends credence to our earlier assertion that the practice of naming is indigenous to all societies. In Africa, as noted by a BBC online article, the choice of names is anything but random (BBC, 2016). Rather, names of places, streets and things are carefully selected to commemorate or mark some unique and/or notable circumstance (David, 2011). Thus, almost every name has a story behind it.
In this regard, the names of many places in Cameroon, like those of other countries throughout Africa, contain traces of both endogenous and exogenous influence. Consider the name Cameroon, for instance; this name traces its roots to Europe (Quartz Africa, 2019). It originated from the tongue of a Portuguese explorer in the 15th century. The explorer had come across the Wouri River, and observed it to be richly endowed with prawns (i.e., shrimps). As one of the earliest attempts at toponymic colonization, the explorer proceeded to rename the river Rio de camarões (Portuguese for “River of prawns”). This name later evolved to become the country’s current name, Cameroon. Westward from Cameroon one finds Sierra Leone, another African country whose name has Portuguese roots, also named by a Portuguese explorer, Pedro de Sintra, in the 15th century. De Sintra had named the area Serra Lyoa, and over time, the name metamorphosed to become Sierra Leone.
Articulation of power and supremacy
Naming places and thoroughfares to articulate power and supremacy has roots that run deep in many cultures. Defined as the ability to influence people’s behavior, power rose to prominence as a principal objective of spatial organization during the heydays of modernist urban planning. As Njoh and Chie (2020) have argued, urban planning stands as one of the professional practices in which toponymic inscription plays a critical function. The role of toponymic inscription in this case is to influence people’s behavior in built space. It typically does so by stipulating where different activities can take place in built space. In this case, some streets may be designated as one-way while others are set aside for fast- or slow-going traffic. Along the same lines, some places may be designated—or in the jargon of the trade, zoned—as residential, single- or multi-family, while a few may be designated as industrial. Therefore, it is difficult to overstate the power implications of toponymic inscription, especially in colonial settings (Cooper, 2000; Njoh, 2017). In Africa, this brand of planning was a critical element in the toolbox of colonial authorities.
Here, it was customary for toponymy itself to be employed not only as a mark of modernity but also to demonstrate the real or perceived supremacy of Eurocentric culture over others. The veracity of this assertion is easy to appreciate once the role of toponymic inscription in the functioning of urban areas is understood. This conjures the notion of urbanization as synonymous with modernization writ large. Seen from this perspective, Wirth (1938: 1) considered the distinguishing mark of Western civilization as “best signalized by the growth of great cities.” Yet, it is necessary to note that hardly any modern city would be viewed as great without unambiguous identifiers for its thoroughfares, real property and places. While the avowed purpose of these is to promote orderliness, safety and functionality, in practice they effectively articulate power in built space (Bigon, 2009; Njoh, 2017; Njoh and Chie, 2020).
Three different illustrative instances are worth mentioning. First, it is common practice among object, place and street christening authorities to draw the names exclusively from the lexical dictionaries of powerful societal groups. By so doing, they fail to honor the achievements of members of weaker groups. Second, christening authorities, especially in colonized territories, are well known for seizing the opportunity to name an object, street or place as an occasion to honor colonial military heroes. This is exemplified by two cases from Nairobi, Kenya (Njoh, 2017). One is Grogan Road, which was named in honor of Colonel E. S. Grogan, a British colonial government official; and the other is General Smuts Avenue, which was named to commemorate the colonial military general who later became prime minister of Apartheid South Africa. Third, the names of things, streets or places are often chosen as a means of engraving the real or imagined power and fame of those the names seek to immortalize in a metaphorical posterity stone. Street names in Cameroon such as avenue Général de Gaulle in Douala, and schools named after historical figures such as Lycée Général Leclerc, Yaounde are illustrative.
The opportunity to name or signpost the name of a thing, street or place has also been viewed as an occasion to articulate the real or imagined supremacy of one culture over another. A glaring example of this comes from Cameroon. Here, the use of French, the language of 80% of the country, to label things, places and streets in the Anglophone regions, comprising 20% of the country, is not uncommon. In the few cases where the signs are bilingual, the French, in contrast to the English, version of the sign is often bold-faced or in larger fonts.
Promoting preferred ideologies
One of the main but seldom avowed goals of toponymic inscription is the promotion of a preferred ideology (Cohen and Kliot, 1992; Cretan and Matthews, 2016; D’Almeida-Topor, 2016; David, 2011; Njoh, 2017). In this regard, the names are often designed to promote two specific ideological objectives (Bigon and Njoh, 2015; Njoh, 2017). The first concerns spatial functionality. Street names epitomizing efforts to promote spatial functionality are those indicating geographic position, direction or destination. Names with prefixes or suffixes such as Northwest, Southwest, East, West, Central, and Victoria Road are illustrative. Although this is one of the avowed purposes of toponymic inscription generically, it is necessary to note that it dovetails neatly into the ideology of rationality and order that emerged during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. Central to this ideology is the notion of rationality and spatial order (Bigon and Njoh, 2015). Thus, in Africa, toponymic inscription, particularly place and street names, were supposed to introduce order into what modernist planners considered nondescript built spaces.
The second has to do with attributing names with ideological connotations to important places and thoroughfares. The accounts of toponymic researchers such as Njoh (2017) and Bigon (2009) contain good examples of street and place names with strong ideological overtones. A couple of illustrative cases from Senegal’s national capital are in order. These include the Place de la République, avenue de l’Indépendance and Place de la Liberté. These names were chosen by French colonial urban planners to immortalize their home country’s real or perceived image as the promoter and protector of republican and libertarian ideals. This assertion echoes the sentiment of one analyst who contended that the names were intended “to immortalize France’s self-proclaimed image as the promoter and protector of republican and libertarian principles” (Njoh, 2017: 1187). Apart from simply connoting an ideology, street and place names have occasionally been chosen to commemorate important personalities that are best known for their instrumental role in efforts to attain one or more ideological goals. In this case, places and streets in many parts of the world have been named after civil rights leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi of India, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the United States, and classical thinkers such as Germany’s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who promoted the socialist ideology.
In general, place names such as Liberty Square and Freedom Place, as well as street names such as Independence Boulevard, Constitution Avenue and Imperial Street, seek to advertise the ideologies reflected in their appellation. Occasionally, the ideology being propagated is not even thinly veiled. The case of Unity Palace, the official name of Cameroon’s presidential residence seeks to literally concretize the widely held belief by the country’s leadership that the two previously separate Anglophone and Francophone parts that evolved from German colonial Kamerun now constitute an inseparably fused polity. The same can be said of places and streets in the aforementioned Senegalese capital, Dakar.
Political manipulation
This, from a Machiavellian perspective, is typically designed to influence people’s behavior with a view to making them do something they would not otherwise. Examined from this perspective, an important role of place and street names is to have people act in certain ways or cultivate a set of beliefs that can foster attainment of some desired goals of their christeners. Territories that are experiencing or have experienced colonialism are replete with place and street names designed to politically manipulate the citizenry (cf., D’Almeida-Topor, 2016). A few examples from French colonial West Africa have been vividly described by Njoh (2017), Stolz and Warnke (2016) and Bigon (2009). For example, during the earlier phase of colonialism in Dakar, French colonial authorities were bent on impressing their perceived allure and grandeur of imperialism upon the colonial subjects and the world at large. This explains the choice of names such as rue Impériale, rue Colbert and avenue Faidherbe. Rue Impériale, one of Dakar’s major thoroughfares, was so named to glorify France’s image as an imperial power. For its part, rue Colbert was named in honor of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), France’s pioneer minister of state, a post he occupied from 1661 until his passing in 1683. Similarly, avenue Faidherbe was named in commemoration of Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1818–1889); he, was instrumental in establishing French Domion over territories in West Africa. He also served two non-consecutive terms (1854–1861 and 1863–1865) as Governor-General of colonial Senegal.
This choice of names was in conformity with the philosophy of political domination and cultural assimilation that was in vogue during the earlier phase of European colonialism in Africa. However, with the passage of time, imperialism came to lose its allure and levels of opposition to colonialism rapidly heightened in the colonies. This necessitated a reformulation of colonization strategies with a view to winning the hearts and minds of the colonized. This led to a replacement of names designed to advertise and promote colonialism with appellations that honored indigenous artifacts and/or acknowledged the accomplishments of indigenous personalities. This gave birth to toponymic nomenclatures that reflected efforts towards winning the hearts and minds of the people—in other words, colonial policies of association. Exemplifying this trend are streets in colonial Dakar that were named in honor of local heroes such as El Hadji Malik Sy (avenue El Hadji Malik Sy) and Blaise Diagne (avenue Blaise Diagne).
Asserting or reclaiming national identity
Reclaiming and/or reasserting a once-lost identity or ideology has been advanced as a major purpose of toponymic inscription (Azaryahu, 2012; David, 2013; Light and Young, 2014). Typically, the identity being reclaimed or reasserted is one that might have been previously supplanted by a dominant force such as colonialism. This was the case in Bucharest, where, as Azaryahu (2012) and Light (2004) noted, local authorities employed toponymic inscription as a means of reappropriating a hitherto supplanted identity. The reappropriation assumed the form of renaming and ideologically reordering streets and places subsequent to the demise of the Soviet communist era in capital cities such as East Berlin, Bucharest and Budapest. Another example is the christening of streets and places in honor of local heroes who challenged orthodoxy (Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch, 2016). Two examples from two different countries, Tunisia and France, are also noteworthy. The Tunisian example comes from Tunis and concerns a major thoroughfare, boulevard du 7 novembre, which was renamed to commemorate Mohamed Bouazizi for his valiant efforts in the Arab Spring of 2010. The French example comes from Paris, where as Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch (2016) observed, Bouazizi was also honored with the renaming of avenue de la Sibelle (in the 14th arrondissement) as Place Mohamed Bouazizi.
Although few and far between, the use of toponymic inscription by people for purposes of reappropriating and reclaiming their identity and ideology is not completely unfamiliar in Africa. Here, and particularly in Nairobi, Kenya, the indigenous leadership wasted no time to replace British colonial street names with indigenous African varieties (Njoh, 2017; Wanjiru and Matsubara, 2017). This was aimed at renouncing “the colonial regime and its ideology, and redefining the city’s identity with toponymic symbols of nationalism and pan-Africanism” (Wanjiru and Matsubara, 2017: 1).
Places and streets in Germano-Anglo colonial towns in Cameroon
Previous works on toponymic inscription in erstwhile colonized territories have been narrowly focused. This has led to the erroneous conclusion that the roots of most street and place names in such territories are traceable to their former European colonial master nations. This is true of many major African towns such as Dakar, Senegal; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Lagos, Nigeria; Yaounde, Cameroon; Harare, Zimbabwe; Nairobi, Kenya; and Cape Town, South Africa. However, as shown below, this does not hold true for some colonial towns, particularly those of Germano-Anglo Cameroon. The conspicuous absence or underrepresentation of names from the lexical dictionaries of erstwhile colonial master nations suggests the presence of a largely ignored set of factors at the root of street and place names in Africa.
As noted earlier, Anglophone Cameroon boasts five major colonial towns: Buea, Victoria, Kumba, Mamfe and Bamenda. These served as colonial government administrative centres (see Table 1). Anyone familiar with the towns would notice the glaring scarcity of place and street names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries. This goes against the grain of established knowledge of toponymic practices. According to this knowledge, the most indelible footprints of colonialism in erstwhile colonial towns are place and street names with European roots. Before ferreting the annals of Anglophone Cameroon’s socio-political evolution for explanations of this unusual phenomenon, we present an overview of each of the five towns with emphasis on the names of their most prominent streets and places.
Buea
Known to members of its indigenous population as Gbea, Buea stands atop the ladder of all Germano-Anglo colonial administrative towns in Cameroon. German colonial authorities made their first attempt to conquer Buea in 1891. They were, however, repelled by the valiant armed forces of the Bakweri, the indigenous people led by Chief Kuva Likenye. It was not until 1894 that the efforts succeeded and resulted in the German colonial government establishing suzerainty over the area. Upon subduing the native population, the German colonial government claimed the land stretching from Great Soppo to Buea Town, and from Small Soppo to Bokwaongo. Here, the government built its main colonial facilities at a locale it christened the Colonial Government Station. This adjourns Buea Town, the Government Residential Areas (GRA) in Bokwaongo adjacent to the Bokwaongo Native area, the Colonial Government Clerical Staff Quarters (Clerks’ Quarters). Clerks’ Quarters, which is on the left side of the highway from Limbe/Kumba to Buea, is a stone’s throw from Great Soppo Stranger Quarters, which lies on the right side of the aforementioned highway.
In 1889, the German colonial government began work on the 72-room colonial Governor’s Lodge (the Schloss). The project, which employed forced labour input from the Bakweri, was completed in 1902. The first occupant of the gargantuan structure (see Figure 2) was Governor Jesco von Puttkamer, the German colonial government’s pioneer governor in Kamerun, after whom the lodge was named. The year 1902 also witnessed completion of construction works on the German primary school at Buea Station and the first German colonial post office in Kamerun. The post office building has been preserved as a historic monument, while the school building currently serves as a Cameroon military office. In 1901, a year before completion of the Schloss, Buea had been designated the capital of Kamerun.
German Colonial Governor’s Mansion built in 1902.
Three main factors—cold temperature, absence of anopheles mosquitoes and high altitude—informed this decision. The cold temperature mimicked the climatic conditions of the colonial authorities’ homeland. The absence of anopheles mosquitoes—the vector of plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria—greatly influenced the decision, particularly because malaria had proven to be very lethal for Europeans in tropical Africa. The importance of high altitude as a consideration in the decision to designate Buea the colonial capital rested on the knowledge and appeal of elevation at the time. Knowledge of infectious disease based on the miasmatic theory suggested that disease transmission was significantly reduced at higher altitudes because of the ease of air circulation commensurate with such heights. Also, and more importantly, European colonial authorities employed altitude to symbolize the unequal distribution of power (Njoh, 2008; Njoh and Bigon, 2015; Winters, 1982). In this regard, elevations were seen to separate the ruler from the ruled. It also permitted the location of the ruler at a height that facilitated his fixed gaze over, and constant surveillance of, the ruled.
With time, German colonial authorities came to consider the volcanically active nature of Mount Fako, upon whose upper reaches Buea is perched, to be too dangerous for the location of a colonial capital. Consequently, in 1909, they relocated the capital to Douala, which is currently Cameroon’s most populous city and economic capital. The national capital was later relocated to Yaounde, where it remains to date. However, the German colonial government continued to situate important colonial government facilities in Buea even when it was no longer the colonial capital. For instance, it was selected as the locale for the cemetery of German soldiers killed in the First World War. A number of other German colonial government facilities situated within the vicinity of the cemetery include the Bismarck Fountain, which was built to commemorate Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck was the pioneer German Chancellor, holding that office from 1871 to 1890. The German colonial post office (Figure 3), the colonial Governor’s Lodge and the German colonial government school are also located in the same general area on the upper reaches of the mountain.
First formal post office in Cameroon built in Buea in 1902.
Buea’s status as a colonial government administrative centre was reinstated in 1922 when it was designated the seat of the government of British Southern Cameroons. It continued to play this role and was made headquarters of West Cameroon as part of the Federal Republic of Cameroon until the demise of the country’s federal structure in 1972. Since then, Buea has served as the headquarters of the Southwest Province-cum-Southwest Region. Located some 39 kilometers (24 miles) from Limbe on the Atlantic coast, the population of Buea township has grown from a couple of thousand during the colonial epoch to about a quarter of a million today. The township, or Buea municipality, encompasses nine smaller locales with names drawn from disparate lexical dictionaries. The locales include Bokwaongo (comprising Bokwaongo Native, GRA and West Farms), Buea Station (comprising Old Station, New Station, Upper Farms, Lower Farms, Clerks’ Quarters, Bongo Square), Buea Town (including the Native and Strangers’ Areas), Small Soppo (including the Native enclave and Long Street Corridor), Great Soppo, Bonduma (including Bokova and Bwitingi), Molyko (including Mile 17 and Mile 16 or Bolifamba) and Muea.
Infrastructurally, Buea has grown by leaps and bounds since the German colonial era. At the time, only the highway linking the town to other parts of the colony and a few access roads serving the Government Stations and the GRA existed. Today, the town in particular, and municipality in general, boast a network of many, albeit mainly unmarked, dirt streets with no signposted names. A good number of the streets are nameless. Those with established names appear on Table 2. In Great Soppo, almost all the streets are identified by numbers (i.e. Street I, Street II, . . . Street VII). In Molyko, the names are assorted and range from Campaign Street to Razi Street.
Street names and their origins in Buea.
Victoria
The presence of Europeans in the area that evolved to be christened Victoria, and later Limbe, predates the formal onset of the European colonial era in Africa. British Jamaican missionary, Rev. Joseph Merrick, who arrived in Bimbia in the general vicinity of present-day Limbe in 1843, is the first recorded European to arrive in the area. He is credited with establishing what was essentially the first formal primary school in Cameroon in 1844. In 1858, Alfred Saker, another British Baptist missionary, relocated from Fernando Po in present-day Equatorial Guinea to a place not far from Bimbia; he named the place Victoria in honor of the Queen of England at the time (Opio and Mbom, 2009). Incidentally, 1858 is the same year that John Hanning Specke stumbled across Lake Nyanza in East Africa, upon which he imposed the name Victoria to commemorate the same queen. Although credit for the so-called “founding” of Victoria is often Saker, it is worth noting that members of the native population were already settled in the area prior to the missionary’s arrival. Two years following the formal onset of the European colonial era, Britain and Germany agreed to trade Victoria and surrounding areas for German rights at the Forcados River in Nigeria and St. Lucia Kwa Zulu-Natal in South Africa. On 28 March 1887, Victoria and the surrounding area was ceded to Germany, thereby effectively making it part of German Kamerun. Following this, the town was designated the capital of Victoria Division. Its stature as an administrative centre did not end with the ousting of Germany as the colonial proprietor of Kamerun. Rather, the town’s role as an administrative centre continued through the British colonial era (1916–1961) and beyond.
Currently, the town serves as the headquarters of Fako Division. In 1982, a presidential decree by Cameroon’s pioneer and erstwhile president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, changed the township’s name from Victoria to Limbe. The latter is rooted in a botched attempt by the natives at pronouncing the name of Lieutenant Kurt Graf Puckler-Limpurg. This is the German engineer who constructed the bridge over a major local river near the point where it empties into the Atlantic Ocean. The river also goes by the name Limbe. Thus, contrary to the opinion of the powers that be and conventional wisdom in Cameroon, the name Limbe is not drawn from an indigenous lexical dictionary.
Limbe township comprises many smaller towns, quarters and neigbourhoods. Those within the urban space include Down Beach, New Town, Mabeta, Clerks’ Quarters, Cassava Farms, Gardens (or Mokeba Farms), Lumpsum Quarters, Half Mile, Mile One, Coconut Island, Nurses’ Quarters, Bota, SONARA Village and Middle Farms. The human settlements classified under the rural compass of the township include Wovia, Botaland, Batoke, Isokolo, Mukundange, Mukunda, Kie, Wonya Dikombo (also known as Bonadikombo, but more popularly as Mile IV), Seme Beach, Man O’ War Bay and Bimbia. The township also includes notable places such as the Alfred Saker Statue (Figure 4), Centenary Stadium, the Botanical Gardens including the zoo, the palm oil mill in Bota, and SONARA, the oil refinery in Cape Limboh. The street system within the township’s core assumes an orthogonal form. Despite this, hardly any of the streets has a signposted name, and many are nameless. Prominent among the few with names are Church Street, Nambeke Street, Mbende Street, Carr Street and Bota Road.
The statue of Rev. Alfred Saker, credited with founding Victoria in 1958.
German swinging wooden and metal bridge over the Cross River.
Kumba
Known to its native Bafaw people as Midiki, and fondly referred to by its buoyant inhabitants as K-Town, Kumba was founded by a fearless hunter named Midiki Uke-Bokeng around 1640. Legend has it that a Portuguese explorer had stumbled onto this valiant Bafaw hunter while he was resting under a large shade-providing tree known in the Bafaw language as ekomba. When asked by the explorer how he was doing, the hunter misunderstood him to inquire about the name of the tree under which he was resting. When he stated the tree’s name, the explorer repeated after him but mispronounced the word ekomba as Kumba. This then stuck as the town’s name. Thus, the name can be considered the product of a Portuguese explorer’s botched attempt at pronouncing the Bafaw word ekomba.
Its roots as a colonial administrative town can be traced to the German colonial era. This is when it was designated the administrative headquarters (HQ) of the Johann Albrecht Shohe District (Berzirk) (Njoh, 1995). This was one of the four original administrative districts created in the area that metamorphosed into British Southern Cameroons, and later, Anglophone Cameroon. The British assumed control of this area in 1916, and the district’s name was changed to Kumba, the same as the town’s. Concomitant with this, its role was amplified as it had become a major commercial centre within the geo-economic system of colonial Nigeria, under whose administrative auspices British Cameroons functioned. In addition, it was a major town along the highway linking the seaport town of Victoria to Mamfe/Nigeria and Bamenda. As an administrative HQ and an important commercial centre, the town attracted people from other parts of the country and Nigeria. By some accounts, most of the town’s earliest immigrants included persons from tribal groups adjourning the native Bafaw such as Balong, Bakundu and Barombi; they also included Meta, Kom, Banyangi and Bakossi from other Anglophone areas, and Bamilike from Francophone Cameroon as well as Ibo, Hausa and Ibiobio from Nigeria (Yongsi and Bryant, 2008). For most of its existence, the town’s native Bafaw population has always been dwarfed by immigrants. As discussed below, this explains the dominant non-native influence on the town’s toponymic experience.
Kumba remained a divisional administrative HQ after 1961 when Southern Cameroons became politico-administratively one half of the Federal Republic of Cameroon. It maintained this status when the country was reconstituted as a unitary state in 1972. However, its importance as a commercial centre and population magnet witnessed a sharp decline. This is mainly because the predominantly Francophone government of Cameroon failed to improve and/or maintain the Victoria–Kumba–Mamfe–Bamenda highway. Rather, the highway’s traffic was diverted to go through towns in the Francophone parts of the country.
The town’s vast geographic terrain is serviced by an equally extensive, if only nondescript web of street network. They are largely nondescript because most are nameless, and in the few cases where they are named, the names are seldom signposted. Also, in the exceptional cases where they are named, the naming process was never preceded by any formal spatial planning activity. Rather, the names constitute an upshot of an organic and informal process. Streets typically assume the name of their most popular business entities, social, cultural or academic centres. In some cases, the street or road simply assumes a descriptor tying it to its destination. This organic and informal process of naming also holds true for major places in the town. Table 3 contains a list of the major streets and places by name in Kumba.
Kumba street names and their origins.
Kumba’s major place names include Meta Quarters, Fiango, Mabanda, Hausa Quarters, Mbonge Road, Kosala, Kake I, Kake II, Barombi, Kumbambeng, Buea Road, Kumba Town, Kumba Station, Ibo Quarters and Hilltop. At least three of these, including Meta Quarters, Hausa Quarters and Ibo Quarters, were named after the earliest dominant groups of immigrants to occupy their respective locales. Thus, persons of Meta extraction from Cameroon’s Northwest Region were the earliest dominant immigrant tribal group in Meta Quarters, while the Hausa and Ibo from neighboring Nigeria were the first immigrant tribal groups to establish permanent homes in Hausa Quarters and Ibo Quarters respectively. The same holds true for Bamileke Street, which for all practical purposes—and despite its implied linear structure—qualifies as a quarter in the sense of a neighborhood. The area associated with the street name, Bamileke Street, was during the town’s early days occupied mainly by people of Bamileke origin in the country’s Western Region. To be sure, Bamileke is not the only street name that is attributable to a whole neighborhood as opposed to a singular street in Kumba. Others include Mbonge Road and Buea Road, which are the names of neighborhoods as opposed to a street or road exclusively.
Mamfe
The name Mamfe comes from the phrase M’en fié fa, which means “can we settle here?” or “can we place it here?” in the dominant native language. To understand the town’s origin as a colonial administrative centre, it is necessary to possess some knowledge of the efforts of German colonial authorities to expand and reinforce their grip on Gesselschaft Nordwest Kamerun. These efforts date back to 1900 when German colonial authorities established a government outpost under the auspices of Lieutenant von Quies at Nssakpe along the banks of the Cross River. However, Nssakpe’s role as the locale for the German colonial government administrative activities was short-lived, as it ended on 17 July 1901. This is when the station was relocated to Ossidinge and placed under the charge of Hans Glauning, who was later succeeded by Kurt Graf Puckler-Limpurg on 15 November 1902. The station came under several attacks by members of the native population. In addition, diseases were rampant and lethal. These factors led to the decision to relocate the station again; this time, the destination was Mamfe or what German colonial authorities called Ossidinge II. Here, the station was designated a district headquarters or Berzirksamt in 1909. However, it is necessary to note that this designation belies one important fact.
Apart from a swinging metal and wooden bridge over the Cross River, no more than a few huts and very essential pieces of infrastructure had been constructed in Mamfe by the outbreak of World War I. The bridge, which is shown in this article as Fig. 5, remains in usable condition as a relic of the German colonial era in Mamfe. At least three other bridges, including two in Small Mamfe and one in Naitock, were built by the Germans in the general area of Mamfe.
Upon succeeding the Germans in 1916, British colonial authorities decided to maintain Mamfe as a divisional HQ. The administrative division headquartered in Mamfe included the following towns: Nguti, Fontem, Widikum, Akwaya, Eyumojock, Tinto and Mamfe Central. In 1917, the British colonial government created a Native Authority, the Mamfe Native Authority (MNA) based in Mamfe. This evolved to become the Mamfe Area Council after independence in 1961, and in 1978, when Eyomujock was designated a sub-division, it became the Mamfe Rural Council (MRC). Today, it is known as the Mamfe Urban Council. It encompasses a geographic area that is bordered on the part leading to Besongabang by Moyen Stream, on the part along Kumba Road by the Badi River in Okoyong, and on the way to Egbekaw by the Brasseries Warehouse (Mamfe Brochure, Online; mamfe.wordpress.com).
During the colonial era, Mamfe occupied an important regional and international economic position. It was a vibrant river port on the Cross River. Familiar international commercial entities that were active in the town at the time were mostly British-based and included John Holt and the United African Company (UAC).
The town currently constitutes an important national and international hub; it is located at the intersection of the Bamenda–Nigeria and Bamenda–Kumba/Limbe highways. Major place names in the town include John Holt Beach in Small Mamfe, Egbekaw Beach, Mile 18 Beach, Reunification Roundabout, Reunification Monument, Nchang Waterfall, Bachou Ntai, Eshobi and Ntaitock Caves, the German Bridge (over the Cross River), and the Cross River Confluents.
Bamenda
The word Bamenda has its roots in the efforts of German colonial government officials to employ the prefix “ba” to connote “people from,” followed by the name of the people’s place of origin. Thus, Ba-Mendankwe means people from Mendankwe, which evolved to assume the shortened form, Bamenda. As early in the colonial era as January 1889, the German emissary, Alfred Zintgraff had arrived in Bamenda and signed treaties with local chiefs. This was barely five years following the German annexation of Kamerun. For more than a decade before the arrival of the first German official in the region, the German colonial government was busy fighting off resistance from members of the native population.
In 1901, Bamenda was designated the headquarters of the Bamenda Grassfields. A year later, this government built a fort at the top of the hill overlooking Abakwa or Abakpa, the nucleus of the “native” settlement. The location of the fort, which appears as Figure 6, is at the Government Hill Station. As in the case of Buea, this location was chosen specifically to ensure that members of the native population remained under the constant gaze of the colonial authorities. German colonial authorities constructed a meandering road to link the German Colonial Government Station, the locale of the offices and living quarters of the colonial officials, to the native settlements at the foot of the hill.
The German Fort, Bamenda built in 1902.
As noted earlier, the German colonial era in Kamerun ended abruptly in 1916. In 1918, the British colonial government, which had assumed control of the territory west of the River Mungo, ordered the Hausa residents of Bamenda to relocate to the area at the foot of the Colonial Government Station Hill (Amadou, 2018). Hausa Quarters, as the place is commonly known, is meant to reflect its origins. Fon Angwafor, the head of the indigenous people of the general area of which Abakwa is a part, considered the Hausas his guests or visitors. In fact, Abakpa—the name that the place assumed under the reign of its leader at the time, Sarikin Hausawa, Mallam Baba—is a Hausa word meaning “strangers’ settlement.”
In 1949, Bamenda Division was raised in status to a province, namely the Bamenda Province. At the same time, the division was divided into three, with Wum Nkambe constituting new divisions in addition to Bamenda. Commensurate with this, Abakwa was made part of the Ngemba Native Authority (NA), one of the NAs through whose indigenous leaders the British colonial government indirectly ruled the area. This was formalized under Section 35(1) of the NA Ordinance of 1949.
Bamenda town continued to serve as the headquarters of Bamenda Division. The town has been speedily growing, and today boasts a population of about 300,000. It is the headquarters of the North West Region, and has for a long time been Cameroon’s third largest city (after Douala and Yaounde) (Acho-Chi, 1998).
Currently, Abakwa is fondly considered by residents as the name of Bamenda township as a whole, while Hausa Quarters is also known as Old Town. Major quarters, neighborhoods and towns within Bamenda include Up Station, Hospital Roundabout, City Chemist Roundabout and Fish Pond Market. Others include Abangoh, Azire, Nkwen, Mile II, Ndamukong, Nitop I, Nitop II, Meta Quarters, Mulam, Ntamulung, Mile IV and Mile VIII. The major streets, which are generally not signposted, include Commercial Avenue, Foncha Street, Ndamukong Street, Mbengwi Road, Bali Road, Bafut Road and Sonac Street. Prominent places in the township include City Chemist Roundabout, Hospital Roundabout, Ntamulung Presbyterian Church Centre and the Fort at Upstation.
Analysis and discussion
The two questions of centrality in this study have to do with the extent of colonial infrastructure development and the conspicuous scarcity of streets and places with names from European lexical dictionaries in Germano-Anglo Cameroon. One important observation is necessary before attempting to tackle these questions. Anyone familiar with the five colonial towns discussed here is aware of their quantitative and qualitative dominance vis-à-vis other human settlements in their vicinity. This dominance is credited to their designation as centres of government administration during the colonial era and beyond. However, as Table 4 suggests, other factors have also been effective in affecting the fortunes of these towns. For instance, Buea ranked as the most populous town in Germano-Anglo Cameroon through the 1930s thanks to its role as the capital of Kamerun during the German colonial era and the seat of the colonial government of British Southern Cameroons. The 1950s through the immediate-post-colonial era witnessed Kumba as the most populous town in the area. This was a function of the important commercial role that the town played when British Southern Cameroons was governed as an appendage of Nigeria. By 1976, four years following the decision to abrogate the federated system of government in Cameroon, Kumba lost its place as the most populous town in the polity to Bamenda. Also worth noting is the fact that Mamfe, which was the polity’s second most populous town in 1935, dropped to become the fifth or least populous of the colonial towns in 1976. It is arguable that the decline of these two towns was caused by the failure of the predominantly Francophone government of Cameroon to improve the Victoria (Limbe) to Bamenda highway. This, as mentioned earlier, effectively rerouted the Limbe to Bamenda traffic through Francophone Cameroon towns such as Nkongsamba, Melon, Dschang, Bafousam and Mbouda.
Population and rank of towns in Germano-Anglo Cameroon, 1935–1976.
Like their colonial predecessors, Cameroon’s post-colonial authorities have undertaken very little infrastructure development. This is illustrated by Figure 7, which is a photograph of part of the Central Motor Park in Fiango, Kumba in the 1970s. Note that this was more than a decade after Cameroon became independent. This explains the near-absence of street and place names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries.
Public motor park, Fiango, Kumba, first decade after colonization (1970s).
In other words, because the colonial and post-colonial authorities developed only a few streets and places, they had only a few to which to attribute names from their preferred lexical dictionaries. However, this leaves one important question unaddressed. What factors account for the fact that colonial authorities developed only a few streets and places in Germano-Anglo Cameroon?
A logical starting point for any meaningful effort to address this question is to appreciate the ideologies that prevailed during the earlier phase of the European colonial era in Africa. Two of these, “emigrationist” and “economic,” guided German colonialism. Smith (1974) has succinctly summarized their major tenets and contends that they were in vogue from 1840 to 1906. The ideologies coincide with more conventional labels that classify colonies as settler colonies and colonies of economic exploitation. The former includes colonies that were designed to serve as permanent homes for Europeans away from Europe. The Germans actualized this ideology under a program known as Auswanderung. This program was intended to facilitate the massive emigration of Germans displaced by local socio-economic conditions to suitable German colonies in Africa. The program had sociocultural and economic preservation objectives. In this regard, the emigrants were supposed to settle as farmers in the colonies where they were expected to “protect” and “preserve” German culture. This culture, particularly the peasant way of life, was viewed as being seriously threatened by the social dynamics engendered by the industrial revolution in 19th-century Europe.
The ideology of economic colonialism led to the creation of colonies of economic exploitation. From the perspective of German colonial authorities, for example, colonies such as Kamerun were appendages of the industrial and commercial sectors of the German economy. These colonies served as steady sources of raw materials that were unavailable in Europe. It is essentially for this reason that the colonies were known as “colonies of economic exploitation,” in contrast to settler colonies, which served as permanent outposts for Germans displaced by the contracting German economy of the time. The treatment of Germano-Anglo Cameroon as a colony of economic exploitation remained unchanged when the British took over as trustees of the League of Nations in 1916.
As Njoh and Bigon (2015) observed, this is one of the domains which German colonial authorities employed to articulate power and facilitate attainment of essential goals of the colonial project in Kamerun. In 1910, for instance, the German colonial government in Kamerun crafted and implemented a plan under the guise of urban renewal that set aside the best parts of Douala—Bonanjo and Akwa—as exclusively European enclaves. In practice, the plan called for the relocation of members of the native population and other African immigrants to the rundown, squalid and delapidated parts of the town, including New Bell and the peripheries (Schler, 2015). In contrast to the European enclaves, these areas were/are physically far removed from the coast. This plan effectively created a distinctly racially segregated built space. Within this spatial configuration, the European enclaves mimicked human settlements in Europe, complete with numbered buildings and well-aligned streets whose names were signposted. In contrast, the African areas were served by footpaths or dirt roads with neither signposted names nor building numbers. Thus, these latter areas were largely neglected and only appreciated as a reservoir for the labour force that fueled the colonial economy.
In the part of the country that evolved to become Southern Cameroons during the colonial epoch, and Anglophone Cameroon during the post-colonial era, urban planning received little attention. Whatever spatial or physical development occurred in this area was a by-product of military defense and agro-industrial development initiatives. These happened mainly in the area west of River Mungo. Some have opined that it is the agriculturally rich volcanic soil of this region that convinced the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, a known critic of the colonial project, to reluctantly consent to the idea of colonizing Kamerun (Njoh and Bigon, 2015). German economic investment in the colonies was necessary to help bolster Germany’s international economic standing. Some of the country’s most notable colonial economic development activities took place in the area around Mount Cameroon between 1897 and 1906. This is when the German imperial government authorized four German agro-industrial companies to operate in Victoria Division (present-day Fako Division). These included the Westafrikanische Pflanzunsgessellschaft Viktoria (i.e., the West African Planting Society, Victoria) (established in 1897); the Berlin West African Plantation Company, Bibundi (1897); the Moliwe Plantation Company (1897); and the Bimbia Plantation Company (1906).
The genre of colonial agro-industrial development activities in which these corporations were involved had at least three implications for spatial development in the coastal area of Germano-Anglo Cameroon. The first is the dispossession of members of the indigenous population of access to prime land by confiscating such land for colonial agricultural purposes. Three specific examples from the 1890s are worth noting. The first involves German colonial authorities imposing huge fines on members of the native population, the Bakweri, and relocating same into “native reservations” (or reservat). Another involved the assignment of each native family with a male member a land parcel of 1.5 hectares for living and subsistent farming (Njoh, 2013). The last example is the enactment on 15 July 1896 of the sweeping piece of legislation that converted all so-called “vacant and unoccupied lands” in Kamerun into property of the German Crown. These German colonial development policies were inherited and maintained by their British successors. The British, on their part, bequeathed the policies to the post-colonial authorities. As an example, consider the case of the agro-industrial plantations that the British inherited from German colonial authorities. These plantations evolved to become the mainstay of the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), which was established in 1946 and has remained active since the end of the colonial era.
These and other policies of the German and British colonial authorities were never meant to propel development in the colony. Rather, as with other activities in colonies of economic exploitation, the policies were designed to accelerate development in the colonial master country. Consequently, the colonies were there to be exploited and only appreciated for their economic value. Whatever minimal development took place in the colonies was intended to facilitate their exploitation. Nowhere was this as true as in the case of Victoria Division. Here, the narrow-gauge railways and few roads that were developed in the area were meant to facilitate the transportation of palm nuts, bananas and rubber from the plantations to processing or packaging facilities at the wharves. Thus, the wharves, as other pieces of infrastructure, served to enable the onward transmission of raw materials from the colonies to the colonial master nations. This explains, at least in part, the lack of attention to urban development issues such as the building and naming of streets as well as the numbering of buildings. It also explains the near-absence of street and place names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries.
It would be misleading to assert that street and place names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries are completely absent in the polity. Here, it is necessary to reiterate the fact that Victoria, for example, was so-named in 1858 to honor the Queen of England at the time. Also, the little CDC company town named Saxenhof, the Bismarck Fountain and the German Cemetery in Buea as well as the German Fort at Station Hill (Upstation), Bamenda are the names of places and objects in the territory’s built space that serve as inescapable reminders of its German colonial heritage. At least one place, John Holt Beach in Mamfe, and a number of schools, including the Saker Baptist College in Limbe, Sasse College in Buea and Joseph Merrick Baptist College in Ndu, commemorate non-indigenous personalities or entities. Thus, the point is not that these towns contain no streets or places bearing names from foreign lexical dictionaries. Rather, it is that such names are extremely rare in Germano-Anglo towns in Cameroon in comparison to towns that served as colonial government administration centres elsewhere in Africa.
This can be explained by at least three related facts. First, the colonial tenure of Germany, the initial colonizer of this polity, was considerably brief (1884–1914). More importantly, the Germans spent most of this period fending off fierce resistance to the colonial project in the territory and protecting it from other European adversaries. Second, Britain, under whose colonial auspices the territory fell as an outcome of the First World War, manifested a gross dereliction of duty by treating it as a mere appendage of colonial Nigeria, the territory’s neighbor to the West. Third, at no point during the colonial era was the territory ever treated as a settler colony. Rather, it was, as all of its peers in the West and Central Africa region, a colony of economic exploitation. Such colonies were, as noted earlier, appreciated exclusively for their economic worth. This is in contrast to settler colonies such as South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) that were colonized, developed and settled by Europeans. The fact that permanent settlement was never the intention of European colonial powers in colonies of economic exploitation ensured that they built very few, if any, pieces of social and physical infrastructure,. Consequently, colonies of exploitation were relatively less developed than their settler peers at the eve of independence throughout Africa. The problem of underdevelopment was aggravated in Germano-Anglo Cameroon by its diminutive size and relative lack of natural resources. As noted above, the region was literally neglected by the colonial powers that controlled it at one point or another. It is therefore, no wonder that, at the eve of independence, Anglophone Cameroon boasted significantly fewer pieces of public infrastructure than its Francophone counterpart (Budi, 2019). Thus, it is safe to conclude that their preference notwithstanding, colonial authorities had hardly any streets and places to christen with names from colonial lexical dictionaries.
Cameroon’s unique colonial and post-colonial experience is another important internal factor at the root of the toponymic nomenclature of towns that served as Germano-Anglo colonial government administration centres. Contemporary Cameroon comprises two territories that were carved out of German colonial Kamerun, which existed from 1884 to 1916. As afore-noted, these territories were transformed into League of Nations mandates and placed under the auspices of France and Britain respectively after the First World War in 1918. However, as noted earlier, German control of Kamerun effectively ended in 1916. For 45 years—that is, from 1916 until independence in 1960/61—the two existed under distinctly different politico-administrative and sociocultural systems, namely French and English. A preoccupation of the country’s political leadership during the post-colonial era has been to unify these systems. For instance, streets and places have been christened with names designed to attain cultural assimilation objectives of the country’s predominantly Francophone government. Two situations illustrate this tendency. One involves the change of the name Victoria to Limbe, while the other relates to the christening of a major roundabout in Mamfe as Reunification Roundabout. To this, one can safely add the many institutions of learning that have been christened “Government Bilingual Grammar School” throughout the territory.
At first glance, these situations pass for what some have characterized as an effort on the part of a people to employ the power of toponymic inscription to affirm or reclaim their national identity (cf., Azaryahu, 2012). However, upon further scrutiny, the decision to rename Victoria is part of a broader effort by post-colonial Cameroon’s majority Francophone government to assimilate the minority Anglophone part of the country by purging it of any English relics. Efforts to employ toponymic inscription as a tool of cultural assimilation have been observed in other parts of the world (see e.g., Alderman and Inwood, 2013; Azaryahu, 2012; Njoh and Bigon, 2013; Kearns and Berg, 2002; Medway and Warnaby, 2014; Njoh, 2017; Vuolteenaho, 2017). Thus, the decision to name or rename built space or any object therein is certainly not a benign undertaking designed to exclusively signify objective facts. Rather, as Azaryahu (2012) puts it, the act of place and street naming involves deliberate choices of nomenclatures. The selected names always tend to reflect the predilections of the party doing the (re)naming as opposed to that of the object being (re)named (Bigon, 2009; Njoh, 2017; Njoh and Chie, 2020).
The Victoria-to-Limbe name change was not taken kindly by many an Anglo-Cameroonian. The indigenous leaders of the town and its environs found this change particularly perturbing. These leaders, especially the local chiefs, went so far as to express their discontent in writing to the national leadership. As Opio and Mbom (2009) noted, the chiefs have officially expressed their desire to have the relevant national authorities reinstate the township’s original Anglo-Saxon name, Victoria. Such reinstatement, the local leaders contend, is necessary to reflect the township’s British heritage. While the local leaders’ efforts in this connection qualify as an attempt to reclaim a threatened identity, it is ironic that what they desire to reclaim is anything but indigenous. This is essentially what makes the Anglophone Cameroon case unique. Otherwise, resistance to foreign-imposed names is commonplace. In a number of notable cases such as Nairobi, Kenya, this resistance occurred after the fact and led to the replacement of street and place names from British lexical dictionaries with names from Kenya and other parts of Africa during the post-colonial era (Njoh, 2017). Similar resistances, which are often discussed under the rubric of geographies of resistance, have been recorded in Zanzibar (Myers, 2009) and Singapore (Yeh, 2013; Yeoh, 1996).
Yet, the minimal influence on place and street names in the polity cannot be ignored. One evidence of this near-absence of foreign influence on the polity’s toponymy is the presence of many streets named after their destinations. Streets such as Mbonge Road and Buea Road in Kumba as well as Bali Road and Mbengwi Road in Bamenda are illustrative. The names of neighborhoods such as Meta Quarters, Ibo Quarters and Hausa Quarters in Kumba and Meta Quarters and Hausa Quarters in Bamenda constitute yet another piece of evidence bolstering the theory of a near-absence of foreign influence on the toponymic practices in the polity.
Place and street names whose roots can be traced to endogenous sources are plentiful. In this regard, there are many streets and places that have been named in honor of indigenous or African heroes, political leaders or local events. Bongo Square in Buea, for instance, was named in honor of the late Gabonese President, Omar Bongo, while Lumumba Street in Kumba was named in memory of the anti-colonial leader, Patrice Lumumba of Congo (DRC). Centenary Stadium, Limbe was so named to commemorate the 100th anniversary (1858–1958) of the professed founding of Victoria by the Rev. Alfred Saker. As for Ndamukong Street and Foncha Street in Bamenda, they were named after two of that town’s most influential politicians: J. N. Foncha, who was the pioneer prime minister, and L. M. Ndamukong, one-time secretary of state for education and social welfare in the West Cameroon Government, which became defunct with the creation of the short-lived United Republic of Cameroon in 1972.
Further evidence of the dominance of endogenous influences on toponymic practices in Anglophone Cameroon is their largely organic nature. Accordingly, most of the names originate from the inevitable social interactions that occur among the citizenry itself. In the case of a town, such names originate from the social interaction among the town’s residents. For instance, many streets in Kumba are named after popular spots of social intercourse or commerce. Examples of these include Lido Street, named after Lido Bar, and Confidence Street, after Confidence Bar in Kumba, as well as Sonac Street after the Société National du Cameroun (SONAC) trading store in Bamenda. A number of areas are named after the first dominant tribal group to settle in the area. Also exemplifying this trend are streets such as Church Street in Limbe and Kumba and Commercial Avenue in Bamenda that take after the dominant activities on the street: churches in the former and commerce in the latter. Bamileke Street, which, despite its suffix, is in fact a quarter, was so named in honor of the tribal origin of its most populous residents. These originated from the mainly Bamileke Western Region of Cameroon. Metta Quarters in Kumba and Bamenda and Hausa Quarters in Kumba, Mamfe and Bamenda, as well as Ibo Quarters in Kumba, derived their names from the dominance of Metta, Ibo and Hausa people in the corresponding neighborhoods.
Concluding remarks
The term Germano-Anglo Cameroon refers to the part of Cameroon that experienced German and British colonialism. Presently better known as Anglophone Cameroon, this polity provides an ideal context for addressing the three questions of centrality in the study reported here. The questions relate to factors accounting for the relative lack of infrastructure in this polity, the absence of place and street names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries, and the impact of endogenous and exogenous factors influencing the polity’s toponymic practices. This study has employed colonial towns in Germano-Anglo Cameroon to tackle these questions. The colonial towns include human settlements that served as centres of government administration during the German and British colonial eras. Incidentally, these towns have continued to serve as government administrative centres during the post-colonial era. Despite this, the towns—as was the case during the colonial era—continue to be ignored as targets of public infrastructure development projects. In addition, the towns have benefited from very little, if any, town planning initiatives. Thus, the towns have largely developed organically; this explains the scarcity of names from Eurocentric or preferred official lexical dictionaries.
This study unveils an important fact that broadens understanding of factors accounting for the quantity of names from non-indigenous lexical dictionaries in any town’s inventory of street and place names. The fact is that this quantity is a function of the level of formality in town planning writ large and the naming procedure in particular. Thus, the conspicuous absence of streets and places with such names in Germano-Anglo Cameroon is a reflection of the fact that both colonial and post-colonial authorities have never prioritized the need to develop the infrastructure of this polity. Thus, without public infrastructure, including streets and places, there is nothing to name.
This revelation is novel and would need to be tested in other settings to ascertain its validity. Yet, it must be noted that although Germany’s tenure as a colonial power in Germano-Anglo Cameroon was very brief, it managed to complete some meaningful infrastructure projects. Little is known of these projects. This paper presented an opportunity to help reverse this situation with verbal and visual images.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
