Charles Atangana ( – 1 September 1943), also known by his birth name, Ntsama, and his German name, Karl, was the paramount chief of the Ewondo people.
Early life Atangana was born sometime between 1876 and 1885 in Mvolyé, a small village in what is today Yaoundé, Cameroon. His parents gave him the drum name "He who is known by the nations". He was the eleventh of twelve children born to Essomba Atangana, a headman of the Mvog Atemenge sublineage of the Ewondo ethnic group. Essomba Atangana was one of thousands of minor Beti leaders living between the Sanaga and Nyong rivers, each charged with providing for his compound and the extended family and slaves who lived there. His father died when Ntsama Atangana was about six years old.
Little is known about Atangana's childhood. Like other Beti boys, he would have learned to fish, hunt, and trap, and would have memorised his family's genealogy and folk wisdom. Explorers from the German Empire appeared near his village in 1887 in search of a direct route to the ivory trade in the savannas to the north. 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. The Ewondo opposed the foreigners at first, although Atangana was probably not yet old enough to participate in the fighting. After the defeat of Omgba Bissogo in 1895 and others like it, Ewondo resistance waned. The Germans randomly appointed chiefs and mayors to serve under them, and took local youths to perform menial tasks; Atangana was among them, sent by his uncle to be a houseboy.
Ewondo who learned were highly favoured in the early days of the colonial regime. 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. There, Atangana learned German language, history, and geography; mathematics; and Roman Catholicism. Father Heinrich Vieter especially liked the boy, and Atangana became the first Ewondo baptised a Roman Catholic; he took the Christian name Karl. Atangana's schooling had just ended when members of the Bulu ethnic group, one closely related to the Ewondo, invaded Kribi and sacked the school and church in 1899. Atangana waited out the revolt in Douala with the Fathers until the colonial militia defeated the rebels the following year.
Early career At some point between the end of his schooling in Kribi and the end of his service in Victoria, Atangana met Marie Biloa, a woman from a village called Mekumba. Although she was a little older and living as a kept woman by a German functionary, Atangana married her. She would eventually bear him two children: Jean Ndengue and Katerina (or Catherine) Edzimbi.
Atangana was a devout Christian, and he supported the church throughout his life with land and gifts. He opposed popular Beti syncretist practices, and he was an opponent of an Ewondo initiation rite called the Sso; his efforts led to its eventual eradication from Beti society. In 1901 he secured land for the Pallottine Fathers to build a mission in Jaunde, thus opening east and south Cameroon to Catholic proselytisation. Nevertheless, Atangana supported traditional Ewondo customs on marriage. On widows, he said,
Early in 1902, the colonial government appointed him their representative to the Ewondo people, and interpreter and clerk for the Germans posted in Jaunde. He was tasked with organising a census and tax collection system. He chose 300 headmen to be tax collectors, of whom the Germans approved 233. Atangana negotiated a cut of 5% for the collectors, much to their delight.
Hans Dominik became the Jaunde post commander in 1904. For the next six years, Atangana accompanied him on at least fifteen administrative patrols and probative excursions. 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. Atangana helped open posts in such wide-ranging places as Bafia, Abong-Mbang, Mouloudou, Ngaoundéré, Garoua, and Maroua. 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. Back in Jaunde, Atangana gained responsibilities valued by the regime, such as overseeing a poll tax in October 1908.
In 1907, members of the Mvog Ada sublineage revolted against the colonial government over Atangana's appointment as their official interpreter. The plot included a conspiracy to poison Atangana, but word leaked to him. He informed his masters, and on 11 April, six plotters were put to death and two others imprisoned.
Dominik died on 16 November 1910. 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). However, he resigned the post when the head of his sublineage died; Atangana took over as headman of the sublineage and Mvolyé village.
In late 1911, Atangana voyaged to Germany to teach Ewondo at the Colonial Institute of the University of Hamburg. He stayed there for about one year and transcribed Ewondo history and folklore for translation into German. His writings eventually became the Jaunde-Texte, an important source document on Ewondo history and culture. In 1913, he met Emperor Wilhelm II in Germany and Pope Pius X in Rome. He returned to Cameroon the following year.
Paramount chief
The Germans had seen some success in uniting disparate groups under single individuals called paramount chiefs (). Atangana was chosen for this position among the Ewondo and Bane either before his trip to Germany or soon after. This was technically only a temporary appointment; his subjects would have to approve it a year later to make it permanent. They had little alternative; Atangana was already the primary conduit of information to and from the Germans.
Some emulation of European manners and dress was expected of all chiefs, but Atangana seems to have genuinely preferred European styles to African ones. He endeavoured to fit himself into the German mould of an ideal administrator. He wrote, "To dare to approach the Germans it is necessary to abandon the traits which displease them, to become their friend and then be valued by them." Accordingly, Atangana ate German food; formed a European-style, 20-piece orchestra; and ordered a large, Germanic mansion to be built. This latter project requiring construction of a brickyard and sawmill and earned Atangana another epithet, Mindili Ebulu, "the man whose house is so large that it had a roof divided into nine sections instead of the two sections of an ordinary dwelling." The number nine has great significance in Beti folklore.
Atangana was suspicious of anyone who might supplant him as the Germans' favourite. He wrote,
Atangana won over other chiefs and headmen through gifts, tax cuts, flattery, and intervention on their behalf. He lavished attention on visitors from out of town, letting them stay at his palace and use his horses, and treating them to feasts. In addition to flattering them, this allowed him to monitor their activities and dealings with the colonial authorities. His clerk appointees in Jaunde informed him of the doings of both the Germans and his subjects. Atangana gained a substantial amount of wealth. He owned workshops and sold produce from five plantations to provision impressed railway construction workers.
The paramount chief maintained some loyalty for his subjects. 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. In one instance, an Ewondo interpreter fired a gun during a dispute with a German, an offence punishable with a stiff prison sentence. Atangana interceded, and the man's punishment was reduced to porter duty. However, the paramount chief remained completely loyal to the governors. In 1914, for example, representatives of Duala leader Rudolf Duala Manga Bell tried to secure Atangana's backing for a pan-Cameroonian revolt. Atangana kept the plot under wraps, but he instructed the envoy to urge Manga Bell to reconsider.
Atangana's appointment irritated members of the Bulu ethnic group. They feared they might one day lose German favour, or worse yet, fall under the dominion of the Ewondo. This culminated in the 1912 Bulu uprising led by Martin-Paul Samba, a German-trained man much like Atangana. The rebellion was crushed and Samba executed.
World War I The Allied West African Campaign of World War I reached Cameroon in 1914. Douala fell on 17 September, and the Germans regrouped at Jaunde. Beti informants alerted Atangana as to the Allies' progress, and as the loss of Jaunde seemed inevitable, Atangana prepared to escape with his masters. He and the chiefs under him gave their posts to weaker relatives so they could more easily take them back should the Germans return. They held out in Jaunde until 1 January 1916, when troops of the British Army captured the town, and the German soldiers and missionaries fled into the forest. Atangana and 72 Ewondo and Bane chiefs, along with 14–20,000 villagers (mostly soldiers and their families), led them through. A Beti folk song, "Atangana Ntsama, the War Is Over", tells of the retreat and shows the conflict between those Beti who supported Atangana and those who opposed him:
Atangana Ntsama, the war is over . . . Hè! Atangana Ntsama, the war is over! The cannon are broken, Go tell it to the son of Ndono Edoa, To the great man who is the son of Ndono Edoa, Run quickly, why do you languish there? All you Ewondo, come and run quickly, Come and run quickly, brothers; Go tell it to Mindili Ebulu, son of Ndono Edoa. How is it that you would like me to leave so many goods behind? Hè! They will surprise you in your greed! Such richness. I should take some! You others, move off, what are you doing there? Friend, there were as many goods as in a market; Friend, we have marched through all of that without taking anything!
They reached Spanish Guinea in February and surrendered to the unaligned representatives of Spain. 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 and members of his family accompanied them. In 1918, the Germans sent Atangana and six other chiefs to Spain, where they would witness if necessary that the Germans had treated their African subjects humanely. In September 1919, Atangana had an audience with King Alfonso XIII of Spain and urged him to support the Germans in these proceedings. Atangana remained in Madrid for two years and stayed a month in Barcelona to retrieve money he had deposited through the Basel Mission.
Meanwhile, Ewondo lands came under the administration of the French Third Republic under a League of Nations mandate. Atangana, now known by the French version of his name, Charles, wrote the French government to swear his allegiance and demand readmittance to his homeland. He received his wish in June 1920 and arrived in Douala on 28 November 1920.
Later life