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Max Esser was an adventurous young merchant banker, a Rhinelander,
who became the first managing director of the largest German
plantation company in Cameroon. This volume gives a vivid account
of the antecedents and early stages as experienced and described by
Esser. In 1896 he ventured, with the explorer Zintgraff, into the
hinterland to seek the agreement of Zintgraff's old ally, the ruler
of Bali, for the provision of laborers for his projected
enterprise. The consequences, many optimistically unforeseen, are
illustrated with the help of contemporary materials. Esser's
account is preceded by a look at his and his family's connections,
added to by an account of newspaper campaigns against him, and
completed by an examination of his Cameroon collection, which he
gave to the Linden Museum in Stuttgart.
Max Esser was an adventurous young merchant banker, a Rhinelander,
who became the first managing director of the largest German
plantation company in Cameroon. This volume gives a vivid account
of the antecedents and early stages as experienced and described by
Esser. In 1896 he ventured, with the explorer Zintgraff, into the
hinterland to seek the agreement of Zintgraff's old ally, the ruler
of Bali, for the provision of laborers for his projected
enterprise. The consequences, many optimistically unforeseen, are
illustrated with the help of contemporary materials. Esser's
account is preceded by a look at his and his family's connections,
added to by an account of newspaper campaigns against him, and
completed by an examination of his Cameroon collection, which he
gave to the Linden Museum in Stuttgart.
The following pages, initially prepared for limited circulation in
1961, contain brief extracts and summaries of those parts of Eugen
Zintgraff's book Nord-Kamerun (1895), of most interest concerning
the colonial Bamenda and Wum Division. Zintgraff's book, the first
by a European about the Grassfields, has not been translated and is
hard to get second-hand. In using these notes the following points
should be borne in mind: Zintgraff's knowledge of Bali (Mungaka)
and Hausa was very slight, and his discussions of character,
motives and political institutions are consequently superficial and
open to criticisms. He had no means of checking what he was told,
or thought he was told. He had no previous knowledge of any similar
culture and no training in ethnographical method. He was, however,
a good observer, and his descriptions of tools, dress, weapons and
the like, can be regarded as fairly reliable. Finally, it must be
remembered that Zintgraff wrote the book to justify his own actions
and to support that small but influential section of public opinion
in Germany which favoured rapid imperial expansion. A full account
of the actions and motives of Zintgraff's opponents in the Kamerun
Government and in the Colonial Bureau of the German Foreign Office
has not been written: we only have one side of the story. But there
are some suggestive points made in Rudin's Germans in the Cameroons
and others referred to in these notes. What is perhaps most
striking about Zintgraff's account is the fact that the people of
the Western Grassfields were not so isolated from one another or
their neighbours as might be thought. A network of
trade-friendships covered the country and big men exchanged gifts
over long distances. These links must be set beside the insecurity
due to raids and slave-catching, and are well worth investigation.
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