Charles Atangana - Early Life

Early Life

Ntsama 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 German 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.