Charles Atangana - Later Life

Later Life

Atangana's unfailing loyalty and subservience to Germany prevented the French from ever fully trusting him. His first task under the new colonial regime was to supervise gangs of forced road-construction labourers in the town of Dschang. In Atangana's absence, the French had appointed a Beti headman named Joseph Atemengue as their local representative in Jaunde (now known by the French spelling, Yaoundé). However, Atemengue never enjoyed the popularity Atangana had among the Beti. Atangana tried to secure an alliance with him by sending his 20-year-old, German-educated daughter, Katerina, to marry him, but she eventually fled from the much older Atemengue and back to her father. Atangana's work performance convinced the French to let him return to Yaoundé in late 1921 or early 1922.

Soon thereafter, Atemengue was made chief of the local court, and Atangana was again appointed paramount chief (chef supérieur). He received a seat on the Council of Notables, a body the French had introduced to act as liaisons to their subjects and advisors to the administration. Atangana set up a cabinet based on those he had observed in Spain, but he never allowed it to do much, and its members were not accustomed to European-style administration. It disbanded in 1925.

The French granted the chiefs significantly less power than had their German predecessors. Atangana's major role was simple: to enforce the dictats of French rule. Governor General Van Vollenhoven wrote in 1917 that, "the chiefs have no power of their own of any kind because there are not two authorities in the circle: French authority and indigenous authority; there is only one. Only the commander of the circle commands." As a colonial administrator, Atangana was expected to collect taxes, help the French introduce cocoa and coffee plantations, and mobilise chiefs to secure the labour to work these estates. In 1924, the French introduced a requisition system to procure food for the Yaoundé urban community and for rail labourers; Atangana was responsible for rallying the chiefs to gather the necessary provisions from rural farmers; the exact methods used by the chiefs was left to them. Cocoa production in the South and Centre provinces increased even during the Great Depression, partially as a result of these efforts. He reorganised the chiefs and their duties and tried to Westernise his subjects by encouraging them to wear European-style clothing, utilise new building methods and house styles, and work to improve roads.

Most of the chiefs respected Atangana as their spokesman and leader, and the Beti at large deferred to him prestige and power. A new system of status had evolved under his rule: a cadre of minor bureaucrats, envoys, interpreters, and office staff worked for Atangana and the other chiefs independent of the French government and were completely dependent on the chiefs. Atangana set up a private police force, for example, known as the fulus in Ewondo. The entire class recognised its reliance on the chiefs and gave them loyalty in exchange for protection and pay, and the chiefs relied on these functionaries to swiftly fulfill their duties to the French regime.

Nevertheless, the Beti at large detested French forced labour practices and taxes. Some people fled to the bush before the tax collector arrived; others circumvented taxes by counting wives as out-of-town visitors or waiting until the last minute to pay and thus reducing the collector's cut of the tax money. If the taxes were not collected to the satisfaction of the colonial administrators, Atangana himself was expected to make up some of the difference. To counter these minor rebellions, chiefs could punish their subjects with 15 days in jail or 100 franc fines without due process of law. This was meant to be reserved for only certain infractions, but Atangana and other chiefs interpreted it broadly to include all sorts of difficult behaviour. Atangana and his sub-chiefs were expected to discipline such difficult subjects. He exerted continual pressure on the sub-chiefs, who in turn placed constant pressure on the villagers to pay taxes and supply labourers.

Nevertheless, his wealth continued to grow. In 1922, his salary was 6,000 francs per year, and in 1938, it had risen to 24,000 francs per year. Atangana also received 2% of all taxes collected by lower chiefs, pay for his legal role, and stipends for organising road construction. Oral informants have reported that as early as 1924, he owned enormous plantations with as much as 1 km² of cocoa, 1.1 km² of palms, 5 km² of food crops, and 500 head of livestock. The amounts may be exaggerated, but Atangana was by all accounts a wealthy man. He owned two lorries and a car by 1926, which he used to haul produce from his plantations. By the 1930s, important chiefs such as Atangana could earn more than 400,000 francs per year on tax collecting alone.

The 278 Beti chiefs under Atangana's control began to oppose his primacy by the mid-1920s. His control fell especially among the Bane. In 1924, the Bane filed a complaint against Atangana in court, claiming, "We work always and it is Atangana who receives the money. For all the things that we have sent to the Europeans, such as chickens and eggs, through Atangana, we have received nothing." They plotted to raise their own paramount chief and to drum up sentiment against Atangana among the common people. The French arrested the plotters for refusing to pay their taxes and provide labourers. This left Atangana still head of the Bane, but his influence had been severely curtailed.

In 1925, the French reduced the number of Beti chiefs to 40 and removed the chiefs of Yaoundé from Atangana's direct control. However, in 1928 the Yaoundé chiefs were deemed quarrelsome and incompetent, and Atangana was once again placed over them. In 1929, he wrote a work on traditional Beti society in which he tried to hide his unremarkable childhood by taking the title of "King" and claiming descent from a fictitious line of Ewondo royalty. By the end of the decade, he was the head of perhaps 130,000 people, the chief of Mvolyé village, and the supervisor of eight sectional chiefs and 72 village chiefs. In reality, his position was one of prestige but little actual power.

Collecting taxes and finding labour grew increasingly difficult as the decade progressed, thanks to greater access to paying employment in Yaoundé and on the plantations. Atangana's 1938 proposal for the reorganisation of Yaoundé's administration shows the frustration he experienced at that time:

the local people do not know what endurance means . . . work with ill-will for the administration or for private concerns, where they seek refuge as a safeguard when the administration gives the chiefs an order in the public interest or for their own good.

He further complained, "Notables, with their diminished influence, are almost inert in relation to the growing number of their recalcitrant subjects" and suggested that a chief could hardly control more than 5,000 people. Atangana is not even mentioned in a French report on their African leaders from 1939. However, he retained the right to announce the appointment of new chiefs and to claim that both he and the French had selected them.

Atangana travelled frequently in the French colonial period. He made a point of attending his subjects' weddings and funerals, for example. He had more opportunities to visit Europe, including the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 and the French Colonial Conference in 1935. In 1938, his wife died. Atangana was a handsome man by Ewondo standards: strong, well groomed, with a reputation as a good fighter, dancer, and husband. He remarried on 6 January 1940 to Julienne or Yuliana Ngonoa, a young Beti woman of the Mvog Manga sublineage from the village Nkolafamba. She bore him two children: Marie-Thérèse and René Grégoire. Atangana seems to have adhered to Catholic strictures against polygamy, despite the fact that other Beti chiefs at the time had several hundred wives.

Atangana lobbied in his later life for public health causes, such as the eradication of sleeping sickness. He never supported the expansion of Cameroun's public school system, since he believed that educated subjects might one day challenge his rule. Atangana's health began to fail him beginning in August 1943. On 1 September, he died in Mvolyé, Yaoundé.