Religious conflict and the evolution of language policy in German and French Cameroon, 1885--1939

Language policy in Cameroon under German and French rule evolved in response to ongoing metropolitan debates about colonial policy and the role played by religious organizations in shaping, and occasionally threatening, national identity. In German Cameroon, missionary conflicts with the colonial administration mirrored a resurgence of the Kulturkampf that erupted in Prussian Poland shortly before the turn of the century. While in the metropole the Kulturkampf saw the Catholic church branded as an unpatriotic organization for its insistence on defending the Polish language and the rights of Prussian Poles, in Cameroon the situation was reversed. Whereas interdenominational rivalries, the desire to capitalize on African demands for access to the language of power, and eagerness to ensure colonial authorities of their loyalty and patriotism caused Catholic missionaries to endorse and enthusiastically promote government sponsored efforts to spread the German language, Protestant mission societies in German Cameroon quickly became targets of official disapproval as a result of their insistence on defending African rights and staunch commitment to conducting evangelical and educational work in local vernaculars.;Despite the shift to French control after the German defeat in WW I, official language policy in French Cameroon continued to be shaped and informed by debates about colonial policy and residual anti-clericalism left over from the 1903–1905 Church-state conflict inside metropolitan France. In the immediate aftermath of WW I French Catholic missionaries threw themselves behind official efforts to Gallicize Cameroon in an effort to maintain the Union Sacrée created during the war and out compete their Protestant rivals for African converts. Protestant missions, on the other hand, encountered the wrath of colonial authorities for their reluctance to help promote the spread of French in inter-war Cameroon. By the mid-1920s, however, this situation suddenly and dramatically reversed itself when the Catholics began to question the wisdom and utility of spreading French inside the colonies. Coming as it did on the heels of renewed anti-clerical sentiment created by the short-lived Herriot government, this seeming betrayal led to repeated clashes between Catholic missionaries and French colonial authorities in Cameroon that persisted until the outbreak of war in 1939.