In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. the First World War and widespread demands for local troops, plus post war conflicts with the French, was to leave the local society fragmented.Ī collection of thirteen chapters by leading scholars in the field, this book examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. The result of these 20-odd years of contact with the Germans, climaxing in.

They became manpower for European concerns - military, commercial, and administrative.

Thousands of Beti men were forced to leave farming to work as labourers on the coastal-inland railroad, where the death rate was high. There were other striking changes as well. Headmen, the rulers of traditional Beti society, were supplanted by an order of chiefs appointed by the Germans, who, in turn, were replaced by other chiefs when the French established a local administration in Yaoundé in the 1920s. Within little more than two decades, this fragile, acephelous society underwent a complete change of leadership. The Beti society had only just established themselves in the corridor between the Nyong and Sanaga Rivers when the Germans arrived there as well. Wars rarely come at propitious times for their participants, and the First World War came at an especially difficult time for the Beti, a group of recent migrants into the rain forest of central Cameroun.

The African Queen by C.S. Forester