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A petition dated 19 October 1939 was received at the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva. Shortly after the outbreak of what would soon expand into World War II, the League of Nations, which had been unable to prevent the escalation on the continent, was flooded with petitions by refugees and persecuted minorities in Europe. However, the international body that had issued mandates to European empires over various overseas territories was also responsible for numerous people in the colonial world. In this context, its Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) was approached by Karl Anton Lehmann, a German planter living in the Cameroons, a territory that covered parts of today’s Cameroon and Nigeria and was mandated by the League of Nations.

Karl Anton Lehmann had been employed in the Cameroons for five years as a manager for the coca and oil plantations in the town of Victoria (today Limbe). Prior to that appointment, he had worked for six years in Sumatra (in today’s Indonesia), then a Dutch colony, as tobacco planter for a Dutch company. His petition detailed his arbitrary dismissal by his employer while he was on leave, visiting his wife and two children in Switzerland. The removal from his office, he argued, was unlawful and not accompanied by any financial compensation.

Recounting the circumstances of his dismissal, Lehmann explained that his »too cordial« relations with the British had antagonized his German colleagues. Such animosity between the Germans and the British was deeply ingrained in the colony’s history. It was the Germans who had first established a foothold in the West African region in the nineteenth century. As they expanded their control inland, they formed the Schutzgebiet (protectorate) of Kamerun in 1884. In 1916, at the height of World War I, a joint British, French and Belgian force conquered the German colony. In 1922, Britain and France, the war’s victors, received official mandates from the League of Nations to rule the previously German territory as custodians. The PMC was entrusted with protecting the colonial subjects of the vanquished empire from abuse by the new mandatory powers.

In the reorganization of the German colonial space, Britain received about one-fifth of the former Kamerun, comprising two portions of land bordering the British colony of Nigeria, whereas the remaining four-fifths were allocated to France. In their territory, the French implemented an assimilationist policy that banned the use of German literature and undertook an intensive campaign to disseminate French education among the population. The British, in contrast, pursued a policy of indirect rule and remained dependent on the local German landowners and plantation managers who possessed intimate familiarity with the country.

It was in this context that Lehmann, an experienced German plantation manager, took up employment in the British-ruled but still German-dominated Cameroons. He joined the Westafrikanische Pflanzungsgesellschaft »Viktoria«, a large and old-established German plantation company headquartered from Berlin. While the company had been expropriated by Britain after World War I, it was gradually reacquired by its previous German owners.

Despite the stable Anglo-German status quo, there remained a deep resentment of the colony’s German inhabitants towards the new rulers. This tension increased as the hostilities in Europe grew, as illustrated by the open celebration of Germany’s annexation of Austria (The Anschluss) by many Cameroonian Germans in 1938. By showing a »cordial« attitude towards the British, Lehmann seemed to have antagonized his German compatriots. This attitude was reflected in the names he provided at the bottom of his petition as character references – almost all of them English and only one German.

According to Lehmann, however, the accusation of cordial relations with the British was tied up with his racial descent. The real reason behind his dismissal, he wrote, was the fact that his father was Jewish. That the family appears to have converted to Christianity – Lehmann also described his father as a »protestant minister« – made no difference according to the Nazi race policies that were extended from Germany to the colonial world. Based on his alleged Jewishness, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the National Socialist labor union, demanded Lehmann’s removal from the Pflanzungsgesellschaft. He subsequently left for Switzerland, where he then submitted his petition to the PMC.

The neutral Switzerland, of which Lehmann’s wife was a citizen, was a temporary haven. As he wrote in his petition, however, the Swiss authorities were making it »very difficult for a foreigner to stay«. While his sojourn in Lutry was highly precarious, Lehmann felt unable to return either to his native Germany, from where he had been expatriated in 1938, or to the formerly German colony, where he was persecuted by his colleagues. Transplanted from both homes, his belongings were stranded in the Cameroonian town of Buea, some 20 kilometers from Victoria. He thus asked the PMC to protect his property while he searched for another planter’s position in Africa.

While the PMC was meant to protect the Cameroonian population, including the Germans, from British abuse, Lehmann’s case was that of a German seeking protection from his German compatriots. His petition thus illustrates the vortex of contentions in which Lehmann was caught up, including the antagonism between Germans and British, the growing appeal of Nazi ideology among German expatriates in the Cameroons and the application of racist policies in both Germany and the colonial world.

The PMC confirmed the receipt of Lehmann’s petition yet informed him that the organization was unable to deal with his request; he was advised to put his case before the British Colonial Office in London. In the following years, the Cameroons’ Germans, now considered enemy aliens, fled the British territory or were interned in British camps. Their plantations, including those of the Westafrikanische Pflanzungsgesellschaft, were expropriated once again. For planters of Jewish descent such as Lehmann, who had been stripped of their German citizenship, this could have ensured a safe return to the African territory. Lehmann is nevertheless known to have remained in Switzerland during the war and obtained Swiss nationality in 1947.

Ayode Habib Daniel Dossou Nonvide has recently completed his PhD in International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. His dissertation deals with claims of Jewish identity in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya as well as Judaization movements in sub-Saharan Africa. | ayodanih(at)gmail.com

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