Dr. Olisa Godson Muojama

Fellow during the winter term 2021/22

German Subjects and Properties in Colonial West Africa during World War II, 1939-1945
Abstract

Wars create many changes in the relationships of the belligerent countries. As soon as war is commenced, all communications, negotiations and commercial intercourse between citizens of hostile territories cease. In law, the declaration of war makes ‘enemies’ of all the respective subjects of the belligerents, most often leading to unfair treatments such as proscription, internment or repatriation of ‘enemy subjects’ and the dispossession and disposal of their properties. Extant studies on the impact of the global wars on the German subjects and properties have omitted the experience of colonial West Africa, where the wartime legislation was also implemented. This could be due to the received assumption that in the First and Second World Wars, the colonial campaigns were dismissed as ‘side-shows’, while it was the Western Fronts that claimed popular attention. This study aims to address this historiographical imbalance by examining the wartime relations between Germany and the Allied powers in their colonial territories of West Africa during the Second World War (1939-1945). It specifically deals with the wartime status and treatment of Germans (traders, professionals, researchers, and
missionaries) and their properties (firms, estates, factories, missions, patents and trade mark) in British West Africa during World War II, with a special emphasis on Nigeria, including the Cameroons under the British mandate. The research is founded on an amazing body of primary colonial records generated from the National Archives in Nigeria, which will be augmented with the materials obtained from the library of the Munich Centre for Global History, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, as well as the German archives, like the Federal Archives and maybe the old “Reichsarchiv”. The analytical frame of the study is historical, intersectional, and
structuralist. It argues that the treatment of German subjects and properties during the Second World War, which was an extension of the policy of the First World War, affected the German position in, and relations with, the postwar and postcolonial West African states; and that the wartime treatment of the German ‘civilians’ as well as the German ‘private’ properties in West Africa and elsewhere during the Two World Wars was against the age-long principle of the inviolability of the enemy civilian and private property in the spirit of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. The significance of this study is not only in its contribution to the literature on
the wartime relations among the belligerent colonial powers in Africa, but in extending the conversation on German-African relations beyond the period of official German colonialism in Africa (1884-1918), which had been the focus and domain of earlier studies on German presence in Africa.