Keeping the Flame

Between 1918 and 1919, an estimated 40,000 African men returned home to Cameroon after being released from internment in Spanish Guinea and Fernando Po. Many had been imprisoned as a result of their service in the German colonial army on the fronts in Chad and Nigeria. Others had been detained because they were employed by German missionary societies or because they were porters, translators, or chiefs in the service of the German colonial government. Between 1914 and 1918, African prisoners of war were housed in close quarters with 30,000 German troops and civilians, and formed close relationships with interned German Catholic and Protestant missionaries. As the war continued on various fronts in West and East Africa, missionaries heard confessions, recited the liturgy and daily prayers, and performed the sacraments for their fellow African prisoners. When Spanish, French, and British forces began releasing Africans from Cameroon in staggered cohorts in 1917, many detainees rejoined their families and embarked upon new undertakings as Christian evangelists.

Christian conversion and spiritual practice led by former African prisoners of war continued in Cameroon throughout the years of European military occupation before the arrival of significant French missionary cohorts. In 1916, African Catholics had nearly twelve months without any interaction with a foreign missionary inside the Cameroon territory as the few remaining German mission personnel had been evacuated and Père Jules Douvry had not yet received new French mission leaders. African catechists nonetheless performed and recorded 5505 baptisms, 471 marriages, 64,147 confessions, 71,506 communions, and 3023 first communions, as well as instructed 12,825 catechumens. Baptisms were often improvised and confessions were frequently lengthy processes, as African evangelists collected confessions from the faithful in Cameroon and brought them to Spanish Guinea to be heard by a priest, whose absolutions and recommendations for penance would be transmitted back to believers. In 1918, the French Commissioner in Cameroon Lucien Fourneau grew suspicious of the hundreds of African men regularly crossing the border and demanded that the Spanish authority in Fernando Po supervise and disclose all the names of catechists who had regular sojourns in the territory.