Manga Bell – A good German

Cameroon, 1914: Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, king of the Duala tribe in Cameroon after his father and grandfather, speaks German, he reads Goethe, Schiller and Lessing, he wears elegant men’s skirts and knows the German legal system, because Cameroon at this time belongs to the German Empire as a “protectorate”. In the spirit of Immanuel Kant, he dares to use his own intellect. The benevolence of the German colonial officials in the face of his cultural inquisitiveness turns into brutal violence when they discover that Manga Bell understands and applies their legal system better than they do. To assert their claim to power against his sound legal reasoning, they eventually murder him and his closest associate on the gallows in a mock trial for “high treason”. To this day, there is no official German statement on this judicial murder.