German Colonial Narrative on Cameroon: Pluri-Referentiality, Construction of Ethnological Knowledge’s and Intercultural Relations. The Case of Urwald-Dokumente: vier Jahre unter den Crossflussnegern Kameruns of Alfred Mansfeld
German Colonial Narrative on Cameroon: Pluri-Referentiality, Construction of Ethnological Knowledge’s and Intercultural Relations. The Case of Urwald-Dokumente: vier Jahre unter den Crossflussnegern Kameruns of Alfred Mansfeld

Summary/Abstract: Linked to propaganda and the dissemination of informations about colonies, German colonial literature played a very active part in the media campaign for German colonization. The colonial discourse developed by this literature incited the Germans to immigrate to the colony. Therefore, the colonial space became for colonial writers the object of the construction of a diversified knowledge allowing the reading of the relationship of the Self to the Other. This can be verified by the German colonial writer Alfred Mansfeld. From 1904 to 1907, he was assigned as regional manager of the German colonial administration in Cameroon. On the basis of a sample of ethnographic data, he collected many observations on the lives of the colonized and documented them in detail in his travel texts. From his travel writing Urwald-Dokumente: vier Jahre unter den Crossflussnegern Kamerun (1908), we propose, in this contribution, to show how the narrator-character construct diverse knowledge’s about Cameroon. At the end of our analyzes, we will come to the conclusion that the colonial novel, as exotic literary genre, often worked by the concepts of ethnocentrism, cultural hegemony and overhanging gaze, seems to be a vector of interculturality in a colonial situation.

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