Paper short abstract:

This paper will critically analyse different kinds of visual media from the time of the German colonialism in Cameroon showing cocoa plantations. The space of the colonial plantation was characterised by an inequality in wealth accumulation and by the extraction of land and labour.

Paper long abstract:

For the German colonial project in Cameroon, plantations were a critical resource for accumulating wealth by cultivating plants which could be processed into colonial commodities. One of these plants that was cultivated for colonial wealth was cocoa. This paper will critically analyse historical material from the time of the German colonialism in Cameroon showing the places of cocoa cultivation, the cocoa plantations. One kind of material that will be analysed is a published collection of images including images of German plantations in Cameroon by the agriculturalist Ferdinand Wohltmann, another kind of material is a series of postcards by the German company Reichhardt Kakaowerk including images of the Victoria plantation in Cameroon and the Reichhardt factory in Wandsbek. The different kinds of visual media promote the German colonial project and its inequal accumulation dynamics. In the case of cocoa / chocolate production, the accumulation of wealth was (and still is until today) distributed unequally between the places of cocoa cultivation and chocolate processing which was (and still is) mostly done in countries of the Global North. The space of the colonial plantation was characterised by the inequality in wealth accumulation, by the extraction of land and labour and by monocultures which are a significant part of today’s climate crisis. This paper argues that for an understanding of the (German colonial) plantation as a space – partly – responsible for today’s climatological crisis, it is interesting to take a close look at the representation of plantations in the time they were established.