Douala, the beating heart of Central Africa, is a place so tattered yet fascinating. The decaying birthplace of Pan-Africanism appears as a speck bordering Germany's hinterland possessions, yet the most potent of will. For every small settlement clawed back from the European empires, the spirit of freedom and socialism reignited ever more ferociously.

As yet another victim of colonialism, Douala's story is prevalent as fleas in the Dark Continent — first subjected by the Germans under a protectorate, which the local chiefs became entrapped in by coercion for close to half a century. When the Second Reich's continental ambition failed on a disappointing note of destruction after Versaille, the Frenchmen substituted in the most direly sought-after role of an indifferent oppressor, an enforcer of the mandate's paternalistic task to establish Western businesses in this amalgamated town of many villages subsumed.

Like a domino set that never subsided in velocity, the Francophone empire also fell with an equal measure of humiliation following de Gaulle's folly, which perished with London's occupation. Despite best efforts to retain a foothold unmolested by the Vichy cohort, national liberation forces that emerged amid Western Africa's anarchy leveled the colossus at last — in a shape practiced by Douala's preeminent intellectuals and meshed into a movement sustained by a united front, something never meant to last.

The collapse continued as expected, even with Cameroon and Douala held in the good hands of democratic principles. A capital barely recognizable as an intact village added little to the legitimacy of the free government. Surrounded by a variety of European predators on all sides — capitulationism is a simple but damning option for all those invested in this great revolutionary project.