23 Facts About Ibrahim Njoya

Ibrahim Njoya succeeded his father Nsangu, and ruled from 1886 or 1887 until his death in 1933, when he was succeeded by his son, Seidou Njimoluh Njoya.

Ibrahim Njoya ruled from the ancient walled city of Fumban.

When Ibrahim Njoya was born, the Kingdom of Bamum was in external conflict with the Fulani and internal division amongst the royal family.

Ibrahim Njoya's mother acted as regent and ruled the kingdom until he came of age and could ascend the throne in 1895.

Ibrahim Njoya descended from a very long dynastic line that goes back to Mfon Nchare who founded Bamum in the year 1394.

Yen was a direct descendant of Prince Mbum of Ngan Ha as well as Essedi, a merchant who according to Ibrahim Njoya's historical written testimony was an Egyptian.

Under the influence of a German missionary, Ibrahim Njoya converted to Christianity.

Ibrahim Njoya later created a new syncretistic religion based on Christianity and traditional Bamum religion before converting to Islam along with much of his court in 1916.

Ibrahim Njoya accepted the authority of the Sokoto Caliph, requesting the caliph to send him an emir's flag and Muslim teachers.

German legal scholar Christian Bommarius has refuted the claim that Mfon Ibrahim Njoya betrayed Rudolph Manga Bell's resistance proposal against the Germans.

Ibrahim Njoya greeted the Germans with great celebrations in his residence in Foumban, which soon brought him the title of an official figure-holder of the German colonial government.

King Ibrahim Njoya tried to maintain a good relationship with the German Empire during his lifetime.

Ibrahim Njoya set up schools in which the Bamun children extended their knowledge of their mother tongue, learned the Bamun script introduced by Ibrahim Njoya, and passed on basic knowledge of the German language.

Ibrahim Njoya was not a subordinate in his dealings with the Germans.

Ibrahim Njoya did this by using poses, symbols, and styles that he had come to know in the contact zone and that he had applied to his Bamum regalia.

Ibrahim Njoya abandoned the german style abruptly in 1909 due to some disappointing political results of engagement with them.

Since Ibrahim Njoya resided in Foumban until 1931, despite his formal abolition by France, he had, in a de facto sense, still had assumed the role as the king.

Ibrahim Njoya was exposed to a variety of architectural and building traditions during his childhood and early years of reign from his own travels, encounters with external merchants as well as his reading of Ajami texts.

Many of the German ethnographers were quite impressed with the new Palace and thought that Ibrahim Njoya must have copied the building style of the europeans.

Mfon Ibrahim Njoya affirmed that the design of the Foumban Palace had been the result of his own ingenuity and structural engineering expertise.

Ibrahim Njoya himself had imagined the way to build it.

In 1903 Ibrahim Njoya built schools to teach the writing and began translating scriptural texts.

In February 1910 Ibrahim Njoya completed the process of going from a picto-syllabic system to the syllabo-graphemic system in the development of Akauku.