Name Monneba Monneba | ||
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Monneba, also spelled Moneba and other ways, (fl. c. 1630) was a local Duala leader on the Cameroon coast in the 1630s. Dutch sources from the 1660s say that Monneba ran a trading post on the Cameroons River (the Wouri) at the present location of Douala. His people dealt primarily in ivory, with some slaves. Modern scholars equate Monneba with a Duala ruler named Mulobe a Ewale or Mulabe a Ewale. Assuming this is true, he is the earliest Duala leader of whom we have corroboration in written sources. It is quite possible that Monneba/Mulobe was the ruler who set into motion the transformation of the Duala into a trading people and the most influential ethnic group in early Cameroonian history.
Connection with Mulobe a Ewale
Edwin Ardener equates Monneba with the Duala leader referred to in traditional genealogies as Mulobe a Ewale or Mulabe a Ewale. This individual is placed one generation after Ewale a Mbedi, the eponymous father of the Duala people. Later academics Austen and Derrick accept the Monneba/Mulabe connection as "very reasonable".
There is no doubt that Monneba's Village is in fact Douala. The location on Dutch maps is clearly on the Wouri River at about the location of Belltown, one of the various townships that made up Douala in the precolonial period. Leers and Blommaert give examples of the language spoken by Monneba and his people, and it is obviously that of the Duala. The connection also makes temporal sense. If one starts from the first incontestable Duala leaders known from modern sources and traces their purported genealogy back allowing 25 years for each generation, Mulobe seems to have lived at the same time Dutch sources first mention Monneba.