Gebruiker:LucasApVincent/Kladblok

Vincent Ganty was born in Cayenne, French Guiana, in 1881. He became an orphan at the early age of thirteen. This forced him to leave school and he started working on a sailing boat. During the first forty years of his life he had a number of jobs. He served in the army in the French foreign legion and was send overseas to Madagascar. He was a teacher of fencing and worked for the customs of which he became a spokesperson. After some conflicts he was fired but he was reinstalled in his function in 1911.

In 1922 Ganty moved to Cameroun where he continued to have a series of odd jobs; masseur, amulet seller, magician and teacher of hypno-magnetism. 1927 set up the church La science Chrétienne du Cameroun, which provided a shelter for black empowerment activities. This resulted in the formation of a series of groups like Comité de défense de la race nègre and Group Ganty de défense des citoyens nègres Camerounais et amis des nègres. In 1930 Ganty moved to Paris and became the self-proclaimed spokesperson for the Camerounians. He provided in this living by selling subscriptions of a newspaper of which he was the editor.

After the second world war Front inter-coloniale, Comité philanthrope supérieur d’émancipation intégrale et d’initiative générale de la délégation en Europe des Camerounais, Comité philanthrope supérieur pour la défense du Cameroun were set up and sometimes disappeared soon after their foundation. He started sending many letters and petitions to the League of Nations, the precursor the United Nations. His correspondence, which was sometimes hard to follow, was never taken really seriously. But even if his role in independence was ambiguous nowadays is seen as one of the important figures that paved the road to independence of Cameroun. Ganty died in 1957 three years before Cameroun became independent.