Chief Samuel Endeley dies at 93

One of his last outings was at the Buea Bongo Square on May 20, 2015.

His Majesty Chief Samuel Moka Lifafa Endeley, the Paramount Ruler of the Bakweri, is no more. He passed on at 93 years 7 July, 2015, at 5 pm in his Mokunda Palace at Buea Station. He was last seen in on Tuesday a public ceremony at the Buea ceremonial grounds, Bongo Square on May 20, 2015, where he arrived at the appointed time and took his seat in the grand stand.

‘Our father died peacefully in his sleep and was not ill,” his eldest son, Prince Charles Endeley, told Cameroon Tribune yesterday morning in the palace. According to him, funeral arrangements for Chief Endeley are underway and are to culminate in two weeks. He also said the Chief was a Presbyterian Christian who always walked to and fro the nearby Presbyterian Church until the last four Sundays.

The Paramount Ruler, a short-lived Pharmacist and retired Chief Judge, was an emblematic figure whose last shot was at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, The Netherlands, where he defended Cameroon energetically in the case over the Bakassi conflict with Nigeria. Nakuva Endeley, as he was referred to, was also famous for proclaiming on several occasions that he was not an Anglophone, but simply a Cameroonian.

When the nation was boiling in the early 1990s with students rioting in Yaounde, he was appointed to head a national commission to unravel the truths about the purported killings of students. The commission never had any proof of such allegations and the then Minister of Communication, Prof. Augustin Kountchou, made the clarion statement that there were “no deaths.”

Born on 9 June, 1923 to Chief Mathias Lifafa Endeley and Maria Mojoku Endeley, young Samuel Moka Endeley began his education in 1929 with the German Bassel Mission Vernacular Kindergarten School at Soppo Wonganga (Buea) where he obtained the First School Leaving Certificate in 1939. He then moved to the Umuahia College of Pharmacy in Nigeria where he graduated with a Diploma in Forensic Pharmacy.

Moka Endeley’s knack for erudition led him to switch to law and he graduated in 1959 with a law Degree. He returned to Cameroon in 1960, worked in the then West Cameroon courts and became Judge in 1966. Absorbed in the Bakweri culture, Samuel Moka succeeded his uncle, Mbella Endeley, as Paramount Chief of Buea in 1982.

He and his wife, Gladys Silo Endeley, who died in 2010, had five sons and a daughter.