The chapter provides an account of the visit of Prince Samson Dido, a member of the Cameroonian native elite, to Germany in 1886. The visit took place shortly after Cameroon had become a German colony, and the reactions of contemporary Germans to the visit and to Dido display some ambivalence, in which a degree of readiness to accept him as a (business) partner and person of substance combines with emerging racist stereotypes of the African. Characterising Dido as a colonial middleman or ‘mimic-man’ and situating his visit in the context of the ethnographic shows (or ‘human zoos’) that were popular in the period, the chapter nevertheless seeks to identify elements of self-presentation and self-shaping in newspaper reports and photographs of his presence.