Portuguese shrimp-river explorers reached Douala about 1472
Douala is Cameroon’s largest city and economic capital, seat of the Littoral Region, long home to Central Africa’s biggest port. Portuguese visitors about 1472 named the Wouri estuary Rio dos Camarões—Shrimp River. By 1650 trade densified; four villages—Deido, Akwa, Njo, Hickory-town/Bonaberi—structured the site by 1826.
By 1650 Duala-speaking migrants, said to have come from Congo, had built a town on the estuary, and in the eighteenth century it was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. Before German rule it was called Cameroons Town, then Kamerunstadt, capital of German Kamerun until the seat moved to Buéa in 1902; its present name honours the local people known as the Dua ala. Alfred Saker organised the first British Baptist mission in 1885. France took over administration after the First World War, and the city served as the colony’s capital from 1940 to 1946.
Independence in 1960 put the capital in Yaoundé, 210 kilometres to the east, leaving Douala as the economic heart; it had about 500,000 people when the federation became a unitary state in 1972 and 1.9 million by 2005. Between May and December 1991 it led the ghost town campaign, shutting down business to press for multi-party politics and free speech.
It handles most of Cameroon’s oil, cocoa and coffee exports and serves the whole CEMAC bloc, though the new port at Kribi is taking over its role. Bonaberi Bridge links the two banks of the Wouri. The climate is tropical monsoon, averaging 27 °C with 83 percent humidity and about 3,600 millimetres of rain a year, driest in December.
Seven districts hold more than 120 neighbourhoods. Akwa is the business quarter and Bonanjo the administrative one, with the tallest buildings; district names often begin with bona, meaning descendant of. New Bell was created when the Germans expropriated Duala residents from the Joss plateau and still houses newcomers and two main markets. Duala is the local language, but French serves as the everyday common tongue: in 2014, 76.4 percent of adults could speak it.
Source: Douala
