Yaoundé began as a German rubber and ivory post
Cameroon’s capital holds more than 2.8 million people yet still trails port city Douala. German explorers planted Epsumb or Jeundo between the Nyong and Sanaga in the late 1880s; French mandate planners later chose the inland hill town as administrative seat—and it never let go.
Yaoundé is Cameroon’s capital and second-largest city after Douala, with more than 2.8 million residents. German explorers founded the outpost of Epsumb or Jeundo between the Nyong and Sanaga rivers at the forest edge in 1887 (sources also cite 1888 or February 1889), led by Richard Kund and Hans Tappenbeck as a rubber and ivory trading base with a later military garrison. Douala stayed commercially dominant, but Yaoundé grew into the seat of government at independence in 1960.
After World War I, Belgian Congo troops briefly occupied Jaunde; France then held eastern Cameroon as a League of Nations mandate and selected Yaoundé as capital. Rapid growth after 1957 followed a cocoa crisis and coastal unrest. The modern economy still revolves around civil service and diplomacy, supporting a relatively higher standard of living, alongside industries in tobacco, dairy, beer, clay, glass, and timber, plus distribution of coffee, cocoa, and rubber. Urban farmers keep an estimated 50,000 pigs and over a million chickens in the city.
Flooding long plagued the hills: city data count over 130 floods between 1980 and 2014. In 2010 Mayor Jean Claude Adjessa Melingui launched the Yaoundé City Sanitation Master Plan after waters disrupted the city 15 to 20 times a year. Downtown concentrates ministries, hotels, and markets, while the Bastos district houses many embassies—administrative geography layered atop a nineteenth-century trading camp. Embassies in Bastos and ministries downtown still announce the inland choice France made after Germany’s colony fell.
Source: Yaoundé
