Kribi

The Batanga, Mabi and Yassa peoples fished and traded along this stretch of coast long before Europeans settled it, and the Lobé estuary was a natural landing place between the forest and the sea. Portuguese and later Dutch and German ships called along the coast for ivory, palm produce and rubber, dealing through coastal middlemen who controlled the routes inland.

German traders and missionaries settled at Kribi in 1889, five years after the annexation of Kamerun. It grew into one of the colony's main trading places, with factories — the trading houses of the period — a customs post, a mission and a lighthouse to guide ships onto the open roadstead, since there was no natural harbour. Rubber and ivory came down from the interior along paths that later became roads, and the German administration used the port for the south of the colony while Douala served the centre.

After the First World War the territory passed to France, and Kribi declined as trade concentrated on Douala. For most of the 20th century it was a quiet administrative and fishing town whose main visitors were Cameroonian families on holiday. Two projects changed that: the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline, completed in 2003, which reaches the Atlantic just offshore, and the deepwater port opened in 2018 north of the town, built to take the largest ships and to relieve the congested port of Douala. The town has grown quickly around them.

The coast around Kribi is Batanga and Mabi country, part of the wider Sawa world of Cameroon's shoreline, with Yassa villages further south towards Campo. Fishing shapes the calendar and the social order: pirogues go out before dawn, the catch is sold or smoked on the beach, and boat-building and net-making are skills passed down in families. Canoe races and wrestling feature at coastal celebrations, and the sea and the rivers carry spiritual meaning, as they do for the Sawa peoples of the estuary at Douala.

The Bagyeli, one of the forest hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Cameroon, live inland from the coast and in villages near the Lobé, and some receive visitors on forest walks arranged through local guides. Their communities face pressure from logging, plantations and infrastructure on land they have used for generations, and visits are best made through arrangements that the communities themselves control.

Kribi is also Cameroon's own holiday town. At Christmas, New Year and long weekends families arrive from Douala and Yaoundé, the beach bars fill, and makossa and bikutsi play from the grills until late. French is the language of the street, church attendance is high, and, as elsewhere in the country, funerals and family ceremonies fill weekends and draw people back from the cities.

The 2005 census counted about 70,000 people in the town's two communes, a figure that has climbed steeply since the port and pipeline projects began, and the town swells further during holiday weeks. The economy rests on three things: fishing, tourism and, since 2018, the port and the industrial zone growing beside it. Plantations of oil palm and rubber and the timber trade of the interior add jobs, and civil servants staff the offices of a departmental capital.

The day begins at the water. Pirogues return in the early morning, women buy and smoke fish for the market, and by mid-morning the heat pushes most activity into the shade. Motorbike taxis carry everything and everyone; shops and offices close for a long lunch; the beach grills light their charcoal in the late afternoon and the seafront becomes the centre of town life after dark.

Growth has brought friction as well as work. Land near the port and the new roads has risen sharply in value, arrivals from other regions have swollen the outer quarters, and fishing families complain of crowded waters and lost beaches. Power cuts are common, and the long rains can cut side roads for days at a time.

Kribi is a fish town. Poisson braisé — whole fish, usually bar, capitaine or mackerel, scored, seasoned and grilled over charcoal — is the local speciality, served with a fierce pepper sauce, fried ripe plantain and bâton de manioc, the fermented cassava sticks steamed in leaves that are made all along the coast. It is eaten in the open air, at tables set out beside the grills on the seafront.

Prawns are the other signature. The Portuguese named the Wouri estuary to the north for the shrimp they found there, and prawns matter as much on this coast, grilled, fried with garlic and pepper or cooked into ndolé, the coastal stew of bitterleaf greens ground with peanuts. Crab, langoustines, smoked fish and, in season, oysters from the mangroves appear on the same menus.

From the forest behind the town come plantain, cassava, cocoyam, safou and palm nuts, and villages tap palm wine, drunk fresh and cloudy. Breakfast is beignets with beans and maize porridge from a street stall; the drink of the evening is beer, or a bottle of palm wine brought from the roadside stalls on the way out of town.