Limbe

The bay was home to Isubu and other coastal communities, and the settlement of Bimbia nearby was a trading port whose chiefs dealt with European ships; in the era of the Atlantic slave trade people were shipped from this shore, and the remains of the trading post still stand in the forest. The Baptist missionary Alfred Saker founded Victoria on Ambas Bay in 1858, resettling a congregation expelled from the Spanish island of Fernando Po, and the town grew around the mission, its school and its printing press.

Germany annexed Kamerun in 1884 and took over Victoria itself in 1887, when Britain exchanged it for German rights elsewhere in Africa. German rule turned the mountain's lower slopes into plantations of cocoa, bananas, oil palm and rubber, worked by labourers brought from across the territory, and the botanic garden was laid out in 1892 to study tropical crops for the colony. The administration was seated for a time at Buea, higher up the mountain, while Victoria served as its harbour.

After the First World War the Southwest was governed by Britain as part of Nigeria, and the plantations passed to a public corporation that remains one of the region's largest employers. In 1961 British Southern Cameroons voted to join independent Cameroon. The country's only oil refinery was built at the edge of the town, and in 1982 a presidential decree renamed Victoria as Limbe. The volcano has erupted several times in living memory: a flank eruption in 1922 sent lava all the way to the coast, and the eruption of 1999 stopped about 200 metres short of the sea. Since 2017 the region has been affected by the conflict between separatist groups and government forces.

Limbe is an English-speaking town in a mainly French-speaking country, and the distinction runs through its schools, its courts and its sense of itself. Standard English is the language of official life and Cameroonian Pidgin English the language of the market, the beach and the bar, while Isubu, Bakweri and the languages of families drawn here by the plantations are spoken at home.

The plantation economy gave the town an unusually mixed population, with families from the Grassfields, the Northwest and the francophone regions settled for generations alongside coastal communities. Churches are the centre of social life, Baptist and Presbyterian congregations tracing their origins to the mission that founded the town, and choirs, harvest services and church-run schools remain important. Bakweri communities on the mountain's slopes hold the mountain itself in regard, with ceremonies tied to its spirits and to the annual farming cycle.

The best-known sporting event of the region is the race up and down Mount Cameroon from Buea, run over about 38 kilometres and held in January or February in the years when conditions allow. Football is played on any open ground, makossa and Cameroonian gospel play from the beach bars, and the evening ritual of the town is eating grilled fish at Down Beach as the boats come in.

The 2005 census counted about 84,000 people in Limbe, a figure that has shifted since as the conflict has pushed some residents away and brought others in from the surrounding villages. The town lives on four things: the plantations of the state development corporation, the oil refinery and port on its western edge, fishing, and the trade and services that serve both.

The day starts at the beach, where pirogues return in the early morning and women buy fish to smoke or sell on, and in the plantation fields on the slopes above. The market is busiest in the morning; offices and shops keep long hours broken by a midday lull; and the seafront grills and bars fill in the evening. Shared taxis move people along the single main road, which carries almost all the town's traffic.

Since 2017 the crisis in the English-speaking regions has shaped daily life here as elsewhere in the Southwest. Schools have closed for long periods, businesses have suffered from lockdowns and curfews, and many families have moved to Douala or further afield. Power and water supply are unreliable, the heavy rain damages roads each year, and the volcano's presence is a constant, watched by scientists on the mountain.

Eru is the dish of the Southwest and of Limbe: the fine shredded leaves of the Gnetum vine cooked with waterleaf, palm oil, dried fish and meat, and eaten with water fufu, the soft pounded cassava of the region. It is the meal people come home for, sold in chop houses all over town at a price anyone can afford.

The sea supplies the rest. Fish landed at Down Beach — barracuda, snapper, mackerel — is grilled whole over charcoal with a pepper sauce and served with fried plantain, boiled cassava or miondo, while prawns, crayfish and crab from the mangroves go into soups. Bush meat's place has diminished with conservation enforcement, and smoked fish is the usual protein of the market.

Highland food travels down the mountain: achu, pounded cocoyam with a yellow palm-oil soup, njama njama greens with corn fufu, and koki, the steamed pudding of ground black-eyed peas. Roadside stalls sell puff-puff, roast plantain, maize and safou. Palm wine is tapped on the slopes above town, and bottled beer, brewed in the country, is what the beach bars serve at night.