Douala, Yaoundé, the South & the East

The coast was home to Bantu-speaking fishing and trading peoples long before Europeans arrived. Portuguese sailors reached the Wouri estuary in the 1470s and, finding it full of prawns, called it the Rio dos Camarões — the name that became Cameroon. For centuries the Duala chiefs of the estuary acted as middlemen between European ships and the traders of the interior, dealing first in slaves and later in palm oil and ivory.

In 1884 the Duala kings Bell and Akwa signed a treaty with Germany, and the colony of Kamerun grew outward from their towns. The Germans founded a station at Yaoundé in 1889, pushed plantations and a railway inland, and in 1914 hanged Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, the Duala king who had opposed their land seizures; he is honoured today as a national hero. After the First World War France governed the region under a League of Nations mandate and moved the capital from Douala to Yaoundé.

In the 1950s the independence party UPC fought an armed struggle whose heartland was the Bassa country of the Littoral; its leader Ruben Um Nyobè was killed there by French troops in 1958. Cameroon became independent in 1960 with Yaoundé as its capital, and President Paul Biya, in office since 1982, comes from the South region. The Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline reaches the sea near Kribi, where a deep-water port has since been built.

The region is a mosaic of peoples. The Duala and other Sawa coastal groups hold the Ngondo each year on the Wouri, a festival in which a devotee enters the water to visit the water spirits, the miengu. Around Yaoundé and south to Ebolowa live the Beti-Pahuin peoples — Ewondo, Eton, Bulu and others — whose language, Ewondo, mixes freely with French on the capital's streets. The Bassa live between Douala and Yaoundé, the Batanga and Mabi on the Kribi coast, and in the forests of the South and East the Baka, hunter-gatherers whose polyphonic singing is known well beyond Cameroon.

French is the main public language here, and the region is mostly Christian, with large Catholic and Presbyterian churches alongside Pentecostal congregations. Bikutsi, the dance music of the Beti, grew from their traditions around Yaoundé, while Douala gave the world makossa, the city's guitar-led dance music made famous abroad by Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa" in 1972. Funerals are major social occasions, often lasting a weekend, and greetings are expected to be unhurried and formal.

Douala and Yaoundé each hold several million people, and together they dominate the country's economy and politics. Douala is the commercial city: the port handles most of Cameroon's trade, and its districts of Akwa, Bonanjo and Bonabéri are busy, humid and congested. Yaoundé is greener and more administrative, a city of ministries, embassies and universities spread over seven hills.

Outside the cities the economy rests on timber, cocoa, coffee, palm oil and rubber plantations, and at Edéa on the Sanaga a hydroelectric dam powers an aluminium smelter. The East is sparsely populated and poorer, dependent on logging and mining, and has received refugees from the Central African Republic. Kribi's new port is changing a quiet fishing and holiday town.

Days start early, with commuters on motorbike taxis and street stalls selling beignets and porridge. Traffic, power cuts and water shortages shape city life, and a large share of work is informal: market trading, taxis and small repair shops.

The dish most associated with the coast is ndolé, a stew of bitterleaf greens cooked with ground peanuts and prawns, fish or beef, and served with miondo — thin sticks of fermented cassava wrapped in leaves — or fried plantain. The Bassa make mbongo tchobi, a fish or meat stew turned black by charred spices, and the Beti around Yaoundé are known for okok, shredded leaves of the Gnetum vine cooked with peanuts, and for kpem, pounded cassava leaves with palm nut.

Kribi is famous for poisson braisé, whole fish grilled over charcoal with pepper sauce, eaten at beachside grills with cassava sticks, and for its prawns. City street food means soya, spiced grilled beef skewers, and the breakfast of beignets, beans and maize porridge. Palm wine is tapped in the villages, and in the cities the drink is beer.

Douala is a working city rather than a showcase, but it rewards a day: La Pagode, the pagoda-roofed palace built for the Bell family in the colonial era, the contemporary art of the Doual'art centre, the busy markets and the long bridge over the Wouri. Yaoundé has the Reunification Monument, the National Museum in the former presidential palace, the Benedictine monastery's museum on Mont Fébé with views over the city, and the Mefou primate sanctuary in the forest outside the city.

The coast south of Douala centres on Kribi, with long palm-backed beaches and, a few kilometres south of town, the Lobé Falls, where a river pours over a rock shelf directly onto the beach. Nearby Ebodjé is known for sea turtles. Further south towards Equatorial Guinea, Campo Ma'an National Park protects coastal rainforest with forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees and mandrills, reached with guides from Campo and Kribi.

Inland, the South and East are covered by one of Africa's largest blocks of tropical forest. Bertoua, the capital of the East, is the base for the long road trips. The Dja Faunal Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site almost encircled by the Dja river, shelters gorillas, chimpanzees and forest elephants, and Baka communities live along its edges, where some villages host visitors on forest walks. In the far south-east, Lobéké National Park forms part of the Sangha Trinational World Heritage Site shared with Congo and the Central African Republic.