Douala

Douala is Cameroon's largest city and its port, and it is not the capital, which suits it: a hot, loud, wet estuary town on the Wouri, where the Germans landed in 1884 and left, in Bonanjo, a quarter of colonial villas — the Pagoda of the Bell kings, raised in 1905 for the Duala chief who signed with them, the old courthouse, the chamber of commerce — that the French kept and the city has grown around. Akwa is the centre: the Boulevard de la Liberté, the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul from 1936, the banks, the hotels, the bars where the night begins; Bonapriso has the villas, the restaurants and the flower market; Deïdo, the old quarter of the Duala, has at its roundabout La Nouvelle Liberté, the twelve-metre figure of scrap metal that Joseph-Francis Sumégné raised in 1996 and the city argued about for years and now loves; across the Wouri bridge, Bonabéri is the other shore and the industry. The port is Central Africa's largest and feeds Chad and the Central African Republic; the music is makossa, and Manu Dibango was born here; and every early December the Sawa peoples hold the Ngondo on the river's bank, with pirogue races and a calabash lowered to the ancestors in the water.

The traveller lands at the airport ten kilometres out and gives the city two days: Bonanjo in the morning — the Pagoda, the maritime museum, Doual'art, the German houses under the mango trees; Deïdo's statue and the old quarter; the Marché Central or Mboppi for the cloth and the noise; the flower market and a long lunch in Bonapriso — ndolé with shrimp, grilled fish, miondo, plantain; a boat on the estuary at sunset if one can be found; and Akwa after dark, for a maquis, brochettes and a cold beer, and then wherever the makossa is being played, which the barman will know. With days more, Kribi's beaches and the Lobé falls that drop straight into the sea, three hours south; and, on a clear morning, Mount Cameroon on the horizon to the north-west, four thousand and forty metres of it.

The Guide's honesty: Douala is a working port, not a resort — it is hot and humid all year, the rains from June to September are among the heaviest on Earth, the traffic is fierce and the motorbike-taxis are the way through it; petty theft is real after dark and the ordinary rules apply, a taxi called by the hotel, no phone in hand on the street; the anglophone regions to the west carry a conflict, so Buea and Limbe are checked with the chancellery before sailing; French opens every door and a Duala greeting opens the rest; and the reward is a city that lives on its own energy — the fish grilled on the corner, the makossa at midnight, the river going gold under the bridge —, which the traveller either takes to at once or not at all, and the Guide's wager is at once.