Cameroon

🇨🇲 Cameroon

Douala

Douala (population 4+ million) is the economic capital of Cameroon and the most important port city in Central Africa — the most commercially significant single city in the most geographically diverse single country in Africa ("Africa in miniature": the most biodiverse, the most climatically varied and the most linguistically rich single African country south of the Sahara). Douala is the gateway to Mount Cameroon (the most active single volcano on the African continent — at 4,095m, the highest mountain in West and Central Africa: the most recently erupted single major African volcano), the Waza National Park (the most important large mammal wildlife reserve in the Sahel zone of Cameroon), and the most vibrant nightlife in Central Africa (the most makossa music-producing single African city: the makossa — the most internationally exported single Cameroonian music genre, sampled in Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" — the most precisely Cameroonian-music-internationally-recognized single song in the history of American pop music). The Douala riverside (the Wouri Estuary — the most dramatically mangrove-flanked single Central African port), the Marché Central (the most chaotically energetic single market in Cameroon) and the Doual'Art contemporary art space (the most important single contemporary art institution in Central Africa) make Douala the most dynamic single city in the Central African francophone sphere.

🇨🇲 Cameroon

Yaoundé

Yaoundé (population 4.1 million; the capital of Cameroon since independence (January 1, 1960 for French Cameroun; October 1, 1961 for British Southern Cameroons, which joined to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon in 1961); in the Centre Region of Cameroon, on the southern edge of the Adamawa Plateau at approximately 750 m altitude; the administrative and political capital while Douala (260 km southwest) is the commercial and economic capital — the classic West African dual-capital arrangement) is known as the "Ville aux Sept Collines" (the City of Seven Hills) for the series of forested ridges on which the city is built, a geography that gives Yaoundé its distinctive character among Central African capitals: the city climbs across the seven hills with the government ministries, the residential neighbourhoods and the churches on the hilltops and the commercial activity in the valleys, producing the most dramatically hilly urban topography of any capital city in Central Africa. Yaoundé was a German colonial post (from 1888 — the "Jaunde" station of the German Kamerun protectorate), a French colonial capital (from 1921, when the French mandated territory of Cameroun designated Yaoundé as the administrative capital in preference to the coastal Douala), and since 1960 the national capital of Cameroon — one of only two officially bilingual countries in Africa (French and English are both official languages of Cameroon, a legacy of the 1961 reunification of the French and British Cameroon territories). The primary cultural attraction of Yaoundé is the extraordinary diversity of Cameroonian culture (Cameroon is sometimes described as "Africa in miniature" — the country contains almost every ecological zone of sub-Saharan Africa (the coastal rainforest, the savanna grassland, the semi-arid Sahel, the equatorial rainforest, the highland volcanic zone of Mount Cameroon) and over 250 distinct ethnic groups and languages), visible in the Yaoundé markets, the Mfoundi Market (the largest traditional market in the city), the craft centres and most powerfully in the primate sanctuaries of the surrounding rainforest (the Mefou Primate Sanctuary, 20 km south of Yaoundé, is one of the most significant chimpanzee and gorilla rescue sanctuaries in Africa).