Douala AC

The first Europeans to visit the area were the Portuguese in about 1472. At the time, the estuary of Wouri River was known as the Rio dos Camarões (Shrimp River). By 1650, it had become the site of a town formed by immigrants, said to have arrived from Congo, who spoke the Duala language. During the 18th century it was the center of the transatlantic slave trade.

In 1826 Douala appeared to be made of four different villages located in four specific locations: the village of Deido (Dido), of Akwa, of Njo and Hickory-town (today Bonaberi, located on the other side of Wouri River).

Between 1884 and 1895 the city was a German protectorate. The colonial politics focused on commerce and some exploration of the unoccupied territories. In 1885, Alfred Saker organized the first mission of the British Baptist Church. In the same year the city known as Kamerun was renamed Douala and became the capital of the territory until 1902, when the capital was moved to Buéa.

In 1907 the Ministry of Colonies was established and Douala had 23,000 citizens.

After World War I in 1919, the German colonial territories became French and British protectorates. France received a mandate to administer Douala. A treaty was signed with the local chiefs.

From 1940 to 1946, it was the capital of Cameroon. In 1955 the city had over 100,000 inhabitants.

In 1960, Cameroon gained independence as a federal republic, with its capital in Yaoundé. Douala became the major economic city. In 1972, the federal republic became a unitary state. Douala then had a population of around 500,000.

In the 1980s, in Cameroon the struggle for liberalization and multi-party democracy grew. Between May and December 1991, Douala was at the center of the civil disobedience campaign called the ghost town operation (ville morte) during which economic activities shut down to make the country ungovernable and to force the government to allow multi-partitism and freedom of expression.

Name

With the arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, the area was known as Rio dos Camarões. Before coming under German rule in 1884, the town was also known as Cameroons Town; thereafter it became Kamerunstadt ("Cameroon City"), the capital of German Kamerun. It was renamed Douala in 1907 after the name of the natives known as Dua ala Ijaws (Njos), and became part of French Cameroon in 1919. Many of the Ijaw (Njo) natives migrated to the Niger Delta in Nigeria during the Portuguese era.