Duala Erotic

The Duala gave their name to Cameroon's largest city, not the other way around. They are an estuary people, settled where the Wouri River opens into the Atlantic on the Bight of Biafra, and their oral tradition traces them to Ewale a Mbedi, who brought his followers downriver to the mangrove coast. For most of two centuries before colonial rule they made their living from position rather than production: sitting at the river mouth, they kept European ships on one side and inland suppliers on the other and did not let the two meet. Captives first, then palm oil and palm kernels, moved through Duala canoes. The trade hardened into four great lineages, Bell, Akwa, Deido and Bonaberi, which survive today as the names of city quarters. Much of the map of Douala is really a genealogy: the prefix bona means children of, so Bonanjo, Bonapriso and Bonaberi each carry an ancestor's name. In 1884 the kings of Bell and Akwa signed the treaty that handed Kamerun to Germany, a decision that bought thirty years of privilege and then ended badly. In August 1914 the Germans hanged Rudolf Duala Manga Bell for treason, after he fought, by petition and by lawyer, a scheme to clear his people off the Joss plateau and give the waterfront to Europeans. He is a national martyr now.

Duala is a Bantu language of the coastal Sawabantu group, and it carried further than the people themselves did. Baptist missionaries put it into print in the middle of the nineteenth century, which made it the language of the first schools and the first scripture on this coast and, for a long stretch, a trade tongue used well past Duala territory. Most Duala are Christian and heavily Protestant, but the older cosmology stayed in the room. The miengu, spirits of the river and the sea, are the presiding idea behind Ngondo, the assembly of the Sawa peoples held each December on the Wouri. It was a court and a parliament long before it was a festival, and its central rite is still a delegate going under the water and returning with a message from the ancestors, followed by canoe races. The colonial administration distrusted it; the independent government banned it in the early 1980s and permitted it again a decade later. The sharper problem now is arithmetic. Douala draws migrants from every corner of Cameroon, and the Duala are a minority in the city named for them, arguing over land they hold to be theirs by first settlement.