Cameroons

Cameroons takes its name from the Rio dos Camarões, the "River of Prawns", as the Portuguese called the Wouri estuary when their ships first reached it around 1472. The estuary is a low coast of mangrove creeks and tidal flats beneath dense rain forest, where the Wouri and Dibamba rivers run out into the Gulf of Guinea. Fish and shellfish fed the shore villages, and Duala tradition says the Bakoko and Bassa held the estuary before the Duala arrived and drove them inland.

By 1650 a town of Duala-speaking immigrants had grown up on the estuary, and the Duala became the leading traders of the coast. They bought goods and slaves from the Bakweri, Mungo, Bassa and Bakoko of the interior and sold them to European ships. Through the eighteenth century the estuary was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. By 1826 the settlement consisted of four villages: Deido, Akwa, Njo and Hickory Town on the far bank of the Wouri.