something about Water

As all over the world, water plays an important role in Douala. The city originally grew from a couple of small villages on the banks of the Wouri river. The inhabitants of these villages were known as the Sawa, ‘the water people’. It is the general belief that the people from Douala arose from the water, and since then have been living from the water and with the water. It has always been an inextricable and important part of their lives.
Many years later, under the rule of German government in Cameroon (from 1884 until 1916), the harbors of Douala were built right on the waterfront, as a result of which the people from Douala no longer had a direct access to the water and were thus deprived from their original way of living. In the development of the city that followed, the many small rivers and canals within the city were cut off from the Wouri and from each other, leaving behind a non-functional infrastructure of small canals, creating annual problems to the most poor, and often illegal residential settlements within the city.