Douala
— — a port city the rain has not finished writing.
Not only on a wall.
“Cameroon's largest city sits on the eastern bank of the Wouri estuary, about 24 kilometres inland from the Gulf of Guinea. The port handles most of the country's trade and a good share of Chad's and the Central African Republic's. Rain falls around 4,000 millimetres a year. La Nouvelle Liberté, a 12-metre sculpture by Joseph-Francis Sumégné, holds the Deïdo roundabout.
Douala, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Douala is the largest city and economic capital of Cameroon, with a metropolitan population around three million as of recent estimates. It sits on the eastern bank of the Wouri River estuary in the Littoral Region, about 24 kilometres from the Gulf of Guinea. The Port of Douala handles roughly 95 percent of the country's maritime trade and is the largest port in Central Africa, also serving landlocked Chad and the Central African Republic. The city was administered by Germany from 1884 until the First World War, then by France until Cameroonian independence in 1960. The political capital, Yaoundé, sits 240 kilometres inland to the east.
Douala has an equatorial climate with one of the highest annual rainfall totals of any major African city, about 4,000 millimetres a year, concentrated between June and October. Average daytime temperatures sit between 27 and 32 °C year-round. Humidity rarely drops below 80 percent. The dry season, such as it is, runs from December to February, when the Harmattan wind off the Sahara reaches the coast as a thin haze rather than the heavy dust it brings further north. Heavy storms in the wet season regularly flood low-lying districts along the Wouri.
La Nouvelle Liberté, a 12-metre sculpture by Cameroonian artist Joseph-Francis Sumégné, was assembled from recycled metal and installed at the Rond-point Deïdo in 1996, inaugurated in its current form in 2007. It is one of the signature commissions of Doual'art, the contemporary art centre founded in 1991 by Marilyn Douala-Bell and Didier Schaub. The triennial SUD festival (Salon Urbain de Douala), run by the same centre, has placed permanent public art across the city since 2007 and is the longest-running urban art event in Central Africa.