🇨🇫🇨🇲🚎Yaounde to Bangui By Road. A Cameroonian narrates his Journey to The Central African Republic

A Cameroonian recounts the circumstances of his trip from Yaounde in Cameroon to Bangui in the Central African Republic (CAR).

Yaounde

Yaoundé, often called Ongola in Béti, the language of the indigenous ethnic group, the “city of seven hills/mountains”, is the political capital of Cameroon. With a population of 4,100,000 in 2019, it is, along with Douala, the most populous city in this state and in the CEMAC zone.

Capital of the Center Province and of the Mfoundi department (the administrative boundaries merging with those of the department), Yaoundé is home to most of the most important Cameroonian institutions.

The city of Yaoundé is located in the south of the Center Region and is 250 km east of the coast of the Gulf of Biafra. This mountain site3 is made up of three topographic units inscribed in a rocky base of Precambrian gneiss: the barrier of inselbergs to the northwest dominated by the Mbam Minkom mountains (1,295 m) and the Nkolodom mountain (1,221 m) and southwest with Mount Eloundem (1,159 m); a set of hills 600 to 700 m high and plateaus; the valleys also called élobis.

The different districts are ordered according to the rugged relief of the site of the city. Roads and buildings develop mainly on the heights of the various hills, while the marshy lowlands often give way to subsistence agriculture, vegetation and many small streams. A few of them are the Mfoundi, Ékozoa, Biyeme and Mefou rivers. Near the administrative center of Yaoundé is a lake called Lac Municipal, created in 1951-1952. The marshy lowlands are also a land reserve for the development of precarious housing: the geographer Martin Luther Djatcheu has shown how this type of self-built housing developed in the flood-prone parts of the city, following the strong population growth.


bangui

Bangui is the capital and largest city of the Central African Republic. The population of the agglomeration is estimated at approximately 1,145,280 inhabitants, i.e. a quarter of that of the country, it extends over the bordering communes of Bégoua to the north, Bimbo to the west and Zongo on the south bank of the Oubangui in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.


The city is located on the right bank of the Oubangui, which marks the border between the Central African Republic and the DRC, opposite the Congolese city of Zongo which is located directly on the opposite bank of the river. The rapids of Oubangui, just upstream of the city, limit the river transport of commercial products, they are historically a break point for steam navigation. Most of the city extends over a marshy plain to the west of the Gbazabangui hills which cut the locality along a north-south axis. To the east are the Ndrès corridor and the Kassaï hills.


The Douala Bangui corridor
The Douala Bangui corridor is one of the main axes of African transport, it constitutes an axis of the CEMAC community network. The 1,500 km route is particularly essential to the trade in goods of the Central African Republic, a landlocked country

Agreement
Trucks loaded with goods and passengers (2015)

Axis crossing a village (Nana-Mambéré)
Its itinerary falls within the framework of the convention on land transport of goods between the Republic of Cameroon and the Central African Republic of December 22, 19991. The conventional distribution of freight in transit is 60% for Central African carriers and 40% for Cameroonian transporters.

Funding
The work on this route is financed by the European Union, the World Bank and the African Development Bank within the framework of the transport facilitation programme.


Terms
Escort vehicle seen from the sky (2015)
As it stands, the road transport networks in the CEMAC offer difficult conditions. Douala - Bangui road times can reach 5 to 7 days for 1,500 km. It is interspersed with many checkpoints and weigh stations. In October 2012, it takes 15 to 28 days to transport a container from Douala to Bangui.


Routes
This axis is made up of different routes and modes of transport connecting the Autonomous Port of Douala5.

A combined rail-road route of 1,789 km: railway between Douala - Yaoundé - Belabo, then by road from Belabo - Bonies - Bertoua - Garoua-Boulaï, Bangui. This route is used for transporting logs from the Central African Republic.
A totally road course of 1,500 km: Douala - Yaoundé - Bonis - Bertoua - Garoua-Boulaï - Bangui