01 A figure that does not fit
It is worth saying up front what those figures are: estimates quoted in reports on the city, not a livestock census. But the order of magnitude holds up on its own the moment you look at the ground, because the explanation is not economic. It is topographic.
02 Why it happens here
Yaoundé is built on a succession of 600-to-700-metre rises separated by waterlogged valleys. Those bottoms have their own name: élobis. They are threaded with a multitude of small watercourses, they flood, and for decades they were considered impossible ground to build on.
Flat ground, with water all year, inside the city and without property value. That is the exact definition of a market garden, and that is how it gets used.
The result is that the green you see between the buildings from any high point is not scenery: it is production. Maize, plantain, vegetables and small livestock, spread across the bottoms of a city that by the year 2000 already covered three hundred and four square kilometres, against the twelve it had in 1961.
03 The cost of living in the bottom
There is a second half to this story that is not comfortable, and telling it without that half would be dishonest. When demographic pressure built, those same flood-prone bottoms also became a land reserve for self-built housing. The geographers who have studied the city have documented it in detail: houses go up where the ground has no value, and the ground has no value because it floods.
The figures are specific. Little over a decade ago, severe flooding disrupted the city fifteen to twenty times a year and could affect a hundred thousand people at once. A sanitation master plan started in 2010 cut that frequency from fifteen to three episodes a year within four years, and cases of water-borne disease fell by almost half.
Which is to say: the same feature of the ground that allows farming inside the city is the one that floods it. The gardens and the flooding are the same geographic fact seen from two sides.
04 How to look at it
This is not a visit: there is nothing to book and no ticket to buy. It is a change of reading, and it works from day one. Every time you cross a bridge or reach a high point, look down. What in any other capital would be an abandoned lot is here under cultivation.
The second place to see it is the market, and there you should go early. Neighbourhood markets work at dawn and by midday little is left. If you ask where the plantain or the greens come from, part of the answer will be the name of a district of this same city.
And one last thing, which is what makes the fact worth having. In almost every capital in the world, the relationship between the city and its food is one of import: it arrives from outside, by lorry, at night. Here part of it does not arrive: it climbs. From the valley floor to the next rise, forty metres of height.
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