Douala
-ä´lə), city (1991 est. pop. 1,604,500), Cameroon, on the Wuori River estuary. Cameroon's largest city and major port, it is a commercial and transportation center handling most of the country's exports (chiefly cocoa and coffee) as well as transit trade from Chad. Douala developed as a center of the slave trade after the Portuguese arrived in 1472. It later became part of a German protectorate (1884) and of the French Cameroons (1919).