The City of Yaounde
It is not the first time such an initiative is being taken. Before independence, there was a semblance of street naming, very much limited to what was then the city centre and emphasized mostly monuments and squares, mostly to recognize or remember colonial officers who served during the colonial times.
Several attempts have been made since independence; but have tended more to recognize or remember some other local or national heroes. Street names have hardly been conceived as a way of easing movement within the city and providing addresses for homes, workplaces or other institutions.
Be it in the past or today, the hurdle of haphazard constructions often made movement almost impossible in most neighbourhoods. Under such circumstances, circulation or naming of streets could hardly meet any standards.
The situation has gone virtually beyond control because of the exponential growth of the city which has seen its area of a few square kilometres in the early sixties to some 200 square kilometres today.
New layouts have been built up, generally without any well mapped out plans while several outlying villages have been engulfed in Yaounde’s gigantic growth, turning the once small urban concentration around the Yaounde central post office and the central hospital areas into a huge human concentration which will certainly in the next few years drag in neighbouring towns as Obala and Mfou and later, Mbalmayo.
In psite of the demographic growth, no effort has been made for building to be registered with the town planning officials.
If it is true that city hall officials have done a wonderful job by opening up the town with new roads, the question of identification remains a major one for Yaounde.
To get to destinations people still have to use amusing names, many of which simply describe some structures as a way of identifying a destination. In the generalized absence of street names, city dwellers have even forgotten that some streets have names.
Cameroon Tribune’s offices, for example, are found on Avenue de l’OUA, but taxi drivers simply know it as Route de l’aèroport. Stop a taxi for the Place Awae and be sure no driver will stop; but say Carrefour Mvog-Mbi and the deal is quickly sealed.
Did you know that CRTV radio is found on the CONRAD Adenauer avenue? Certainly not. It is much easier to tell a cab driver that the structure is next to the Ministry of External Relations. Yaounde has grown enormously in status and today hosts a number of international organizations. This means it is no longer just a national city.
This also means it has more responsibilities in meeting the desires of all its inhabitants, including those of the international community summoned here by duty.
It is greatly expected that this new initiative will be taken to the end even if simply to satisfy the exigencies of modernization which Yaounde, the capital city and centre of international activity, badly needs.
