The Atlantic slave trade and the port of Bimbia

c. 1750

Known to Portuguese navigators from 1472, the port of Bimbia, near present-day Limbe, became from the second half of the eighteenth century a major collection point of the Atlantic slave trade on the Cameroonian coast, linked by trade routes to the kingdoms of the interior. Coastal Cameroon thus supplied captives to the Americas until the trade declined in the early nineteenth century.