Late 1919.
Cabinda City.
Among East Africa's many provinces, Congo Province was a rather unusual presence. From a climatic perspective, because most of it lay within the tropical rainforest zone, Congo Province was not suited to growing food crops.
In ancient times, Congo Province simply could not have supported the emergence of a large civilization, and it would have been difficult for it to enter the age of agrarian civilization. Of course, agricultural civilization throughout Sub-Saharan Africa had advanced at an extremely slow pace; even regions like the East African Highlands, which were suitable for agricultural development, were no exception.
This could be seen from the populations of countries in Africa's tropical rainforest climate zone in the previous life. Even by the twenty-first century, Congo (Brazzaville) had only a little over five million people, Gabon only three million, Equatorial Guinea barely over one million, and even Cameroon, with its relatively large population, had only a little over twenty million. Only Congo (Kinshasa) had a population nearing one hundred million.
However, as mentioned before, Congo's population was basically distributed along the edges of the basin—that is, the transition zone between tropical rainforest and tropical savanna. Once one went deep into the rainforest, the population was almost negligible.
Cameroon, with a population exceeding twenty million and even approaching thirty million, illustrated this point even more clearly.
Cameroon was a country with an extensive coastline. By all logic, its population and economy should have concentrated along the coast, yet in the previous life, Cameroon's population had been more concentrated in the northern or southern highland regions.
In the previous life, its capital, Yaoundé, had been built amid the hills of Cameroon's southern plateau.
Cameroon's administrative divisions in the previous life also proved this point quite well. The deeper one went into the tropical