The Lobé Falls are the place where a rainforest river reaches the Atlantic as a waterfall, a few kilometres south of the town of Kribi on the coast of Cameroon's South Region, dropping twenty metres across a front of a hundred metres in a staircase of cascades straight onto the beach, and sacred to the three peoples who share the river. The Lobé comes out of the forest as a wide brown river, breaks over the rock shelves in a dozen channels of whitewater and runs its last few hundred metres across the sand into the surf, so that from the high ground above the mouth the whole geometry lines up at once, the cascades, the wide pool, the moored pirogues and the open ocean beyond; the boatmen paddle their dugouts out of the flat water below the mouth and take visitors in under the lowest step, where the spray comes over the bow, and below the shelves the river runs wide and slow enough to wade, tea-dark water pushing warm against the legs. Because the falls face west into the ocean, the last hour of light comes in off the water and strikes the whitewater head-on, turning it copper while the forest behind goes dark.
The river is shared along its length by the Bagyeli hunter-gatherers in the forest upstream, the Mabi farmers on the middle river and the Batanga fishers at the mouth, and the falls are a place of rites for all three, where the miengu, the mermaid-like spirits of the rivers and the sea, are asked to cure disease and carry messages to the dead. The dark sand the river spills onto is a nesting coast, where olive ridley turtles come ashore between October and March. At the end of the long rains in September and October every channel across the ledge runs full and silt-brown. The Lobé is a river that ends in a waterfall on a beach, and the sea takes it a few steps from the drop.