African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 24: Chapter 20, Town 1 (Mlandizi)

Starting from Dar es Salaam, heading west for about 58 kilometers, one can see a brand new village, which is the first stronghold established by the Heixinggen colonial team in East Africa.

To commemorate this important place, the colonial team leader Arman named it First Town (later known as Mlandizi Town in Tanzania), symbolizing the first step in colonial development.

First Town is situated in the buffer zone between the coastal plain and highland of East Africa, with no mountains around, only a few hills in the southwest, making the terrain relatively flat and open.

First Town is located in the coastal plain area not far from the Indian Ocean, close to the Zanzibar Sultanate border. Influenced by warm moist air flows near the equator, the annual rainfall of First Town is over 1300mm, with abundant grass and trees surrounding it.

Due to the uneven distribution of rainfall in Africa, the heavy rains upstream during the rainy season may gather in the river downstream, causing floods. Therefore, First Town is built on a highland to avoid the sudden flood disaster during the rainy season.

To the north of First Town, there is a major river passing by, originating from the Uluguru Mountains. It is named Little Rhine River (Lu River) by the team leader Arman, extending to Bajamojo in the Zanzibar Sultanate and into the Zanzibar Strait.

First Town lies in the Little Rhine River basin. The region has abundant rainfall and, due to its proximity to the equator, sufficient sunlight and heat, making it suitable for the growth of rice, flax, corn, and other crops.

Currently, this place is still barren, with wild beasts everywhere, only occasionally visited by slave-hunting teams from the Zanzibar Sultanate.

Due to the Zanzibar Sultanate’s perennial slave-hunting activities, there are basically no large indigenous tribes nearby. The slave-hunting teams must penetrate inland to achieve gains, so they only briefly stop here.

The Heixinggen colonial team dug trenches around First Town and built low fences to prevent wild animal attacks, making the scale of the village small due to the considerable amount of work involved.

There are currently more than eight hundred residents in First Town, including colonial team members stationed here, newly arrived Chinese immigrants, and over five hundred indigenous people temporarily held here.

In February, the first batch of seven hundred East Asian immigrants arrived here via Dutch fleets. Most of them were tricked under the guise of recruitment, and they are likely to spend the rest of their lives in East Africa, unable to return to their hometown.

The employment contract of Heixinggen is as long as twenty years, and it’s clear they will work for the Hohenzollern family for a lifetime. After all, they were adults when they came, and in this era of short average life expectancy, twenty years basically means spending most of their lives here.

However, with the future development of East Africa, by that time, even if Ernst sends someone to invite them to leave East Africa, they might not be willing to return to their distant and disaster-stricken hometown.

After docking at Dar es Salaam port, the immigrants were driven off the ship by staff, and the port staff, who had been prepared long ago, performed disinfection work on these immigrants.

In temporary shelters, grouped fifty by fifty, their clothes were removed, and they were cleaned with water from wooden buckets and soap. In hot weather, there’s no worry of catching a cold.

After changing into uniform German clothing (mostly second-hand Prussian military uniforms bought by Ernst), they started to cut their hair and shave.

The cutting of braids caused a small panic. After nearly a hundred years of suppression, there is still fear in their hearts. But having come here, it’s not up to them, and even if unwilling, they must accept calmly.

After cleaning work was completed, they were sent to First Town for land reclamation. The colonial team spent a month clearing the surrounding wild beasts, making the surrounding five to six kilometers a safe area.

Due to its proximity to Zanzibar, there are almost no indigenous tribes nearby, only a few small villages, most of which were driven away by physical threats and intimidation from the colonial team, and the few disobedient were directly captured to serve as free labor.

As for why they were not all captured but chosen to be driven away, it was because of the lack of manpower. Every colonial team member is currently a valuable asset, and it’s not cost-effective to use tough methods with these tribes, but those unwilling to leave their land were made examples of.

Now, in First Town’s POW camp, they are digging canals and building roads, using the captured people for the village trenches completed a few days ago, and over five hundred people are currently constructing the first gravel road from First Town to Dar es Salaam port.

Initially, these indigenous people were substitutes for livestock and machines, serving as power sources for the colony, and tens of miles of land around First Town are waiting for them to act as labor force.

The land of Tanzania is flat and open, not making these immigrants feel uncomfortable since the first batch of immigrants mainly came from the northern part of the Qing Country, where there’s also a vast plain.

Although the weather is hotter, it’s better than cold, and the strong ultraviolet rays in Africa are nothing for these farmers who have spent years facing the loamy earth.

What is the first problem new immigrants encounter? Even Ernst didn’t think of this, or forget to mention it—that the coastal areas of East Africa are more suitable for growing rice due to the humid and hot climate.

However, most of these immigrants are northerners with no experience in rice cultivation, and Ernst also didn’t prepare rice seeds.

It’s not to say that wheat can’t be planted; wheat can actually be grown in tropical regions, but the yield is low, tropical wheat is suitable for highland areas, but First Town is located on the coastal plain of East Africa.

Just like India, the Deccan Plateau primarily grows wheat, whereas the Ganges Plain is primarily for rice, and India’s annual wheat yield is not less than rice.

Given this, wheat is temporarily used as a substitute for rice cultivation, not chasing after yield, growing some staple food is enough, and other areas will be converted to economic crops.

Sisal is the primary crop developed by the Heixinggen colonial team. In later generations, tropical Tanzania became a world-famous sisal production area. Sisal fiber is strong, not afraid of seawater erosion, and is an excellent raw material for making ship cables, burlap bags, and carpets.

The current era is still the time of wooden-hulled ships, sisal’s excellent properties combined with the huge market, make its economic value on the rise, and compared to grain, Ernst can exaggerate that it produces as much as it’s planted.

After all, developing the grain market is a long process, the world has the largest number of farmers, and agriculture is the largest industry, every country has its own grain industry, and the market competition is fierce as can be imagined, and all staple foods are sold at thin profits with high sales, unable to quickly gain profits, which is why the U.S. has so many plantations.

But sisal, being such a scarce commodity, is different. Basically, only tropical regions can widely cultivate it, and it requires high rainfall, as tropical areas can also have dry climates like tropical deserts.

Tropical rainforests are also not suitable for sisal cultivation, not because the tropical rainforest climate conditions are inadequate, but due to high development difficulty. In terms of land alone, there are too many trees in tropical rainforests, and cutting them is difficult, and small plots don’t make impressive economic gains.

But Tanzania is different, besides favorable climate conditions, it has vast land area, especially arable land area.

Statistics suggest Tanzania’s arable land area can reach 600 million mu in later generations, accounting for more than 40% of its land area, able to feed 400 million people.

Ernst doesn’t know where the data came from, but his own past life experience tells him East Africa is indeed suitable for agriculture.

The East African Plateau has a vast area, and although called a plateau, Ernst, who grew up on the North China Plain, feels East Africa is very similar to North China, albeit East Africa has a higher altitude. In Ernst’s eyes, it’s almost no different from plain areas.

The most unique feature of the East African Plateau is that it doesn’t form coastal shields like Brazil, with slow transitions between coastal plains and highlands, ensuring favorable economic hinterland conditions.

Therefore, in later generations, Tanzania’s population distribution is very even, unlike Brazil’s population, which all gathers in the southeastern corner of the Brazilian Plateau.

The main body of Tanzania lies on the East African Plateau, with stable terrain fluctuations nationwide, basically on the same plane, mountains distributed in the border areas of the East African Rift, such as Mount Kilimanjaro, whose sudden appearance on flat land is quite spectacular.

This is also the puzzling mystery that Ernst can’t understand because Mount Kilimanjaro and the African savanna are distinctly separate, not having a buffer like other regions between mountains and plains.

Regardless, Ernst believes that East Africa has excellent natural conditions, with the only limitation for land development being water resources, which was the agricultural dilemma in Tanzania in his past life.

Lack of water facilities and reservoirs for storage. During the rainy season, a lot of rainfall flows uselessly into the Indian Ocean without being effectively utilized.

Therefore, in the future, solving the water diversion and storage problems of the East African colony can address the greatest limiting factor in agricultural development in East Africa.