African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 85: Chapter 81 Coal Mine

Tanzania has some coal resources, but not a lot, mainly distributed in the southern plateau areas.

The reserves are about several billion tons, primarily of high-quality low-sulfur coal, which is not outstanding across the entirety of Africa, and certainly cannot compare to other coal-producing regions in the world.

Initially, Ernst did not intend to develop Tanzania’s meager coal resources ahead of schedule, but for the subsequent agricultural development in East Africa, Ernst changed his mind and decided to develop Tanzania’s coal resources earlier.

To develop agriculture, agricultural product processing is essential, and in East Africa, it certainly cannot rely on manual labor to accomplish this.

If the indigenous people are used, it would go against Ernst’s principles. If they take root again, it will be difficult to get rid of them later.

Moreover, agricultural processing is already considered the most basic industry, and Ernst does not even want to teach the indigenous people farming, let alone industrial skills.

After all, the population explosion in Africa in previous generations was fundamentally due to European colonizers teaching Africans agricultural practices.

For example, Tanzania was in a primitive society relying on hunting for survival, with its population consistently at a low level. However, after being colonized by Germany and Britain, due to plantation development.

The indigenous people who learned to farm doubled their population from a few million to sixty million within two hundred years.

Before this, Zanzibar was actually engaged in colonization in eastern East Africa as well, but Zanzibar’s engagement in the slave trade had a completely negative effect on the population growth of the East African indigenous people.

The Sultanate of Zanzibar did not need the indigenous people to farm for them; they simply coveted their bodies. Thus, instigating tribal wars and capturing slaves was the Sultanate of Zanzibar’s way of making money.

Under such circumstances, the Black population in East Africa naturally became fewer and fewer. In fact, across East Africa, including Somali and Ethiopia regions, within the sphere of Arab influence, the indigenous population showed a decreasing trend.

Therefore, Ernst sought to prevent the emergence of a ”teaching them to fish” situation; tasks like road building, digging canals, and mining, which are highly exhausting and have no technical standards, can still be entrusted to the indigenous people.

The aim of engaging in agricultural processing in the colonies is for higher profits and to facilitate food transportation.

Currently, immigrants are considered a scarce resource throughout East Africa, with just over two hundred thousand immigrants in total across the entire East African region.

Thus, it is still necessary to import some machinery from Europe for production, and the machinery’s power naturally requires coal, so importing coal from Europe and other places is definitely not feasible.

Therefore, developing Tanzania’s local coal resources becomes indispensable.

Mbeya, the capital of the Upper Malawi Lake area.

This is an important mining area in future Tanzania, with distributions of gold, coal, and iron.

At this time in the world, the most attractive to colonizers undeniably must be mentioned—the gold mines, as many colonies were established because of gold resources.

Mbeya was entirely designated as the capital of the Upper Malawi Lake area by Ernst himself, following the important city structure of future Tanzania, with no significant resources discovered before this.

Now, with Ernst sending people for on-site surveys and conducting analyses of local mineral resources, its mineral wealth is beginning to emerge.

If other colonizers had discovered these resources, the place would undoubtedly have been fiercely contended for, and the East African colonial government would have long since completely controlled the East African region.

Moreover, the East African colony operates under a semi-militarized management, lacking currency and any free market economy, hence it can very effectively control these resources.

Mbeya, located inland, is well-controlled in terms of information and is not easily discovered by other colonizers. Even if discovered, it would be difficult for them to bypass the East African colony to the inland to seize it.

Unlike in California, USA, where everyone could get a share, all the wealth in the East African colony is controlled by the Heixinggen Consortium.

Thus, Mbeya’s resources were quietly developed by the Heixinggen Consortium, with the coal and iron resources being directly used for local construction, while the gold mines would be supplemented into the Heixinggen Bank.

In this era, mining was a manual labor-intensive activity, so the indigenous people captured by the East African colony found employment opportunities again.

They were driven by the East African colonial government into the mines, where they toiled day and night with simple tools and rudimentary safety facilities.

Currently, the East African colony has a large amount of idle indigenous labor force, and before their outlets became clear, most of them worked on road and hydraulic projects.

To connect the colonial cities and towns, the colony planned this year to build about ten thousand kilometers of roads using the hundreds of thousands of indigenous people available.

These roads were naturally not paved with cement or asphalt but were simple gravel roads. Even so, this volume of work was considered relatively significant at that time.

East Africa was really impoverished, with nothing much besides some roads built by the Sultanate of Zanzibar along the coastal areas. In the vast inland regions, there were no proper roads before the East African colony was established, or rather, there were no roads at all.

Of course, as a tropical savanna region, roads might have been utterly useless to the indigenous peoples of East Africa.

However, the East African colony definitely needed to rely on roads to manage the colony, and just the transportation of grain needed some basic road requirements. Currently, East Africa was vigorously developing horse-drawn and ox-drawn vehicles as animal-powered transportation tools.

So simple roads were essential; otherwise, with East Africa’s climate, especially during the rainy season, the wheels would certainly get stuck in the mud, unable to move an inch.

Transportation of mineral resources in the East African colony also inevitably relied on these gravel roads.

The East African colony currently lacked the capacity to develop railways, so transporting coal and iron resources to various parts of the colony must depend on animal power to pull carts.

Railway development was not due to a lack of funds; merely developing resources along the railway line could repay the cost. The main issue was a shortage of human resources.

The colony had just driven most of the indigenous people out of the East African colonial territory, with only a few hundred thousand indigenous captives in its possession.

It wasn’t that the East African colony didn’t want to capture more labor force; it’s primarily because the current grain production in the East African colony could not supply that many people.

Even for the indigenous people, their food standards could only meet the most basic survival needs, yet the consumption for tens of thousands was still not a small number.

Moreover, the colony’s grain, apart from what was needed for the immigrants, also had to supply initial rations and seeds for the immigrants, and the remainder was originally intended for export.

But now, to feed these indigenous people and build the colony’s roads, exports have instead decreased, being primarily absorbed by the colony itself.

Human energy is limited, and with the current colony’s focus on road construction, it is not feasible to simultaneously undertake other projects, even if these projects, like hydraulic works contemporaneous with road building, were mainly dependent on the immigrants themselves to complete.

Once the primary road system of the colony is completed, Ernst will then consider other large-scale projects. As for the indigenous people, they are an inexhaustible resource, with the Northwestern Eight Nations sitting there; their labor will definitely be indispensable for the future development of East Africa.