African Entrepreneurship Record

December 14, 1866. Tanga region.

Under the scorching sun, East African colonial administrators wearing straw hats were using whips to supervise the indigenous people working on the construction site.

The natives worked in groups of four, carrying huge stones with their bare hands and slowly stacking them on the shore.

The immigrants used wheelbarrows to transport sand, gravel and cement to the shore, add water and mix it evenly to fill the gaps between the stones after they were laid.

This is a newly built pier, all made of stones. The stones have been polished flat and strong.

Not far away, immigrants and natives used shovels, pickaxes and other tools to expand the scope of the bay along the coast. Thousands of people were working together, and the scene was quite spectacular.

This construction site was located in Tanga City, later Tanzania, and the Tanga Port was under construction in the colony.

Tanga Port, originally a military port in the German East African colony in 1889, was the northernmost seaport after Tanzania's independence, the second largest port in Tanzania, and a sisal processing and trading center.

Currently, this is land leased by the East African colonies from the Sultanate of Zanzibar to prepare for the construction of a port for the colony's own use.

Before that, it was just a deserted bay in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.

Tanga Port faces Tanga Bay to the east. The coastline is more tortuous, and the fine bays are relatively dense. The average water depth is 17 meters. In the eastern sea, Pemba Island serves as a sea barrier, and there are no strong winds or waves in the sea.

The Tanga area has southeasterly winds from December to February and southwesterly winds from April to October. The highest average temperature in January is 32 degrees and the lowest average temperature in July is 20 degrees. There is little fog all year round and the sea view is wide.

Tanga Port is about 120 kilometers away from Manda Town, the nearest town in the Upper Coast District, making it the newest northern stronghold in the Upper Coast District of the East African colony.

The reason why the port is located here is not only because the natural conditions are suitable for building the port, but also because starting next year, East African colonies will penetrate into Kenya.

At present, the East African colonies have roughly controlled the Tanganyika region, especially those more important transportation nodes and relatively fertile places with sufficient water sources, have been captured by the colonies.

However, Tanganyika covers a vast area, and there are still large and small indigenous tribes among the East African colonial strongholds. At present, the East African colonies do not have the ability to clear out these indigenous tribes.

The main reason is that there is no place to arrange for these indigenous people. The best way is to sell them to businessmen of the Zanzibar Sultanate, and secondly to digest some projects in the colony.

But these are just a drop in the bucket. After all, the Arabs' demand for slaves is limited, and since the expansion of the East African colonies, the inland East African colonies have packaged a large number of indigenous people to the Zanzibar Sultanate, causing market saturation.

Until now, the price of slaves has remained at a low level, and industries that were once hugely profitable have adopted the routine of small profits but quick turnover.

Since the Arab merchants could not digest it, the East African colonies could only find ways to get rid of these natives.

Due to the shortage of ships, most ships can only be used to arrange immigrants and are temporarily unable to pack these indigenous people and send them overseas.

Therefore, the East African colonies could only temporarily drive away some indigenous tribes. Even so, the East African colonies still accumulated a large number of indigenous labor forces.

In this case, the East African colonies could only use them to carry out some major projects, in addition to cultivating farmland, building roads, and digging canals.

The biggest project this year is the construction of Tanga Port. At the same time, a large number of indigenous people are used on the road from the port to Manda Town in the Upper Coast District.

After the extensive use of indigenous captives, Tanga Port began to take shape. Piers and warehouses were built. At the same time, a seventeen-meter-high lighthouse was built in the port.

As a key port for the import and export of the future East African colonies, Ernst imported a batch of artillery from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, loaded it from Trieste, bypassed the Strait of Gibraltar and the long African coastline, and settled in the port of Dar es Salaam. Go ashore.

After being dragged by men and horses, they were sent to Tanga. Now these artillery pieces are used to set up defensive forts in the north and south of the port area.

At the same time as the construction of Tanga Port, Ernst prepared the establishment of the first factory in the colony, the sisal processing factory.

Ernst specially imported a batch of hemp peeling machines from France and shipped them to East Africa for assembly.

As the dominant commodity in the current East African colonies, sisal is very profitable. In order to further increase the value of sisal, the export of sisal raw materials was changed to export of finished products and semi-finished products.

The sisal processing factory selects and sorts the sisal grown in the East African colonies, and sends it to the machine to complete the processes of crushing, filtering, cleaning, and drying. Finally, the workers arrange, sort, and draw the sisal, and then spin it. Yarn, weaving and other processes.

The finished products are hemp rope and canvas, as well as semi-finished fiber products for primary processing.

Sisal is a coarse fiber, so it is not suitable as a textile fabric.

However, sisal has a fine texture, strong toughness, resistance to salt and alkali, and is not easily corroded by sea water. Before the birth of chemical fibers, it was the best material for ship cables.

At the same time, sisal is also widely used in fishing nets, canvas, mine cables, hemp ropes for various purposes, and sacks...

It is also used as raw material for high-grade paper, such as nautical charts and banknotes.

Therefore, the market for sisal is not a problem. Sisal is also grown in other parts of the world, among which Brazil and Southeast Asia are larger.

The establishment of a sisal processing plant in Tanga Port will help enhance the competitiveness of the East African sisal industry in the world in the future.

Sisal itself is a plant that is relatively resistant to drought and barrenness. In addition, the climate in East Africa is very suitable for sisal cultivation. Farmers basically do not need to take care of the sisal after planting it in the ground.

The current labor cost in the colonies is quite low, and with the support of machinery, the cost of sisal fiber produced by the sisal factories in the East African colonies is extremely low.

Currently, all the workers in the factory are immigrants, and a total of three factories have been established, all near Tanga Port.

With the roar of the machine, the workers put the piled sisal leaves into the machine. The rollers rolled on the sisal leaves and were scattered.

Workers use wooden sticks to wrap the sisal into balls at the outlet, rinse it in a pot, and then take it out to dry.

Finally, the sisal fibers are smoothed by hand and used to twist into twine or become canvas in the next factory.

The produced sisal finished products and semi-finished products will be exported overseas at the nearby Tanga Port, and transported back to Europe for sale by the East African colonies' own merchant ships or the Portuguese and Dutch merchant ships passing along the coast.

Tanga Port has become a sisal processing and trading center. At the same time, the colonial specialty products, cloves, pyrethrum, cinchona bark, etc. can also be transported to the outside world through Tanga Port.

The supplies needed by the colony can also be transferred here, especially for penetration into Kenya next year.

Starting directly from Tanga Port, you can enter Kenya not far to the north. At that time, immigrants transported from overseas can directly disembark in Tanga, and after being distributed, they can be directly transported to various parts of Kenya.

This saves a lot of manpower and material resources compared to disembarking directly from the Port of Dar es Salaam.

Of course, immigrants who subsequently develop Tanzania will land at the Port of Dar es Salaam to fill the blank areas of the colonies in Tanzania, while immigrants heading to Kenya will choose to land at the Port of Tanga.