Chapter 42 Immigration Boom
There are many preachers like Wang Dazhi who go deep into their hometowns to publicize the benefits of the East African colonies and dispel the concerns of the Chinese.
Of course, it also found a way out for these poor people who are illiterate and have no experience. Ordinary people would not easily step into unfamiliar fields without access to avenues or support.
Who wants to starve in their hometown? They didn’t know before, or had no way to do it. Now they know, as long as they can have food to eat, what does it matter if they sell their life!
The most exaggerated one was a preacher named Zhang Gensheng. His hometown was suffering from drought. When he returned, the response was so strong that villagers from several neighboring villages even reported back on their own initiative.
The people affected by the disaster didn’t know what the situation was like in the East African colonies, but Zhang Gensheng didn’t look like he had ever suffered. In this era, one could basically tell how a person was doing by looking at his appearance. Most ordinary people had yellow complexions, their bones were clearly visible, and there was no fat at all.
The station where Zhang Gensheng was heading to represented the healthy state that people of this era were pursuing, which represented having enough food to eat.
And Zhang Gensheng! Everyone in the neighborhood knew that when foreigners came here to recruit workers, life was barely sustainable, so everyone just watched Zhang Gensheng board the "pirate ship" with a funny attitude. After all, what good intentions could the foreigners have?
There were even rumors that the Western devils were man-eating evil spirits and that Zhang Gensheng would never come back. But now a year has passed and Zhang Gensheng is back, and the rumors have been dispelled.
Seeing Zhang Gensheng wearing gorgeous clothes and looking full of energy, the people who had suffered from the disaster naturally asked him all kinds of questions. As for the fact that Zhang Gensheng had shaved his braids, no one cared much. Didn't they see how the village officials bowed and nodded when the group of people arrived?
This shows that they were not afraid of the government at all. After all, in the Qing Dynasty at that time, only revolutionaries would shave their braids, or let their hair down like the southern long-haired people.
The authorities will never talk to you nicely when they see this kind of person. They will just take you away through a set of procedures. The worst punishment is imprisonment, and the worst is execution.
Zhang Gensheng obviously did not belong to either of these two categories, so the villagers who knew him asked him about the situation, and Zhang Gensheng naturally told them everything he knew.
After hearing Zhang Gensheng's description, the group of villagers were very excited. There was actually such a good thing in the world. The villagers who couldn't even get enough food to eat naturally ran around to tell each other.
Then the nearby villages also learned about this. With numbers giving them courage, the villagers thought about going to the East African colony together so that they could look after each other.
It is understandable that these immigrants think this way, but unfortunately the East African colony will not put these people together. They will still have to be dispersed and distributed to various parts of the colony, and the villagers will naturally not know about it.
As a result, more than a thousand people from the area Zhang Gensheng was in charge of signed up to go to East Africa that day. This put a difficult situation on the staff of Jiaozhou Bay. They were able to arrange for these people only after urgently dispatching a batch of food and medicine.
In this case, they could only report to their superiors and request a few more ships, and at the same time notify the East African colonies to prepare more rations in preparation for receiving this group of immigrants.
Ernst also bought a batch of grain from Europe and sent it to East Africa to stockpile in preparation.
In this way, many people from the Shandong Zhili area north of Jiaozhou chose to go to Guandong, while people from the south of Jiaozhou, especially those at the junction of Anhui, Henan and Shandong provinces, chose to go to East Africa. The East African colony had a very effective way of recruiting people. They provided meals on the way to the port, and free rations were provided all the way to East Africa. Once they arrived in East Africa, they had to participate in labor.
There is naturally nothing we can do about those who really don’t want to leave their homeland, but they will regret it in the future. It doesn’t matter whether East Africa is a paradise or not. What matters is that East Asia is now hell.
Later, according to the population registration of the East African colonies, more than 50,000 immigrants came to the East African colonies in the next three months just after this action of the Chinese returning to China to persuade immigrants.
The surging population quickly filled the land gap in the coastal areas of East African colonies. Neighboring Zanzibar had only a few hundred thousand people, while the Binhai New Area quickly reached nearly 60,000 people after this immigration activity.
It must be said that Ernst’s family is wealthy and powerful now, otherwise who could have accommodated 50,000 people in such a short time!
Another winner of this immigration was the Dutch. Ernst signed a long-term agreement with the Dutch, and the commissions were basically fixed.
Due to this sudden surge in immigration, we had to temporarily rent more ships from the Dutch, so the price naturally had to be increased.
After that, the Dutch fleet was divided into three batches, visiting the East African colonies once every six days, and immediately returning to East Asia for the next trip after unloading the population at the port of Dar es Salaam.
After these immigrants arrived in the East African colonies, some of them were allocated to the areas under construction in the west, such as the Great Lakes (Lake Victoria) region and the Solon Lake (Lake Tanganyika) region...
Most of them first filled in the blank areas in the coastal areas, and then drove out the indigenous people. The land here has been left barren ever since.
Now that the manpower has arrived, they will be divided into groups and sent into the hinterland of the coastal area to open up wasteland, starting from the north and moving south to the vicinity of the first town.
The continuous influx of immigrants did give the people of Zanzibar in the port of Dar es Salaam a little shock. After hearing about the huge commotion caused by the immigrants, the Sultan of Zanzibar did not take any action. Instead, he lay even calmer. It can be said that the East African colony has now completely established its foothold.
Even if Zanzibar and Portugal united, they could not shake the rule of the East African colonies in the local area. The previous threat of force was only a short-term measure. Now that the population has increased, there will be real long-term stability.
With the help of these immigrants, more than one hundred villages were formed in the coastal area, each of which had a population of several hundred people. The three strongholds built later were upgraded to three town-level administrative districts due to population expansion, with each town-level administrative district having one to two thousand people.
As long as the population of these towns increases, Ernst plans to place some simple primary industries here to form the prototypes of some cities with some industries.
Moreover, this time the immigration is no longer mostly individual as in the past. Affected by natural disasters, some small families also come to East Africa collectively to make a living.
In order to facilitate governance and management, these immigrants were broken up and immigrants from different regions were mixed together to form new villages.
Therefore, the residents of these new villages may not even speak the same dialect, and everyone is unfamiliar with each other, so they naturally rely more on the coordinated management of the colony.
Brand new iron farm tools were distributed to these immigrants. After getting the production tools, the immigrants were full of energy and worked with the help of advanced farm tools, some indigenous captives, horses and cattle.
Immigrants developed nearly 500,000 acres of land, accounting for 10% of the entire coastal area's land area, 30% of the arable land area, and 70% of the irrigable land area.
The paddy field area reaches 200,000 mu, and it is estimated that 30 million kilograms of rice can be harvested in a single season. After deducting the food ration (one kilogram of rice produces about 600 kilograms of rice), there will still be 8 million kilograms of surplus. The rest of the land is planted with sisal and other crops.
Among them, the grain was used for further immigration and expansion needs, so there was no plan for export. As for the value of sisal exports, 5% was used to pay salaries to colonial immigrants and managers. Although the colonial residents could not use it, after all, there were no entertainment venues or other consumption places in East Africa, Ernst did not need to pay them too much salary, which was more symbolic.
The average amount of land that the East African colonial immigrants had to cultivate was more than eight acres per person, which involved a lot of physical labor. However, Ernst did not mistreat them in terms of food rations, which were almost close to the average per capita staple food consumption in later generations. Therefore, even if he did not pay them wages, Ernst felt no burden at all.
After all, in the Far East, you could work yourself to death and still not have enough to eat, but when you arrived in the East African colonies, although it was still very tiring, the food was far better than in all the countries in East Asia today.
Moreover, although a lot of land was reclaimed, the intensity was not as great as imagined. For example, the quality of the tools brought from Europe was much better than those from the Far East. The use of livestock, indigenous labor and collectivized operations reduced the intensity of labor.
Moreover, there is no need for intensive farming like in the Far East. Pesticides and fertilizers are all shipped from Europe, and farmland management is relatively rough.
Of course, in order to improve the production enthusiasm of these immigrants, the colony also formulated an effective reward and punishment system. Those who work hard will be well fed, especially when it comes to meat distribution. If they don't work well, they may go hungry and have to do compulsory labor as punishment.
During the off-season, the East African Colony Coastal District Organization built 196 kilometers of primitive dirt roads, which basically connected the six most important towns in the Coastal District.
By the end of October 1866, the total number of new and old immigrants in the entire East African colony, plus Germans, exceeded 97,000. In the Tanganyika part of the East African colony, important locations and lands were basically under control.
Between these immigrant settlements there are vast tracts of land occupied by local indigenous people, whose number may exceed three million. Except for the coastal areas, there are also large indigenous tribes in other areas.
Compared with these huge numbers of indigenous people, the East African colonies can be said to have initially completed the strategy of cities (towns) surrounding rural areas (tribes).
But immigrants continued to flow into East Africa from the Far East, providing conditions for the further expansion of the East African colonies.
(End of this chapter)
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