Chapter 51 Tanga Port
December 14, 1866. Tanga Region.
Under the scorching sun, East African colonial managers wearing straw hats were using whips to supervise the natives working on the construction site.
The natives worked in groups of four, carrying the 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, added water and mixed them evenly, and used them to fill the gaps between the stones after the laying.
This is a newly built dock, made entirely of stones that have been polished to be smooth and solid.
Not far away, immigrants and natives used shovels, pickaxes and other tools to widen the bay along the coast. With thousands of people working together, the scene was quite spectacular.
The construction site was located in what would later become the city of Tanga in Tanzania, and the port that the colony was constructing was Tanga Port.
The Port of Tanga, formerly a military port in the German East African colony in 1889, became 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 colony from the Sultanate of Zanzibar to prepare for the construction of a port for the colony's own use.
Before this, it was just a deserted bay in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.
The Port of Tanga is bordered by the Gulf of Tanga to the east, with a relatively tortuous coastline and a relatively dense number of excellent bays. The average water depth is 17 meters. The Pemba Island in the eastern waters serves as a maritime barrier, and there are no strong winds or waves in the sea.
The Tanga region has southeast winds from December to February of the following year and southwest 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 view of the sea is wide.
The Port of Tanga is about 120 kilometers away from the nearest town of Manda in the Upper Coastal Area, making it the newest northern stronghold of the Upper Coastal Area in the East African colony.
The reason why the port was located here is not only because the natural conditions are suitable for port construction, but also mainly because the East African colonies will infiltrate into Kenya starting next year.
At present, the East African colony has roughly controlled the Tanganyika region, especially those important transportation nodes and fertile areas with abundant water resources, which have all been taken into the colony's possession.
However, Tanganyika is vast, and there are still large and small indigenous tribes among the East African colonial outposts. Currently, the East African colonies do not have the ability to clear out these indigenous peoples.
The main reason was that there was no place to accommodate these natives. The best way was to sell them to merchants from the Sultanate of Zanzibar, or to absorb some of them through some projects within the colony.
But this was just a drop in the bucket. After all, the Arabs' demand for slaves was limited. Moreover, since the development of the East African colonies, the East African colonies deep inland had sent a large number of indigenous people to the Sultanate of Zanzibar, causing the market to be saturated.
Until now, the price of slaves has remained low, and the once highly profitable industries have adopted the strategy of small profits but quick turnover.
Since the Arab merchants were unable to digest them, the East African colonies had to find ways to get rid of these natives themselves.
Due to the shortage of ships, most ships can only be used to accommodate immigrants and are temporarily unable to pack up and send these natives overseas.
Therefore, the East African colonies could only temporarily drive out some indigenous tribes. Even so, the East African colonies still accumulated a large number of indigenous laborers.
In this case, the East African colonies could only use them to carry out some large projects, in addition to reclaiming farmland, building roads, and digging canals.
The biggest project this year was the construction of Tanga Port, as well as the road from the port to Manda town in the Upper Coastal District, which employed a large number of indigenous people.
After the extensive use of indigenous captives, the port of Tanga began to take shape, with docks and warehouses built, and a 17-meter-high lighthouse built at the port.
As a key port for imports and exports for the future East African colonies, Ernst imported a batch of artillery from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, loaded them on ships from Trieste, bypassed the Strait of Gibraltar and the long African coastline, and landed at the Port of Dar es Salaam.
After being dragged by people and horses, they were sent to Tanga. Now these artillery pieces are used to set up defensive batteries in the north and south of the port area.
While the port of Tanga was being built, Ernst planned to build the colony's first factory, a sisal processing plant.
Ernst specially imported a batch of hemp peeling machines from France and shipped them to East Africa for assembly.
As a dominant commodity in the current East African colonies, sisal has considerable profits. In order to further increase the value of sisal, the export of sisal raw materials was changed to finished products and semi-finished products.
The sisal processing factory selects and sorts the sisal grown in the East African colonies, and sends it into the machines to complete the processes of crushing, filtering, cleaning, and drying. Finally, the workers arrange the sisal, sort it, and draw it into strips, followed by spinning and weaving.
Finished products are hemp rope and sailcloth, as well as semi-finished fiber products from primary processing.
Sisal is a crude fiber, so it is not suitable as a textile fabric.
However, sisal has a dense texture, strong toughness, is resistant to salt and alkali, and is not easily corroded by sea water. Before the birth of chemical fibers, it was the best material for making ship cables.
At the same time, sisal is also widely used in fishing nets, canvas, mine cables, hemp ropes for various purposes, sacks...
It is also used as a raw material for high-quality paper, such as nautical charts and banknotes.
Therefore, the sales of sisal are not a problem. Sisal is also grown in other parts of the world, with Brazil and Southeast Asia having larger scales.
The establishment of a sisal processing plant in Tanga Port will help enhance the competitiveness of East Africa's sisal industry in the world in the future.
Sisal itself is a relatively drought- and barren-resistant plant. In addition, the climate in East Africa is very suitable for sisal cultivation, so farmers basically do not need to take care of sisal after planting it in the fields.
The current labor cost in the colonies is quite low, and with the help 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. There are three factories in total, all near Tanga Port.
As the machine roars, workers put the stacked sisal leaves into the machine. The rollers roll on the sisal leaves and break them up.
Workers use wooden sticks to roll the sisal into balls at the exit, put them into a pot to rinse, and then take them out to dry.
Finally, the sisal fibers are straightened by hand and used to be twisted into hemp ropes, or turned into canvas in the next factory.
The finished and semi-finished sisal products are exported overseas at the nearby port of Tanga and transported back to Europe for sale by the East African colonies’ own merchant ships or Portuguese and Dutch merchant ships passing along the coast.
The Port of Tanga has become a sisal processing and trading center. At the same time, the colonial specialty products, such as cloves, pyrethrum, cinchona bark, etc. can also be exported through the Port of Tanga.
The materials needed for the colony can also be transported through here, especially for the infiltration into Kenya next year.
By departing directly from Tanga Port and heading a short distance north, you can enter Kenya. Immigrants transported from overseas can then land directly in Tanga and, after distribution, be directly transported to various parts of Kenya.
This would save a lot of manpower and material resources compared to going ashore directly at the port of Dar es Salaam.
Of course, immigrants who subsequently develop Tanzania will also land at the Port of Dar es Salaam to fill the blank areas of the colony in Tanzania, while immigrants heading to Kenya will choose to land at the Port of Tanga.
(End of this chapter)
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