African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 55: Chapter 51 Tanga Port

December 14, 1866. Tanga region.

Under the scorching sun, the East African colonial administrators in straw hats supervised the indigenous laborers with whips at the construction site.

The indigenous laborers, grouped in fours, slowly moved colossal stones by hand and stacked them at the shoreline.

Immigrants used wheelbarrows to transport sand and cement to the shore, where they mixed it with water to fill the gaps between the piled stones.

This was the newly constructed wharf, made entirely of stone, which had been smoothed and solidified.

Not far off, immigrants and indigenous people used shovels and pickaxes along the coast to widen the bay, with thousands working simultaneously in a grand scene.

This construction site belonged to what would later become Tanga City in Tanzania, and the colonial powers were building Tanga Harbor here.

Tanga Harbor, originally a military port of German East Africa in 1889, became the northernmost port after Tanzania’s independence, and the second-largest port in the country, as well as a processing and trading center for sisal.

Currently, this is land rented from the Sultanate of Zanzibar, used to prepare for the colonial port’s self-use construction.

Before this, it was just a barren bay owned by the Sultanate of Zanzibar.

Tanga Harbor is east of Tanga Bay, with a rather winding coastline and several excellent bays, an average water depth of seventeen meters, and protected from high seas by Bemba Island on the eastern waters, with no major waves or winds.

The Tanga region experiences southeast winds from December to February and southwest winds from April to October, with the highest average temperature of 32 degrees in January and the lowest average temperature of 20 degrees in July, with little fog throughout the year and an expansive view of the sea.

Tanga Harbor is about 120 kilometers away from the nearest town of Manda in the upper Marine District, becoming the newest northern outpost for the East African colony in the Marine District.

The port was sited here not only because of the suitable natural conditions for building a port but also because, starting next year, the East African colony would expand into Kenya.

The East African colony had already gained control over the Tanganyika region, especially the more important transportation nodes and fertile, well-watered areas, bringing them under colonial possession.

However, Tanganyika was vast, and various indigenous tribes still existed between colonial outposts, with the colony not having the capacity yet to remove these indigenous peoples.

Since there was no place to relocate the indigenous people, the best solution was to sell them to traders from the Sultanate of Zanzibar or deploy some within colonial engineering projects.

But these were drop-in-the-bucket measures since Arab demand for slaves was limited, and since German expansion into the East African interior, large numbers of indigenous people had already been packaged and sent to the Sultanate of Zanzibar, flooding the market.

Slave prices remained low, and previously lucrative industries had turned to strategies of low profit, quick turnover.

Since Arab traders could not absorb them, the East African colony would have to devise a way to get rid of these indigenous people themselves.

Due to a shortage of ships, most could only be used to transport immigrants, with no capacity to send the indigenous population overseas temporarily.

Thus, the East African colony could only temporarily drive away some indigenous tribes, which accumulated considerable indigenous labor power in the colony.

Given the situation, the East African colony on its large construction projects, besides reclaiming farmland, constructing roads, and digging canals.

This year, the largest project was building Tanga Harbor, and large numbers of indigenous laborers were used for the road leading from the harbor to the town of Manda in the upper Marine District.

After extensively using indigenous captives, Tanga Harbor began to take shape; the docks and warehouses had been built, and a seventeen-meter-high lighthouse erected at the harbor.

As the future key port for East African colonial imports and exports, Ernst imported a batch of artillery pieces from Austria-Hungary, shipping them from Trieste, rounding the Gibraltar Strait and the long African coastline, to land at Dar es Salaam.

After human porterage and carts, they were brought to Tanga, and these cannons were used to set up defensive batteries on the port’s north and south sides.

Simultaneously with the construction of Tanga Harbor, Ernst founded the colony’s first factory, a sisal processing factory.

Ernst specially imported a batch of decorticators from France to assemble in East Africa.

As the current advantageous product of East African colonies, the profit from sisal was quite remarkable; to further enhance sisal’s value, the export of raw sisal was shifted to exporting finished and semi-finished products.

The sisal processing factory would select and sort the sisal grown in the East African colony, fed it into machinery to complete processes like crushing, waste filtering, washing, and drying. Finally, workers would comb and align the fibers, make yarn, and weave cloth.

The finished products included rope and canvas, as well as primary processed fiber semi-products.

Sisal is coarse fiber, so unsuitable for textile fabrics.

However, sisal has a fine texture, high toughness, and is resistant to saline-alkali corrosion, making it the best material for ship cables before chemical fibers were invented.

Sisal was also widely used for fishing nets, canvas, mine cables, various ropes, sacks,...

And as raw material for high-grade paper, such as navigational charts and banknotes.

Therefore, there were no market issues for sisal; other regions worldwide also cultivated sisal, with large scales in Brazil and Southeast Asia.

The establishment of a sisal processing factory at Tanga Harbor would help promote the competitive strength of the East African sisal industry worldwide.

Sisal itself is a drought-resistant and poor soil-resistant plant, and the climate in East Africa is particularly suitable for growing it, requiring minimal caretaking after planting in the fields.

Considering the current low labor costs in the colony, combined with mechanical support, the sisal fiber produced by the East African colony’s factory had an extremely low cost.

Currently, all the workers in the factory were immigrants, with three plants in total, all near Tanga Harbor.

With the machines humming, workers fed the bundled sisal leaves into the machine, and rollers rolled over the leaves, breaking them up.

Workers used wooden sticks to wrap the sisal into bundles at the exit, then placed them in a pot for rinsing, before fishing them out to dry.

Finally, the workers straightened the sisal fibers by hand, to twist into ropes, or sent to the next factory to become canvas.

The products and semi-finished products of sisal were conveniently exported overseas from Tanga Harbor, transported back to Europe either by the colony’s merchant ships or passing Portuguese and Dutch traders.

Tanga Harbor had already become a sisal processing and trading center, along with exporting colonial specialty products such as cloves, pyrethrum, and cinchona bark.

Necessary colonial supplies could also be transshipped from here, especially with the upcoming penetration into Kenya next year.

From Tanga Harbor, a route heading directly north entered Kenyan territory not far away, allowing immigrants arriving from overseas to disembark directly, be distributed, and sent across Kenya.

This was far more efficient than landing straight from Dar es Salaam, saving significant manpower and resources.

Of course, immigrants for the continued development of Tanzania would still land at Dar es Salaam to fill colonial gaps within Tanzania, while those destined for Kenya would choose to land at Tanga Harbor.