African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 100: Chapter 95: Northwest Lament

In September, a drizzling rain fell from the sky in the northwest of East Africa.

Bukoba, a small fishing village on the west coast of the Great Lake (Lake Victoria), is a small settlement under the rule of the Karavel Kingdom.

Gentle ripples caressed the damp soil of the shore, as fine rain fell into the lake without stirring a wave.

In the morning, the sun had not risen, yet the dawn light pierced the horizon, reflecting on the western sky of Bukoba village.

The misty water vapor, mixed with fine rain, a gust of cold wind blew through, chilling and damp, the dim sky adding a few degrees of misery to Bukoba village.

Bukoba village, as a settlement, had a primitive architectural structure; stepping into Bukoba village, one could see a circle of fences crafted with vines and mud, covered in moss, appearing low and mottled after being battered by wind and rain.

Within the fences were houses with semi-circular frames built up to about a meter high with vines and branches, roofed with banana leaves and other plant leaves to ward off wind and rain.

In the center of the village was an altar, encircled with stones of various sizes, a place where villagers gathered to hold activities.

Behind the altar was the residence of the chief and elders, having no distinctive features except being slightly taller than the villagers’ houses, marking the general layout of the village.

As a village with a population of about a hundred people, Bukoba village mainly relied on fishing for livelihood, taking advantage of the rich fishery resources of the Great Lake (Lake Victoria).

The Bukoba people would chop down trees from the shore, most being large trees as wide as an embrace, hollowing out the trunks with axes to craft canoes two to three meters long.

The continual fishing and hunting lifestyle endowed the Bukoba people with excellent swimming skills. They maneuvered their homemade canoes, using simple nets woven from hemp, working together to catch local freshwater fish from the Great Lake.

Through fishing, the Bukoba people lived quite well; the surplus catch could be traded with surrounding tribes for earthen pots and essentials like salt.

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In previous days, Bukoba village was a rather lively place, filled with vibrant life, men going out to fish, women doing housework, awaiting important festivals.

The chief and elders would also organize sacrificial activities, everyone would gather around a bonfire, singing and dancing, living each day thoroughly and transparently.

This was also the norm of later African countries, where some tribes and villages merely had to eat and drink well daily, carefree.

Of course, barring special situations, like war.

The conflicts between countries and tribes in Africa are most severe in West Africa, after centuries of slave trade, they wish to capture and execute every member of the hostile tribes.

Western colonizers could stir conflicts among numerous West African tribes with mere bits of supplies; the cause of a war might be some tribe chief coveting a glass bead brought by a Western colonizer.

This referred to the asymmetric trade and communication exploiting the low productivity levels, limited worldview, and even superstitious psychology of backward regions.

In East Africa, people once did the same, like those traders from Zanzibar and the Arab regions, but when the East African colonies were established, such means were disdainfully abandoned.

The colonizers opted for a straightforward and crude approach, similar to deceiving children, to manipulate ignorant natives, which was hardly necessary given East Africa wasn’t as densely populated as West Africa; the colonial government of East Africa could personally contend with the indigenous inhabitants of the East African savannah.

Thus, many natives of the East African savannah were driven to the northwest region. Although East Africa was vast and sparsely populated, the number of natives surviving on the nearly million acres was still considerable.

A sudden influx of a large population into the northwest region, if the resources previously could only support five people, and now five more have arrived, means five people must disappear for the remaining five to survive.

Therefore, the actions of the East African colonial government were somewhat like deceiving oneself, obviously hoping for both sides to engage in conflict.

And Bukoba village was a place ravaged by the East African colonization.

The Eastern Bantu people poured in, slowly spreading to the position of Bukoba village, responding to the kingdom’s call, and simultaneously defending their homeland.

The Bukoba villagers engaged in intense battle against the invaders, together with the neighboring Karavel Kingdom villages, utilizing their terrain knowledge advantage, the Bukoba villagers and the Eastern Bantu people launched guerrilla warfare.

The Eastern Bantu people, hastily driven to the northwest from East Africa, naturally couldn’t carry food; also, as a tribe that lived by hunting, they didn’t have the habit of stockpiling grain.

On their way into the Karavel Kingdom, they relied on looting to get by. Regarding settling down, that would require the Karavel Kingdom’s consent.

Especially those Karavel nobles from the south who suffered first, they loathed the Eastern Bantu people to the extent of wishing to devour them alive.

There was irreconcilable conflict between the two sides, and naturally, a deadly battle ensued, each must eliminate the other.

And the more the war progressed, the deeper the hatred and the larger the scale, thus causing the catastrophe in the northwest nations.

Bukoba village survived the first wave of Eastern Bantu tribe’s impact, but the Eastern Bantu people flowed continuously like water, pouring in from East African colonies into the northwest.

Thus, Bukoba village was obliterated during the repeated baptisms of war, leaving only an empty shell of its former self.

The Eastern Bantu tribes didn’t choose to stay, as they weren’t tribes living near the Great Lake, relying on fishing and hunting for existence.

Lacking the necessary skills, naturally, they couldn’t survive like Bukoba village through fishing and hunting, so the Eastern Bantu people only kept moving north.

Now, the Eastern Bantu people were no longer facing just one or two enemies, but the joint armies of the northwest nations.

So the war was far from over, and the vanguard had already spread towards regions like the Buganda Kingdom and the Tu Rou Kingdom.

The productivity levels of the northwest nations were low, naturally lacking the capability to establish a significant number of towns and defensive constructions; thus, the Eastern Bantu tribes could slip through the southern nation’s territories, directly threatening the northern nations.

Meanwhile, in Bukoba village, after the Eastern Bantu people left, only the corpses of Bukoba villagers remained, unnoticed in the wilderness.

Various scavengers happily feasted; Bukoba village lost its past vibrancy and vitality, becoming a deserted village.

Gradually, it was eroded bit by bit by nature, and these buildings made of plant vines and mud, most likely, wouldn’t be preserved into the future.

Nobody remembered the suffering that once unfolded here; such a war seemed negligible across the northwest of East Africa, and no one recorded it, with even the last evidence being erased by nature.

The culprit behind this tragedy was the East African colonial government, with the proverbial mantis trying to catch the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind it. Regardless of whether East African colonies directly participated in this war, they were the main culprits of the war.

Conversely, the two warring factions, the northwest nations, and the Eastern Bantu tribes were all victims, fighting to the death, and regardless of who ultimately wins, the final beneficiary would still be the East African colony.

The war was merely a microcosm of the northwest of East Africa. The war-induced land abandonment leading to famine, the plague caused by the corpses left by the warfare, the water sources contaminated by bodies, all intensified the extinction of the northwest population.

Only the northern parts of the Buganda Kingdom and the Tu Rou Kingdom were not heavily impacted for the time being, barely managing to get by.

However, across the entire northwest nations, tens of thousands of square kilometers of land, the south had entirely turned into a battlefield, while the north was also under war threat.

The entire northwest region was shrouded in wailing, yet the world knew nothing of its suffering, with only the East African colonizers watching greedily and covetously over this land.