African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 1206: Chapter 215: “Utopia”

Secondly, Mombasa’s current business is somewhat more important than that of Dar es Salaam City; after all, it is the forward base where East Africa and Europe and Asia meet, so many foreign trade operations and exchange centers are set up in Mombasa.

Now, with the war in Europe underway, many businesses that originally lay in the hands of the European powers have naturally transitioned into East Africa’s hands, which has made Mombasa the most important information hub on East Africa’s East Coast.

Thanks to advances in East Africa’s communications technology and the expansion of the national telecommunications industry, with telegraphs, telephones, and the like becoming widespread, orders placed in Mombasa can be quickly transmitted throughout East Africa, and one no longer has to go to a specific city to complete commercial tasks.

So in addition to a large number of exchanges and communication centers, Mombasa also hosts many stations set up by large East African enterprises, or simply serves as their headquarters.

Therefore, in order not to disrupt Mombasa’s current state, the East African Government, after careful consideration, still chose to place the exhibition within the Dar es Salaam City metropolitan area.

This in fact also indicates, to a certain extent, the relative decline in Dar es Salaam City’s position among East African cities; this is easy enough to understand: after the rise of a whole cluster of East Coast port cities such as Bela, Maputo, New Hamburg Port, Pemba, and others, competition for Dar es Salaam City was inevitable.

After all, Dar es Salaam City is not Shanghai, enjoying the commanding position at the mouth of the Yangtze River, that Golden waterway; and in terms of rail and road transport, those upstarts in East Africa are in no way inferior to Dar es Salaam City.

Mombasa, however, is different; one could say it has no competitors at all, and to this day the dividends of the northern railway still rest firmly in Mombasa’s hands.

Of course, the final reason for choosing the Dar es Salaam City metropolitan area as the venue is that Dar es Salaam City alone is sufficient; it remains East Africa’s largest city, its overall strength is still the greatest, and it has no obvious weaknesses in other respects—quite enough to cope with personnel from all the participating countries.

This can at least be seen from the discussions among the Brazilian delegation.

Jodel kept commenting: ”I’ve noticed quite a few details. Take the roads in Dar es Salaam City, for example—they’re clearly much smoother. While this may have something to do with vehicle performance, look, East Africa’s roads are entirely paved with black asphalt, whereas in Rio de Janeiro only a small portion of urban roads enjoy this treatment.”

”And the design features of East Africa’s roads are very striking: there are all sorts of lines and special patterns on the asphalt surface. I imagine they must have particular uses.”

At this point Jodel switched to German to ask the East African driver at the wheel; up to now he had been speaking Portuguese with his colleagues, and as a native-born old-timer from Dar es Salaam City the driver obviously couldn’t join in, since he couldn’t understand.

Because he had emigrated to Brazil so long ago, Jodel’s German was clearly rather rusty; he stumbled along as he tried to converse with the East African driver.

”Sir, how should I address you?”

”Hello, sir, you can call me Fekirini. What can I do for you?”

”Mr. Fekirini, I just have a small question. I’ve noticed there are many patterns and lines on East Africa’s roads, some painted on the surface, some used on warning signs. May I ask, are these part of a unified set of traffic rules?”

Fekirini said, ”That’s right. The white paint divides up the road surface. The most basic function is to separate the lanes—for example, we’re now in the inner lane, and vehicles in the same lane all move in the same direction. Of course it also has an instructive and warning role, such as solid lines where you cannot change lanes, and dashed-line sections where you can...”

These traffic rules were all established under Ernst’s guidance; in fact, early East African traffic was not nearly as strict as it is today.

After all, there used to be few cars in East Africa, and horse-drawn vehicles and the like weren’t very fast, so there was no need for complicated traffic rules; it was only after the number of vehicles increased in the 1890s that the East African Government began to improve and enforce more stringent road traffic regulations.

When Jodel translated these points into Portuguese and shared them with his colleagues, he once again drew unanimous praise from the Brazilians.

As an experienced driver, Fekirini particularly enjoyed this feeling of being flattered by foreign guests; now, with Jodel, who could speak German, acting as interpreter,

the seal on his chatterbox was completely broken, and he began, bit by bit, to introduce many details about East Africa.

”The green belts in the middle and on both sides of the roads—according to foreign tourists or merchants I’ve met—seem to be something only we in East Africa have. These green belts, besides beautifying the environment, can also absorb a certain amount of noise and dust. Of course the effect is certainly limited, but I believe they do work.”

”If you go up close to these green belts, you can see a layer of dust clinging to the leaves—at least before the watering trucks come by to spray them.”

”Our East African roads use the latest traffic-light system. They all run on electricity, and are installed at large and small intersections and other complex sections throughout Dar es Salaam City...”

The Brazilians listened as if entranced; from Fekirini’s words anyone could sense the strength of East Africa’s traffic system, its embodiment of order, fairness, and human-centered design, and so on.

Of course, they would now and then raise new questions.

”Mr. Fekirini, are all the streets in Dar es Salaam City this clean?”

”Of course. We in East Africa attach great importance to sanitary conditions. Not only now; even back in my grandfather’s time, East Africa already had this tradition.”

”According to my grandfather, early East Africa was indeed not very safe, and people’s awareness of hygiene was very weak at that time, but even then the government had already begun to enforce the cleaning of personal and public hygiene, and the results were very significant.”

”I imagine you’ve all heard the saying that Africa is a cursed continent, with all sorts of tropical diseases rampant. It is precisely in this way that we in East Africa have greatly reduced the spread of viruses here; by now East Africa is even safer than many mid- and high-latitude regions.”

If Fekirini had said this to other people, it might not have resonated, but it was different with the Brazilians.

Brazil’s latitude is not far off from that of East Africa, and the two countries’ climates are very similar; so some of the problems present in East Africa apply to Brazil as well.

And there is no doubt that Brazil’s lousy medical system and public health infrastructure, and the various tropical diseases that run rampant, are probably among the reasons why Brazil’s population growth has been less than ideal and its population is concentrated in a few big cities.

Imagine it: a country like Brazil, with relatively few people, vast empty land, and unable—unlike East Africa in the past—to use administrative means to concentrate state power to develop the interior, truly finds it hard to modernize.

To expect private enterprises to take a few dozen or a hundred employees into the interior to open up land is simply to send them to their deaths; it was only because early Brazil had enough Native Americans, and later enough Black people to exploit, that Brazil was able to accumulate even the meager family wealth it has today.

Brazil did not abolish slavery until the end of the 19th century, whereas by that time East Africa’s effective development of its territory had already reached several million square kilometers, and now the western region’s economy and population have also taken shape. This is the institutional superiority of East Africa.

Of course, East Africa’s consumption of Black Slaves was also quite remarkable, though it was not necessarily greater than Brazil’s; after all, Brazil’s Black people have been ”renewed and iterated” for several generations and follow a path of sustainable development, whereas East Africa did not pay much attention to ”sustainable development,” instead adopting a ”drain the pond to catch the fish” approach.

In this sense, Brazil’s Black people are both luckier and more unfortunate than their ”countrymen” in East Africa: at least Brazil did not wipe them out completely. Yet the treatment of Black people in East Africa and Brazil is clearly not as good as in the United States. Although Black people in the United States suffer social discrimination, they at least obtained their freedom in the middle of the last century, whereas Brazil’s Black people have only just been emancipated and their social status is still lower than that of Black people in the United States.

Naturally, Fekirini would never disclose this sort of ”stain” to international friends, so in his telling, East Africa had almost no shortcomings, only virtues.

And many Brazilians believed it to be true; after all, the facts were right before their eyes, and people are more inclined to believe what they see. What East Africa was displaying was the civilized side, so East Africa must be more civilized, more prosperous, and stronger than Brazil—practically a ”perfect republic.”