African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 1379: Chapter 368: Urban Transformation

Over decades, East Africa broke free from the predicament of lacking basic resources like oil and coal through expansion. If Ernst had been content with the territory of former German East Africa, which is now Tanzania, then the ceiling for East Africa would have been just a regional power.

The area of former German East Africa was less than a million square kilometers. Although Tanzania was relatively rich in resources, it was only comparatively so. In all of Africa, the places truly outstanding in resources were former South Africa and Nigeria; the former had a lot of coal, the latter a lot of oil.

This, to a certain extent, reflects the significant role of energy in economic development. Even if East Africa had a lot of overseas territories, its foundation would remain on the African Continent, just like the United Kingdom couldn’t move its political center from the British Isles to India.

In the history of European colonization, only the Portuguese royalty moved to Brazil for a period. Unfortunately, they later shifted their focus back to mainland Portugal.

From the current development status of Brazil and Portugal, Brazil has already surpassed its former sovereign country. Economic-wise, Portugal might have surpassed Brazil earlier.

However, in this timeline, most of Portugal’s overseas territories were taken over by East Africa, while the remaining Portuguese colonies were too small in area and resources to support a prosperous life for Portugal.

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Mbeya City.

In July 1919, East Africa’s Bohemia Province organized a group of officials to Mbeya City for study and exchange.

Bohemia Province is also the most important industrial area in central East Africa, formerly known as Matabele Province (Zimbabwe). It was once known along with Mbeya City’s South Salzburg Province as one of East Africa’s two major heavy industrial bases.

Today, Matabele Province has long been divided into two, becoming Bohemia Province and Lorraine Province, while South Salzburg also renamed as Salzburg Province.

Bohemia Province inherited most of the industry from the original Matabele Province, always being a heavy industrial base in East Africa, as significant as the Ruhr District in Germany or the Great Lakes industrial area in the United States.

However, Salzburg Province is quite different. Although still one of East Africa’s important heavy industrial bases, Salzburg Province has achieved remarkable success in technology in recent years, with light industry also making great strides.

After touring Mbeya City, the Mayor of Harare, Ikti sighed: ”Although our Harare City is larger than Mbeya City, with nearly two hundred thousand more people, becoming one of the country’s only three cities with over a million population, it’s only after coming to Mbeya City that we truly realized the gap between the two cities.”

”Whether it is in traffic planning, city design, or environmental and cultural constructions, Mbeya City is far ahead of Harare City. This shows that even though Harare surpasses Mbeya in population and city scale, we still have a long way to go.”

Harare City is the third largest city by population in East Africa, second only to Dar es Salaam City and Mombasa City, with a population of about 1.03 million in 1918. While Mbeya City ranks fifth in East Africa, just behind New Frankfurt City, with a population of over 800,000.

By 1918, registry data showed only three cities in East Africa with populations over a million. This level isn’t high, particularly compared to the United States, which had nearly ten cities with populations over a million at the same time.

Moreover, among the cities in America, there was even the mega-city New York, with over five million people, and Chicago with about three million. This demonstrates the scale difference between East Africa and American cities.

Of course, if you include the resident population, then the cities in East Africa would certainly exceed the statistical data a bit, but not too much. Take the largest city in East Africa, Dar es Salaam City, as an example, including the resident population, it barely reaches two million.

Based on two million, New York’s population is still more than two Dar es Salaams, which somewhat reflects the different urban development models between East Africa and countries like the United States.

After all, the total population of East Africa is tens of millions more than the United States, and its economic volume and industrial scale are slightly larger than the U.S. If it wants to build a world-class metropolis like London or New York, it certainly has the capability.

Besides the lack of international metropolises with populations over five million, East Africa also has very few cities with over one million people, akin to Russia, which also only has Moscow and Saint Petersburg in this category.

However, the populations of these two Russian cities could be equivalent to the three East African cities with populations over a million.

And Russia’s economy, industry, and transportation are far more backward than East Africa’s, so East African cities clearly aren’t just at this level.

In fact, East Africa has more medium-sized cities leading globally, with fourteen cities having populations over 500,000. In addition, there are many medium-sized cities with populations less than 500,000, like New Hamburg Port City, which has just over 300,000 people, but its industrial level is not low.

In other words, excluding Dar es Salaam City, Mombasa, and Harare, East African cities with populations between 500,000 and one million still have eleven.

During the same period in Russia, there was only one city at this level, Volgograd. To put it differently, Russia has only three cities with populations over 500,000: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Volgograd. This shows how shockingly low Russia’s industrialization is.