About 58 kilometers west of Dar es Salaam, a brand-new settlement could be seen. This was the first foothold established in East Africa by the Hechingen colonial team.
To commemorate this important place, Yalman, the leader of the colonial team, named it First Town (later Mlandizi Town, Tanzania), symbolizing the first step in the colony's development.
First Town lay in the buffer zone between the East African coastal plains and the highlands. No mountain ranges ran through its surroundings; only a few hills lay to the southwest, and the terrain was relatively flat and open.
First Town stood on the coastal plains not far from the Indian Ocean, close to the border of the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Influenced by the warm, moist air currents near the equator, it received more than 1,300 millimeters of rainfall annually, and vegetation flourished all around it.
Because rainfall in Africa was unevenly distributed, heavy rain upstream during the rainy season could pour into the rivers and gather downstream, causing floods. First Town had therefore been built on high ground, shielding it from sudden flood disasters during the rainy season.
A great river ran north of First Town, rising in the Uluguru Mountains. Captain Yalman named it the Little Rhine River (the Luvugo River). It stretched all the way to Bagamoyo in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, where it entered the Zanzibar Channel.
First Town lay within the Little Rhine River basin. The entire region received abundant rainfall, and its proximity to the equator provided plentiful sunlight and heat, making it suitable for crops such as rice, flax, and corn.
For now, the place was still a wilderness. Aside from beasts roaming everywhere, only slave-hunting parties from the Sultanate of Zanzibar occasionally passed through.
Because the Sultanate of Zanzibar had hunted slaves here year after year, there were basically no large indigenous tribes nearby. Slave-hunting parties had to venture deep inland to find any gains, so they only made brief stops here.
The Hechingen colonial team dug trenches around First Town and erected low fences to guard against sneak attacks by wild beasts. The undertaking was no small one, so the settlement remained modest in size.
At present, First Town had more than eight hundred residents, including colonial team members stationed here, Chinese immigrants who had just arrived from afar, and more than five hundred indigenous people temporarily held captive here.
In February, the first batch of seven hundred East Asian immigrants had arrived aboard a Dutch fleet. Most had been lured here under the pretense of recruitment, but in truth, they might never be able to leave East Africa and return home for the rest of their lives.
Hechingen's employment contracts lasted twenty years. There was no need to think twice about it—they could only work for the House of Hohenzollern for the rest of their lives. After all, they were all adults, and in an era when average life expectancy was low, twenty years practically declared that most of their remaining lives would be spent here.
Yet as East Africa developed in the future, by then, even if Ernst sent someone to invite them to leave East Africa, they would likely be unwilling to return to that distant homeland plagued by calamities.
After docking at Dar es Salaam Port, the immigrants were driven off the ships by staff. Personnel already stationed at the port then disinfected them.
Inside temporary sheds, they were divided into groups of fifty, stripped naked, and scrubbed clean with water from wooden buckets and soap. In the scorching weather, there was no need to worry about catching cold.
After changing into standardized German clothing—most of it secondhand Prussian military uniforms Ernst had acquired—they began having their hair cut and their beards shaved.
Cutting off their queues caused a small wave of panic. Having been suppressed for nearly a century, fear still lurked in their hearts. But once they had come here, it was no longer up to them. Willing or not, they had to accept it obediently.
Once the cleaning was complete, these people were sent to First Town to begin reclamation work. The colonial team had spent a month clearing the surrounding area of wild beasts, making the five or six kilometers around the settlement safe territory.
Because this place lay close to Zanzibar, there were hardly any indigenous tribes nearby, only a few small villages. Most had been driven away under the colonial team's physical threats and intimidation, while the few who refused to comply were directly captured and turned into free labor.
As for why they were not all captured and were instead driven away, it was still because there were too few hands. Every member of the colonial team was currently a precious asset, and taking a hard line against these tribes was not worth it. But those indigenous people unwilling to leave their land were still made into examples.
The more than five hundred people in First Town's POW camp were now digging canals and building roads. They had completed the village trenches a few days ago, and were currently constructing the first gravel road from First Town to Dar es Salaam Port.
At this stage, these indigenous people were substitutes for livestock and machines, the source of power for the colony. First Town and the dozens of li of surrounding land awaited them to serve as draft animals.
Tanzania's land was flat and open, and the immigrants did not find it uncomfortable after arriving here, because the first batch of immigrants had mostly come from northern Qing China, which was likewise a vast plain.
Though the weather was somewhat hotter, it was still better than cold. As for Africa's fierce ultraviolet rays, they were nothing to these farmers who had spent their lives with their faces toward the yellow earth and their backs toward the sky.
What was the first problem the new immigrants encountered? Even Ernst had not expected it—or rather, he had forgotten to explain—that East Africa's coastal regions had a humid, hot climate better suited to growing rice.
But most of these immigrants were northerners with no experience growing rice, and Ernst had not prepared rice seeds either.
It was not that wheat could not be grown. Wheat could in fact be grown in tropical regions, but yields were low. Tropical wheat was better suited to highland areas, while First Town lay on the coastal plains of East Africa.
Take India, for example. The Deccan Plateau primarily grew wheat, while the Ganges Plain primarily grew rice. India's annual wheat output was no lower than its rice output.
Since that was the case, wheat would temporarily replace rice. There was no need to pursue high yields; planting enough for rations would do, while other areas would be switched to cash crops.
Sisal was a key crop for the Hechingen colonial team to develop. In later generations, tropical Tanzania would become a world-famous producer of sisal. Sisal fiber was tough and resistant to seawater corrosion, making it a superior raw material for ship's ropes, burlap sacks, and floor mats.
The current era was still the age of wooden-hulled ships. Sisal's excellent properties, combined with its vast market, meant that the crop's economic value was on the rise. Compared with grain, Ernst could say without exaggeration that however much they planted, they would sell.
After all, opening up the grain market was a long process. Farmers made up the largest population in the world, and agriculture was the largest industry. Every country had its own grain industry, so the intensity of market competition could well be imagined. Moreover, all staple grains relied on thin margins and high volumes, making quick profits impossible. That was also why the United States had so many plantations.
A scarce commodity like sisal was different. Only tropical regions could grow it extensively, and it also required abundant rainfall. After all, not every tropical place was blessed with plentiful rain; tropical deserts were a climate type as well.
Tropical rainforests were not suitable for sisal cultivation either. It was not that the rainforest climate was unsuitable, but rather that development was difficult. In terms of land alone, tropical rainforests had too many trees, making logging troublesome, while small-scale planting offered no outstanding economic returns.
Tanzania, however, was different. Beyond its favorable climate, it possessed vast tracts of land, especially arable land.
Later statistics suggested that Tanzania's arable land might reach 600 million mu, accounting for more than forty percent of its territory and capable of supporting 400 million people.
Ernst did not know where those figures had come from, but his firsthand experience in his previous life told him that East Africa was indeed suited to agriculture.
The East African Highlands covered a vast area. Though they were called highlands, Ernst, who had grown up on the North China Plain, felt that East Africa greatly resembled northern China. East Africa was merely at a higher elevation; otherwise, in Ernst's eyes, it was basically no different from plains country.
The most unique feature of the East African Highlands was that they did not form a Brazilian-style shield along the coast. The coastal plains transitioned gradually into the highlands, creating excellent conditions for an economic hinterland.
That was why Tanzania's population was distributed so evenly in later generations, unlike Brazil's population, which was all crammed into the southeastern corner of the Brazilian Plateau.
Most of Tanzania lay on the East African Highlands. The country's terrain rose and fell steadily and remained largely on the same plane, while mountains were distributed along the East African Rift Valley at its borders. Kilimanjaro, for example—such a towering mountain suddenly rising from flat land—was quite a magnificent sight.
This was also something Ernst could not understand no matter how he pondered it. Kilimanjaro and the African grassland were as distinct as the waters of the Jing and Wei Rivers, unlike other regions where mountains and plains had some form of transition between them.
No matter what, Ernst believed that East Africa possessed exceptionally favorable natural conditions. The only thing restricting land development was water resources; that had been the root of Tanzania's agricultural predicament in his previous life.
There was a lack of irrigation facilities and reservoirs for storing water. During the rainy season, vast amounts of rainfall simply flowed down the rivers into the Indian Ocean, never being effectively utilized.
Therefore, once the East African colony's water diversion and storage problems were solved in the future, the greatest constraint on East African agricultural development could be resolved.
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