Dodoma

Dodoma was the destination of the First Team of the East African Advance Corps. While the other teams were still on the road, the First Team had already begun construction.

Dodoma, Tanzania's administrative capital in later generations, stood more than 1,100 meters above sea level. Its climate was cool, and it lay near the upper reaches of the Wami River, amid rolling low hills and diverse terrain.

It was a stopping point for caravans traveling from the Swahili Coast to Lake Tanganyika. In Ernst's previous life, it had been an important railway hub in Tanzania, making its geographical position extremely significant.

Goods unloaded at Dar es Salaam Port could be transferred through Dodoma and sent to various outposts across the East African colony, while it could also provide convenience for later immigrants.

Dodoma received around six hundred millimeters of rainfall each year, and its annual temperatures hovered between fifteen and thirty degrees Celsius, making it highly suitable for human habitation.

This gave the First Team of the East African Advance Corps an advantage. Before the rainy season arrived, the First Team used kerosene lighters produced by the Hechingen Company to set fires everywhere.

Riding the southeastern wind, the blaze spread northwestward. Countless animals fled in all directions, while the unlucky ones that failed to escape added meat to the soldiers' meals, roasted over the fire with gathered wild bananas until they sizzled and dripped with grease.

After the fire, the remaining plant ash happened to neutralize the acidic substances in the soil, and the more than five hundred accompanying immigrants began turning the earth.

There were native tribes near Dodoma as well. This was where they traded with Arab merchants. When they saw that the newly arrived First Team of the Advance Corps carried firearms—though the Arabs had them too—people instinctively became wary of unfamiliar things.

Most importantly, East Asian faces were rarely seen here. Most of the local natives were Bantu people who had migrated all the way here from West Africa centuries ago. Their skin was dark, and they had dealt with both the San people and whites in East Africa. The First Team's complexion fell somewhere between the two, and their style of dress was equally unfamiliar. Even from a great distance, they stood out as different.

The First Team had no intention of clashing with those native tribes for the time being. They had only just arrived; building the camp came first.

Fortunately, East Africa at this time was still a land vast and thinly populated. The population of all the African grassland within Tanzania might not even have exceeded that of the Mongolian Steppe.

After all, Mongols raised horses and sheep, while these natives remained at the hunting-and-gathering stage. With such low productivity, they could support only a small population.

Moreover, Arabs often stirred up tribal conflicts, provoking wars and trafficking people. In recent years, East Africa's population had decreased rather than increased.

Tanzania's later population of fifty million owed much to the Germans and British. Though both were colonizers with impure motives, they truly brought these barbarians into the agricultural age.

Thus, after African countries gained independence, freed from the colonizers' restraints and with productivity improving, their populations surged and doubled again and again. Tanzania, for example, had only a little over ten million people in the 1960s, but by the time Ernst transmigrated, it had nearly sixty million, and its fertility rate was still rising.

At present, across Tanzania's 940,000 square kilometers of land, Ernst suspected that the population might not even have reached five million.

After all, German East Africa had undergone decades of development in his previous life and had only possessed a population of more than seven million before the First World War. German East Africa also included relatively densely populated African regions such as Rwanda and Burundi.

That was why Ernst dared to set his sights on the East African colony. After all, many counties he had seen in his previous life had populations nearing one million, and some even had two million.

Think about it: emptying the population of an entire country would surely be dismissed as the ravings of a madman. But moving the population of several counties? That was still possible.

After all, his homeland in his previous life had terrifying mobilization capabilities. The South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the Three Gorges Reservoir... there were countless examples like these.

And all of them had completed large-scale population resettlement within relatively short periods. Ernst had time to spare. If he spent thirty or fifty years focused on sending the natives away, then East Africa would have no racial problem to speak of.

As for Chinese immigrants and whites, that was easy to solve—at least, Ernst believed it was. Ethnic integration had real precedents. Brazil, for instance, was so magnificently poor that everyone was too busy struggling to survive to bother with such matters. It was instead the highly developed Americans who spent all day using race to divert conflicts.

Cuba was another example. Ernst greatly admired the Cuban government. Under the same system, all races lived together harmoniously. If that had been one of the other small capitalist states of later generations, they would have beaten each other's brains out long ago.

There were negative examples too: Yugoslavia. It was not that Ernst viewed the country through tinted glasses. He felt that its disintegration was entirely the fault of its leaders. It perished amid compromise and freedom, unable even to make sense of its own position, failing to bring its advantages into play. (Scared, trembling.)

That was getting far afield. At the very least, Ernst believed he had the ability to resolve this matter. Having lived for years in a nation with three thousand years of centralized rule and two thousand years of great-unification tradition, he knew a few methods.

Even the enfeoffment system of the Western Zhou Dynasty seemed more centralized to Ernst than the West. After all, the Western Zhou enfeoffment system had a core, and the Zhou Royal Family remained, at least nominally, the common sovereign of all under heaven in its later years. Europe, meanwhile, had everyone thinking themselves Rome; even after fighting two World Wars for nothing, they still could not get a European Union in order.

Russia was half of one in Europe, the only country with a concept of centralized rule at its foundations. So it was no wonder Americans feared Russia, because it truly possessed the ability to unify Europe.

Dodoma's temperature was twenty-three degrees today. The Chinese immigrants' clothing was rather limited in variety, mostly Prussian military uniforms. Back in First Town, the humid tropical climate had made them stiflingly hot, but in Dodoma, they were just right.

The immigrants were therefore in good condition, but the commander remained extremely cautious. In Europeans' eyes, Africa had once been a cursed continent precisely because it was rife with tropical diseases. Most colonizers operated along the coast and were unwilling to venture deep inland.

Therefore, Ernst attached enormous importance to sanitation in the colony and had also laid out a practical set of measures: raw water had to be boiled before drinking; half-cooked wild animal meat could not be eaten; foods such as snakes and frogs, which carried many parasites, were not to be touched; the colony had to be disinfected regularly; mosquito bites had to be prevented; excrement had to be collected and utilized properly...

These were all routine duties for colonial officials. In particular, they had to strictly regulate the immigrants' diets. After all, the people of a great foodie nation that had long suffered famine could find endless ways to eat anything.

But food in the East African colony was still abundant. If there was truly nothing to eat, were there not wild bananas and fruits to fill their stomachs? There was no need to eat bizarre creatures. Even the herds of large herbivores on the African grassland could be hunted through teamwork—zebras and wildebeests, wild by nature and somewhat dangerous.

At night, visibility around Dodoma was excellent. Stars blanketed the sky, and the temperature had dropped somewhat. After a day of labor, the immigrants lay on crude wooden beds and peacefully drifted into sleep.