October 5, 1867.
East Lake Malawi Region.
Mitomoni Village lay more than a hundred kilometers south of Songea City.
The forests of the East Lake Malawi Region were relatively dense, with towering clusters of trees utterly unlike the boundless grasslands stretching as far as the eye could see in the north of the East African colony.
In his previous life, even by the twenty-first century, Tanzania's forest coverage had remained at around fifty percent. In this era, forest coverage across all of Tanzania was only greater, never less.
Unlike tropical rainforests and subtropical forests, East African forests were not tightly packed. There were wide gaps between the trees, with grassland predominating and few shrubs or the like, making travel easy—though without a compass or map, it was easy to lose one's bearings.
Thus, the East Lake Malawi Region was also the least developed land in East Africa at present. After all, a single fire could burn out a vast expanse of wasteland on the grasslands, but felling these trees remained difficult for the sparsely populated East African colony.
Everything had two sides. Where forests flourished, timber resources were abundant as well. Limited by transportation capacity, these trees could not yet be exported, but they greatly satisfied the East African colony's own needs.
They could be used to build houses, serve as fuel, and make tools. Given the East African colony's current population, these timber resources were truly inexhaustible and ever-renewing.
As one of the southernmost villages in the East Lake Malawi Region, Mitomoni Village was also a small military outpost.
Besides low walls built from mud and stones, it had crude wooden watchtowers. Wooden cheval-de-frises stood at the exits. Such defenses were somewhat extravagant for the southern natives.
Strictly speaking, East Africa did not yet border the Mozambique colony established