African Entrepreneurship Records 2

Chapter 70 Mombasa

1867 3 Month 11 Day.

Mombasa is the only port in East Africa as famous as Dar es Salaam, which was built by the Arabs in the 11th century.

Now with the signing of the East Sang Treaty, Mombasa, the second most important port of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, has also fallen into the hands of the East African colonies. In order to improve the operational capabilities of the Mombasa Port, the East African colonial government began to transform the port’s infrastructure.

Today, the highest temperature in Mombasa is 33 degrees Celsius and the lowest temperature is 22 degrees Celsius.

Working at the port during the day is still a bit stuffy, but it is still within the bearable range.

Colonial soldiers are commanding black slaves to push wheelbarrows to and from the port area to transport sand and gravel, and all the dredging of the port area is done by black slaves.
These black slaves are all assets of the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Because the colonial handover work has not been completed, they were temporarily expropriated by the East African colonies.

Except for the soldiers and black slaves who supervised the transformation of the port, most of the rest were Chinese workers and immigrants from the Austrian Empire.

In order to renovate and restore Mombasa, an important port city, the government of Mombasa, a colony in East Africa, has taken out the cement at the bottom of the tank.

The cement in the current colony is still sent from Europe by ship, so the quantity is limited.

On the pier, Mitrovic, an immigrant from the Austrian Empire, is directing his workers to build the buildings on the pier.

Mitrovic is a Yugoslav farmer from the southern part of the Austrian Empire. Fortunately, this guy has attended two years of school and participated in the work of building a church in his hometown, so he was appointed as a foreman by the Mombasa colonial government to direct the workers. construction.

These days, farmers themselves know some crafts, and some tinkering is no problem. After all, most of the one or two dilapidated houses in the family can be passed down for four or five generations.

So cement, a new thing that Chinese workers have never been exposed to, can be mastered very quickly as long as the immigrants from the Austrian Empire take the lead in demonstrating it.

Several workers used iron picks to pry away the loose and decayed masonry, and even some rammed earth foundations.

The staff next to them shoveled the knocked-off masonry and soil residue into the wheelbarrow compartment with a shovel. After the whole vehicle was full, it was pushed to the shore and dumped on a temporary pile of soil. These waste materials may be used to pave the road later .

"Here, we need to build half a meter." Mitrovic said to the workers.

He took the measuring ruler, turned the ruler body outward, and cut off the scale at half a meter perpendicular to the ruler body with his hand, for the attention of the Chinese workers.

"So, do you understand?" Mitrovic said.

This is the disadvantage of the language barrier. Communication between the two parties requires a lot of body language. Although both parties can speak some German, there is not much.

Many immigrants from the Austrian Empire can speak German, but more people can only speak the local dialect in the Austrian Empire. They can only speak a sentence or two of German, and they may have heard and learned it from the ruling nobles.

The Chinese immigrants have also received German education, mostly in temporary classes run by the colonies, teaching some simple vocabulary and phrases.

But there was not enough time, and there was no environment to use German. After all, the early immigrants were basically Chinese except for the German mercenaries.

However, the recruitment of workers in the East African colonies was not foolish, and they made full use of this point. Only those old immigrants who also knew a little German were eligible to work in the colonies.

So the Austrian imperial immigrants and Chinese immigrants working in Mombasa know some German, but not many.

In the colonies, the number of workers was quite small, but from the moment they left the fields, the status of Chinese immigrants was improved a step.

At present the soldiers in the East African colonies are larger than the workers, and the workers are larger than the farmers.And only by knowing German (at least a little) can you become a worker and soldier, otherwise you can farm the land honestly.

Chinese workers reached at least the same stage as those who continued to work in agriculture among the Austrian imperial immigrants, and this is reflected in wages.

Immigrants from the Austrian Empire are not fools, they can't get the benefits, and it's not easy to get away with a full meal.

They may not have the ability to resist the colonies, but they still have the courage to fight for the legal rights and interests of the colonies.

After all, when they set foot on the ship to the East African colonies, they still had a little yearning for a better life in their hearts.

The East African colonial government did not disappoint the immigrants from the Austrian Empire. Although the money they received was small, it was stable. Moreover, there were almost no entertainment venues in East Africa, so there was nowhere to spend the money. The money is also considerable.

Of course, the colonial government has started to use the bookkeeping system. After all, the colonial government in East Africa cannot print money, so the money in the hands of immigrants is "virtual".

When they need it, they can withdraw it from Hexingen Bank through the ledger, but this method has only been used by German mercenaries.

German mercenaries only came to East Africa to make money. Strictly speaking, they are not immigrants, so their families are in Europe, and they can also keep in touch with their families in Europe. It just takes some time, and sometimes they need money at home. Xinggen Bank advances his salary and sends it to his family.

……

Near dusk, the port of Mombasa has been remodeled by more than half.

After all, there are no commodities that can be sold in Africa, so the cargo volume is not large, so the scale of Mombasa Port is not large in the world.

At most, it has some status on one-third of an acre of land in Africa, which is why the repair work in the colony is progressing so fast.

Of course, the use of slaves also contributed a lot. Currently Mombasa is still in the handover stage, and the local residents of the Sultanate of Zanzibar have not been completely withdrawn, so the slaves plundered from Uganda and other places are temporarily requisitioned by the colonial government.

After the ships were emptied, the East African colonial government packed the black slaves and the residents of the Sultanate of Zanzibar and sent them to Zanzibar Island.

Due to Majid Sultan's fainting in his later years, the port of Mombasa was in disrepair for a long time, and the silt was deposited, and the transportation capacity was greatly reduced.

At present, the most important industry in the East African colonies is agriculture, and food, as a bulk commodity, requires a large amount of transportation.

Not to mention that there are immigrants, machinery, and merchant ships from various countries berthing, all of which require the East African colonies to prepare more excellent ports.

Africa is originally a continent that lacks good ports, so it is necessary to use the current ports.

At present, Bagamoyo Port is also under construction. By then, the East African colony will be able to have four excellent ports of Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo, Tanga and Mombasa at the same time, which will greatly solve the problem of transportation capacity.

In Mombasa's revamp, the port's roads have been doubled and paved with gravel and construction waste.

The wharf was reinforced and widened, unreasonable structures were dismantled, potential safety hazards were gradually investigated, and old facilities were replaced.

The current capacity of Mombasa Port will be about [-] times that before the transformation, and it is currently the most important port in the north of the East African colonies.

Mombasa will replace the port of Dar es Salaam and the port of Tanga. After the opening of the Suez Canal in the future, Mombasa will undertake the reception of merchant ships in the direction of Europe and Asia, and become the most important and largest port in East Africa in the future.

(End of this chapter)