December 14, 1866. Tanga region.

Under the scorching sun, colonial managers in straw hats supervise the natives working on the construction site with whips.

The natives worked in groups of four, carrying huge rocks with their bare hands, and slowly piled them down on the shore.

Migrants use wheelbarrows to transport sand and cement to the shore, add water and mix well, and use it to fill the gaps between the stones after they have been laid.

This is the newly built pier, all made of stones, which have been polished and smoothed and firm.

Not far away, immigrants and natives used shovels, iron picks and other tools to widen the bay along the coast, and thousands of people worked together, and the scene was quite spectacular.

The site was located in what would become the city of Tanga, Tanzania, where the colony was under construction.

Tanga Port, originally a military port in the German East African colony in 1889, was the northernmost seaport after Tanzania's independence, the second largest port in Tanzania, and a sisal processing and trading center.

Currently, it is land leased by the East African colonies from the Sultanate of Zanzibar to prepare for the construction of a port for the colony's own use.

Previously, it was just a deserted bay in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.

Tanga Port is adjacent to Tanga Bay in the east, the coastline is more tortuous, the excellent bay is relatively dense, the average water depth is 17 meters, there is Pemba Island as a sea barrier in the eastern sea, and there is no strong wind and waves in the sea area.

The southeast wind blows from December to February of the following year, and the southwest wind blows from April to October, with a maximum average temperature of 32 degrees in January and a minimum average temperature of 20 degrees in July.

Tanga Port is about 120 kilometres away from Manda Town, the nearest town in the Upper Primordial District, and has become the newest northern stronghold of the Upper Primordial District in the East African colony.

The reason why the port is located here is that in addition to the natural conditions suitable for the construction of the port, the main reason is that from next year, the East African colonies will penetrate into Kenya.

At present, the East African colonies have roughly mastered the Tanganyika region, especially those more important transportation nodes and more fertile and well-supplied places, which have been acquired by the colonies.

However, Tanganyika is a vast area, and there are still large and small indigenous tribes between the strongholds of the East African colonies, and the East African colonies are not currently able to clear these indigenous people.

The main thing is that there is no place to arrange these natives, and the best way is to sell them to the merchants of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and secondly, to digest a part of some works within the colony.

But this was only a drop in the bucket, the Arab demand for slaves was limited, and since the East African colonies were pioneered, the inland-deep East African colonies packed large numbers of indigenous people to the Sultanate of Zanzibar, causing market saturation.

Until now, the price of slaves has remained low, and the once lucrative industries have played the routine of small profits and quick turnover.

Since the Arab merchants could not digest it, the East African colonies had to find a way to get these natives away.

Due to the shortage of ships, most of the ships can only be used to arrange migration, and they cannot afford to pack these natives and send them overseas.

As a result, the East African colonies could only temporarily drive out some indigenous tribes, and even so, the East African colonies still had a large number of indigenous laborers in their hands.

In this case, the East African colonies had to use them for some big projects, except for clearing farmland, building roads, and digging canals.

The biggest project of the year is the construction of Tanga Port, and the road from the port to Manda Town in the Upper Primorsky District has been heavily constructed.

After the extensive use of indigenous captives, the port of Tanga began to take shape, with wharves and warehouses already in place, and a 17-metre-high lighthouse was erected in the port.

As a key port for future East African colonial imports and exports, Ernst imported a shipment of artillery from Austria-Hungary, loaded it from Trieste, and disembarked at the port of Dar es Salaam, bypassing the Strait of Gibraltar and the long African coastline.

After being dragged by men, they were sent to Tanga, and now they are used to erect defensive batteries in the north and south of the port area.

At the same time as the construction of Tanga Port, Ernst prepared the first factory in the colony, the sisal processing factory.

Ernst specially imported a batch of stripping machines from France and shipped them to East Africa for assembly.

In order to further increase the value of sisal, the export of sisal raw materials was changed to the export of finished and semi-finished products.

The sisal processing factory selects and sorts the sisal grown in the East African colonies, and sends it to the machine to complete the processes of rolling, filtering, cleaning, drying, etc., and finally the workers discharge, arrange, and draw the hemp, and then spinning, weaving and other processes.

The finished products are hemp rope and canvas, as well as semi-finished fibres for primary processing.

Sisal is a coarse fiber, so it is not suitable as a textile fabric.

However, sisal has a delicate texture, strong toughness, salt and alkali resistance, and is not easy to be corroded by seawater, and is the best material for making ship ropes before the birth of chemical fibers.

At the same time, sisal is also widely used in fishing nets, canvas, mine ropes, hemp rope for various purposes, sacks......

It is also used as a raw material for high-grade paper, such as nautical charts and banknotes.

Therefore, the market for sisal is not a problem, and sisal is also cultivated in other parts of the world, with Brazil and Southeast Asia being larger.

The establishment of a sisal processing plant in Tanga Port will help to enhance the competitiveness of the East African sisal industry in the world in the future.

Sisal itself is a relatively drought-tolerant and barren plant, and the East African climate is very suitable for sisal cultivation, so farmers basically do not need to take care of sisal after planting it in the field.

The labor cost of the current colony is quite low, and with the blessing of machinery, the sisal fiber produced by the sisal factories in the East African colonies is extremely low.

At present, the workers in the factory, all of whom are immigrants, have formed a total of three factories, all of which are near Tanga Port.

With the roar of the machine, the workers put the stacked sisal leaves into the machine, and the rollers rolled on the sisal leaves and were scattered.

Workers wrap sisal into balls at the outlet with wooden sticks, rinse them in a pot, and then remove them to dry.

Finally, the sisal fibers are smoothed out by hand and used to knead them into hemp rope or turned into canvas in the next factory.

The finished and semi-finished products of sisal were exported to the nearest port of Tanga, and transported back to Europe for sale by the merchant ships of the East African colonies themselves or by the Portuguese and Dutch merchant ships passing along the coast.

Tanga Port has become a sisal processing and trading center, and the colony's specialties, such as cloves, pyrethrum, cinchona bark, etc., can also be transported through Tanga Port.

Supplies needed by the colony can also be transferred through this place, especially if they infiltrate Kenya next year.

From Tanga Port, it is a short distance north to enter Kenya, where migrants from overseas can be disembarked directly and distributed to all parts of Kenya.

This saves a lot of manpower and material resources than going ashore directly from the port of Dar es Salaam.

Of course, immigrants from Tanzania would also disembark at the port of Dar es Salaam to fill the void in the colony in Tanzania, while migrants to Kenya would choose to land at Tanga port.