June.

Port of Bagamoyo, on the banks of the Lower Rhine.

As the fourth port of the East African colonies after Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, and Tanga, Bagamoyo is also the focus of the development of the East African colonies.

A 1,000-square-metre factory building rises from the ground in the port of Bagamoyo, all made of masonry and concrete, with red walls that don't fit in with the white Arabic buildings that surround it.

The style is an exact copy of the current European architectural style, in contrast to the dwarf Arab houses that surround it, even the native Arab church in Bagamoyo, which looks a little small in front of it.

Tall chimneys, protruding from the ceiling in the middle of the factory, and billowing black smoke lit up the clear blue skies of East Africa, where the smell of industry swept in the face.

The Sultanate of Zanzibar also has some small-scale handicrafts in East Africa, all traditional small workshops, such as blacksmiths and tailors...... These traditional handicrafts.

The Bagamoyo Flour Mill is the second recorded modern industry in the entire East African region to adopt large-scale machine production.

The first was the Tanga Sisal Processing Factory, which has been in business for a long time, and is currently booming in the market.

But sisal is the dominant industry in East Africa, and only Brazil and parts of Southeast Asia can compete with it.

Flour mills, on the other hand, are the most common industrial industries today, especially in Europe and the United States, and there are countless such factories, including those that are small in scale and may have only one or two machines.

The Bagamoyo Flour Mill uses steam power, that is, a boiler, and its boiler power source is coal developed from the interior of East Africa, which drives the steam engine wheel to provide uninterrupted and stable power to the equipment in the factory.

The machinery and equipment are all imported from Germany, loaded in the form of spare parts in German ports on the Baltic Sea coast, and finally unloaded at the port of Bagamoyo.

After the guidance of professional technicians, dozens of machines have been installed, and these machines are all big guys, all of which are made of metal parts.

The whole workshop is simple and elegant, which is convenient for hygienic cleaning and disinfection work.

The lighting system is all based on Berlin's own technology, which can be maintained continuously even at night, and the generators are imported from Siemens.

Closely connected with the production workshop is a huge modern warehouse, the East African coastal zone is relatively humid, which is not conducive to the preservation of food, so the storage requirements for food are higher.

Therefore, the construction of the warehouse fully adopts the best technology and planning of the current era.

In order to prevent moisture and rats, the ground is completely made of concrete structure, the drainage system is designed by professionals, fully considering the local climate and environment, and at the same time, all kinds of measuring instruments in the warehouse are complete, and workers can check the indoor temperature and humidity at any time to adjust the environment in the warehouse.

The Bagamoyo Flour Mill is an extension of the agricultural industry, and with the help of the local port conditions, the processed wheat of the East African colonies can be exported directly in the form of flour.

Its staff, in addition to the professional and technical personnel employed by the Heixingen Company, maintained the operation of the machines, mainly immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a slight degree of education, supplemented by a small number of Chinese.

However, in the stage of material transportation, packaging and finished product transportation, more Chinese are needed.

For these Austro-Hungarian and Chinese immigrants, it is still necessary to carry out simple training, in addition to health and safety education, to familiarize them with the operation of the machine.

The flour produced by the Bagamoyo Flour Mill is sold in Europe under the trademark of the Black Shingen Company.

Trieste, brought back by the returning Hashingen ocean-going trading fleet, was sold directly through the commercial outlets laid up by companies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

At the same time, it can also take the opportunity to recruit immigrants, after all, this batch of flour can prove that East Africa has its own products, and it is not a barren land.

Bagamoyo was once one of the largest slave trading markets in East Africa, and with the defeat of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, Bagamoyo was also acquired by the colonial government of East Africa.

The colonial government of East Africa only opened one slave market to the Arabs in the port of Dar es Salaam, and the slave markets in Mombasa, Bagamoyo and other places were closed.

As early as the 18th century, Bagamoyo was the most important port in East Africa, and at its peak more than 50,000 indigenous slaves sailed from here every year.

With the development of Dar es Salaam by the Sultanate of Zanzibar, Bagamoyo gradually declined, and now the colonial government of East Africa has re-developed Bagamoyo.

After all, there are still too few good ports along the entire East African coast, and it may seem enough now, but with the development of East Africa and the increase in population, port resources are bound to become precious in the future.

At present, the factories that can be created in East Africa can only be located in the coastal zone, and the machines arriving from Europe can only be landed by borrowing the advantages of port shipping.

As for the inland, don't think about it at the moment, the cost of relocating these stupid and clumsy machines to the inland is too high.

Moreover, the machines of this era were relatively expensive, and if they were rained, or stuck in the mud, or bumped into them, according to the conditions of East Africa, they were not easy to repair.

As the largest food crop in the East African colonies, the annual output of wheat is still considerable, and with the arrival of immigrants and the development of land, the potential will increase in the future.

As for rice, in fact, compared with wheat, rice is cultivated in the coastal plains of East Africa, which has the advantage of distance.

However, because Europe is mainly based on wheat crops, after industrialization, the development of agricultural machinery is naturally biased towards wheat and other European native crops.

It is unlikely that Ernst would have imported machinery for rice planting and processing from Europe, just like in the previous life, after the development of Japanese industry, it was only after the development of Japanese industry that it vigorously promoted the progress of rice cultivation and processing technology in East Asia, and was the first to realize the mechanized production of rice in the Far East.

Therefore, the development of wheat is an important step for ERNST to enter the grain processing market, which is simple and easy to operate, and East Africa has a large land area, a wide area of arable land, and the amount of precipitation is also suitable for wheat cultivation.

At present, the area under wheat cultivation in the East African colonies has exceeded the area under rice cultivation, which is based on the fact that the population of the rice-growing areas in the east is higher than that in the wheat-growing areas of the west.

Wheat embodies its obvious advantages of easy care and more drought tolerance, which is very suitable for the tropical savannah climate, especially in East Africa, which has significant plateau characteristics, the temperature is lower than the same latitude, and the yield can reach above the average level.

The Bagamoyo Flour Mill is a food processing enterprise built on this potential advantage, further extending the agricultural industry chain, improving the level of agricultural industry in the East African colonies, and obtaining higher profits.