African Entrepreneurship Records

Chapter 552 Past

Claire and her group are in self-isolation without supervision, but East Africa is not afraid of people from Rowenad Village running around. As a relatively underdeveloped area, the Nile Province not only has a small population, but also has very backward transportation, so running around is possible. dead person's.

Rowenad Village has only one road leading to the city. This road was not built in East Africa, but was originally made by black people themselves. You can imagine how bad the road condition is. Of course, this does not mean that there are no roads built in East Africa. , but Rowenad Village is a new immigrant village that East Africa has not had time to pay attention to.

There is a necessary prerequisite for building roads, that is, the roads are for people to walk on. Therefore, it turns out that no one lives in Rowenad Village, so there is no need to build roads. It is impossible to let those animals walk after the roads are built!

 In fact, Rowenad Village is not an exception. Every year as East Africa develops inland, many new villages are built. These villages lack everything, including roads and other infrastructure.

Of course, there are some exceptions, such as being assigned to be next to existing roads or railways. For example, many immigrants in Matabele Province (Zimbabwe) live along both sides of the central railway.

“Seeing this, I really miss the days when I first arrived in East Africa, but the life of new immigrants is much better now than it was back then.” Claire, who temporarily lived in Rowenad Village, sighed to her assistant.

The situation in Rowenad Village was very similar to the second place he stayed in when he first came to East Africa. He landed in Mombasa and later went to a village next to Kisumu. At that time, conditions in East Africa were very poor. Mombasa cannot be said to be very good, it can only be regarded as an African port that is not ranked highly.

Now Mombasa is developed, and its infrastructure is better than most ports in the world. This is related to the development time of Mombasa. Mombasa was developed later, the buildings are newer, the planning is more reasonable, and the infrastructure is more advanced. .

Not to mention Mombasa, even Kisumu is developing very well. In terms of urban construction alone, it is on par with many small and medium-sized cities in Europe. In short, eastern East Africa is no longer what it used to be.

It is difficult to find models that are as backward as the original East Africa. It is still possible in these new immigrant strongholds in the west, but the conditions in these new immigrant strongholds are much better than when Claire first arrived in East Africa. This is because the productivity of East Africa has improved. .

“Director, did you live in a room like this when you first arrived in East Africa?” the assistant asked.

Claire shook her head and said: "At that time, the rural conditions in East Africa were worse than those in Rowenad Village, but there was not much difference overall. How did you get from Mombasa to Kisumu? How long did it take?"

“Of course I took the train, it took about three days!”

"You see, you now have railways and roads to choose from. At that time, I could only rely on walking. I stopped and walked on the road. It took me a full month to cover the same distance. You can do it after you arrive in Kisumu. Changed to water transport and then took a boat, right?" Claire then asked.

"certainly."

"You see, immigrants at that time did not have this benefit. They could only continue to go inland along the banks of the Great Lakes. Fortunately, I was assigned early and stopped near Kisumu. Later immigrants were older than me. We still have to suffer, as only a few will be allocated to stay in the east, and most of the rest will still have to be filled inland."

Claire then lamented: “Especially when there were no railways, I can’t even imagine how much torture the people in the Hohenzollern and Swabian provinces (Zambia and southern Congo) suffered on the road at that time. A thousand kilometers away.”

In fact, it was not as exaggerated as Claire said. Although it took longer for immigrants to go inland, the coastal areas had already been developed by that time and could provide supplies, which made the immigration process in East Africa much more convenient. Although Claire only said a few words, the assistant had already imagined how difficult the life in East Africa was.

Seeing that he was in a daze, Claire smiled and said: "But the more I have experienced the rapid development of East Africa, the more I can feel the development potential of the country in East Africa. In the past, Europe's description of Africa was actually quite reasonable, but you newcomers If you haven’t experienced it before, by the time you set foot on the land of East Africa, he will have been completely transformed.”

The assistant nodded in agreement and said: "Yes, director, it was 1876 when I first arrived in East Africa. Mombasa was already quite prosperous at that time. At that time, I felt that Mombasa was no different from those prosperous cities in Europe, or even more Advanced is more pleasing to the eye.”

This is inevitable. Every city in East Africa is designed and planned rationally, so it avoids the shortcomings of many European cities. This is most vividly reflected in urban buildings and roads.

Of course, cities in East Africa also have their own shortcomings, that is, they are not large in number. In fact, this is normal. Many administrative cities in East Africa are not cities in the strict sense. Cities in the true sense must be administrative cities.

When comparing East African cities with European cities, you definitely cannot compare administrative cities with European cities. Administrative cities are a term at the administrative district level. Even if it is just a village, if the East African government sets it as the seat of the administrative city government, then it can also be called a city. For the city.

This is the case for the superior city of Rowenad Village. Of course, East Africa is not so poor that it would actually use a village as the seat of its municipal government. The seat of the higher-level municipal government of Rowenad Village is a township, and the entire city is The total population of the villages attached to it is just over 4,000, which is also the population status of the Nile Province.

Claire said: "So the development in East Africa is changing with each passing day. Don't look at it. Rowenad Village is just a small village now. In the future, it may also become a surrounding administrative center. The minimum limit is a township, because it is considered a development of the Nile River Province. Earlier villages, when I was still living in the east, I saw many villages develop into cities and towns step by step. Take the first town and city as an example. It was just an inconspicuous colonial stronghold at the beginning, but now it has directly turned into a capital."

“The most typical one is Nairobi, which was originally a wasteland, but now it has become the center of the textile industry in East Africa, with a population of hundreds of thousands.”

"There are many places for such counterattacks, and Rowenad Village also has such potential, because it started relatively early in the Nile Province, and the Nile Province is so empty. You must know that the area of ​​the Nile Province is much larger than that of Europe. The country is still large, so Rowenad Village has a bright future.”

Immigration settlements in East Africa do not like to be clustered together. For example, in the early colonial period, many cities in East Africa had already begun to develop, but they were distributed throughout the Tanganyika region at that time.

At that time, there were considerations of enclosure. Ernst's plan of cities surrounding rural areas, or immigrants' plan of surrounding indigenous peoples, was used to suppress indigenous forces and expand territory in East Africa. This also made Dar es Salaam and Mongolia The development of Barcelona's two port cities has been hindered because limited resources are equally divided among more and more inland cities.

However, the benefits also emerged later. After many inland cities and villages developed, a large amount of resources in turn assisted the development of coastal cities, making East African coastal cities eligible to participate in world trade, and fueling the last agricultural economic crisis.

 (End of this chapter)