African Entrepreneurship Records

  Chapter 82 Flour Mill

   June.

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

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

  A factory building covering an area of ​​more than 1,000 square meters rose from the ground in Bagamoyo Port, all of which are constructed of masonry and concrete structures. The red walls are incompatible with the surrounding white Arabic buildings.

  Its style completely imitates the current European architectural style, in sharp contrast with the surrounding small Arab houses, even the local Arabic church in Bagamoyo looks a bit small in front of it.

  Tall chimneys protrude from the roof in the middle of the factory building. Billowing black smoke ignites the blue sky of East Africa, and the breath of industry blows across East Africa.

  The Sultanate of Zanzibar also has some small-scale handicrafts in East Africa, all of which are traditional small workshops, such as blacksmith shops, tailor shops... these traditional handicraft industries.

  The Bagamoyo Flour Mill is the second recorded modern industry in the entire East African region that uses large machines for production.

  The first time was the Tanga sisal processing factory, which has been in business for a long time, and it 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 are a relatively common industrial industry today, especially in Europe and the United States. There are countless such factories, of course including those small-scale factories that may only have one or two machines.

  The Bagamoyo Flour Mill uses steam power, that is, boilers. The power source of the boilers is coal developed from the inland of East Africa, which drives the steam turbines to provide uninterrupted and stable power for the equipment in the factory.

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

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

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

  The lighting system all adopts the technology of Berlin Electric Power Company, which can maintain continuous operation even at night, and the generator is imported from Siemens.

   Closely connected to the production workshop is a huge modern warehouse. The climate in the coastal areas of East Africa is relatively humid, which is not conducive to food preservation, so the requirements for food storage are higher.

  So 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 poured with concrete structure, and the drainage system is designed by professionals, fully considering the local climate environment. At the same time, there are various measuring instruments in the warehouse, and workers can check the indoor temperature and humidity at any time. adjust the environment.

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

  Its staff, in addition to the professional and technical personnel employed by Hexingen Company, to maintain the operation of the machine, are mainly immigrants with a little education from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, supplemented by a small number of Chinese.

   On the contrary, in the stages of material transportation, packaging and finished product transportation, more Chinese are needed.

   For these Austro-Hungarian and Chinese immigrants, simple training is still required. In addition to health and safety education, they must also be familiar with the operating principles of the machine.

  Flour produced by the Bagamoyo Flour Factory will be branded with the trademark of Hexingen Company and sold in Europe.

  Brought back to Trieste by the returning Hechingen ocean-going trading fleet, it was sold directly through commercial outlets laid by companies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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

  Bagamoyo used to be one of the largest slave trade markets in East Africa. With the defeat of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, Bagamoyo was also acquired by the East African colonial government.

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

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

  As the Sultanate of Zanzibar developed Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo gradually declined. Now the East African colonial government has re-taken Bagamoyo for development.

  After all, there are still too few good ports along the coast of East Africa, which may seem sufficient now, but with the development of East Africa and the increase in population, port resources will inevitably become precious in the future.

  Currently, the factories that can be opened in East Africa can only be located in the coastal areas. Borrowing the advantages of port shipping, the machines arriving from Europe can only be landed.

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

  Besides, the machines of this era are relatively expensive. If they are caught in the rain, or get stuck in the mud, or bump into each other, according to the conditions in East Africa, it is not easy to repair them.

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

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

  However, because Europe is mainly based on wheat crops, after industrialization, the field of agricultural machinery development naturally favors European native crops such as wheat.

Even if Ernst wants to import rice planting and processing machinery from Europe, it is impossible. Just like in his previous life, after the development of Japanese industry, he vigorously promoted the progress of rice planting and processing technology in East Asia, and was the first to realize the mechanization of rice in the Far East. Production.

   Therefore, the development of wheat is an important step for Ernst to enter the grain processing market. It is simple and easy to operate, and East Africa has a large land area, a large area of ​​arable land, and the precipitation is also suitable for wheat planting.

  Currently, the wheat planting area in the East African colonies has exceeded the rice planting area, which is based on the fact that the population of the eastern rice planting area is higher than that of the western wheat planting area.

Wheat embodies the obvious advantages of being easy to manage and more drought-tolerant, and is very suitable for the tropical grassland climate, especially in East Africa, which has a significant plateau feature, the temperature is lower than that of the same latitude, and the yield can reach above the average level. The planting area advantage caused by the rarity, the output is quite considerable.

  Bagamoyo Flour Mill is a food processing enterprise based on this potential advantage, which further extends the agricultural industry chain, improves the agricultural industry level of the East African colonies, and obtains higher profits.

  (end of this chapter)