Chapter 48From Durban to Tanga — Through Portuguese Land and Zanzibar — On Africa's West CoastVON DURBAN BIS TANGA — DURCH PORTUGIESENLAND UND SANSIBAR — AN AFRIKAS WESTKÜSTE

draft

Machine translation, not yet checked. This chapter is a raw AI-assisted draft made from the public-domain German. Expect mistakes of fact and of tone; it is here to make the work readable in English, not to be quoted.

📖 This chapter with the German alongside →

Then it was back on board ship. And now we steamed up along the west coast1.

At Beira we made a halt. The flamboyants were in bloom, and I rode by rickshaw deep into the country and sketched Negro kraals.

At Lourenço Marques was the next landing place. An elegant Portuguese city has arisen here in recent years, with a flourishing seaside resort to the north. A more beautiful beach with livelier bathing life is seldom to be found.

And then we went on to Mozambique2, which enchanted me. As modern as Lourenço Marques is, so at every step does Mozambique show the sunken greatness of the Portugal of earlier centuries. The castle is defiant, mighty, and has a wonder-view. Most interesting to me, though, were the many decaying splendid villas in impenetrable gardens of palm thicket. I went into the courtyards. Everywhere swarmed Negroes with countless children of blackest black.

The consul told us that all these villas had been built some 150—200 years ago by rich immigrant Portuguese, who had then married Negro women. And now all these palace-owners with pompously Portuguese names had become full-blooded Negroes again. — Thus the land avenged itself on the intruders!

We also made an excursion to the salt lakes and into the interior, and passed hundreds more dreamlike, beautiful, decaying splendid palaces, some quite abandoned, some crawled through and through by Negroes. —

The goma, the Negro dance, I have nowhere seen danced more beautifully than in Mozambique.

Then we went on to Zanzibar3, which seemed to me like a fairy tale out of the Thousand and One Nights, or like a little piece of India in the middle of Africa. Everywhere (decaying too, admittedly) palaces in the Moorish style in luxuriant tropical gardens. And the clove forests! Over the whole of Zanzibar it lies like a cloud of clove scent. In the almost entirely Arab city one sees wonderfully carved doors. But the German consul grumbled about his fairy-tale palace with its view of palm gardens and sea. “A modern house, with all the comfort of the new age, a real Berlin suburban villa, would be more to my liking!” — “Truly, you do not deserve all this beauty, with such barbarous views,” I said, laughing. “You are mistaken, it is my Moorish castle that is barbarous,” he retorted.

Then we went on to Dar-es-Salam. There I rode about by rickshaw for two hours, in full moonlight, in the palm woods by the sea.

Notes

Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.

↑west coast — A slip that governs the whole chapter, its title included: Beira, Mozambique, Zanzibar — every port that follows lies on Africa's east coast. From Durban she sailed north up the Indian Ocean shore toward German East Africa. Whether the compass failure is hers or the compositor's, it is carried through consistently — the chapter heading too promises “Africa's west coast.” Fourteen years and a world war lay between the voyage and the writing desk.
↑Mozambique — The Ilha de Moçambique — the fortified island town that was Portuguese East Africa's capital for four centuries and gave the whole colony its name. The “castle” is the fort of São Sebastião, begun in 1558, the oldest complete European fort still standing in the tropics. The decay she relished had an exact date: the capital moved south to Lourenço Marques in 1898 and the island's commerce followed it — hence a town of palace shells in the palm gardens, hardly a dozen years empty when she walked their courtyards.
↑Zanzibar — Germany had renounced Zanzibar to Britain in 1890 — traded, in the popular telling, for Heligoland. The Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of 1890 drew East Africa's lines: the sultanate became a British protectorate, and Germany kept the mainland coast opposite, taking the North Sea rock into the bargain. Hence a German consul, and not a German governor, grumbling in his Moorish palace.