My Peace Corps group, Tanganyika V, landed at Tanganyika’s capital city, Dar es Salaam, on a September day in 1964. As we made our way through airport immigration and customs, I was struck by how, for the first time in my life, I was a member of a racial minority. Almost everyone here was African.

Tanganyika’s largest city, Dar es Salaam (see figure above) was just a small fishing village when, in 1884, it became part of German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi). However, Germany soon made it the capital of “German East,” developed its port and made it the terminus of a 780-mile-long railway connecting with Kigoma on  Lake Tanganyika, and Mwanza on Lake Victoria. (Kigoma includes the one-time village of Ujiji where the famous meeting between Stanley and Livingstone took place in 1871.) Consequently, Dar es Salaam thrived, to the extent that when we arrived, it had 130 thousand inhabitants of which four percent were European (mostly British) and twenty-seven percent Asiatic (mostly Indian).

(According to Wikipedia, Dar es Salaam now has 5.12 million people, is the third fastest growing city in Africa, and is predicted to become, at 76 million people, the world’s third largest city boy 2100. The Dar es Salaam I knew in 1964 was, by comparison a sleepy little place.)

Nonetheless, as I had grown up in a town with under 25,000 residents (Longview, Washington), in a county (Cowlitz) with less than 50,000, I was impressed by Dar es Salaam’s size.

I also liked its ambience.

Although its newest buildings might have been modern twenty years earlier, and its signs mostly in English, Dar es Salaam exuded a cosmopolitan air. English cotton dresses, Indian saris, boldy colored African kangas and kitenges, and voluminous Muslim buibuis graced women of three races and several religions. A bronze statue of a native askari (soldier) commemorating Africans who had fought for Britain in the First World War, stood in the center of a traffic circle. Automobiles shared the streets with sweating Africans pulling rickshaw-like carts laden with goods. African mamas carried babies in cloth slings on their backs and balanced baskets of fruit on their heads. 

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika

Some buildings, such as the old Lutheran church (now the Azania Front Lutheran Church–see below), showed a definite German architectural influence. Derived from an Arabic term, Azania means Land of the Black People. When Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged in October 1964, it became part of the new nations’s name–Tanzania. The church probably had a different name during German times.

However, at least one substantial, and very attractive, German-built building, a hospital, looked neither German nor like a hospital. Constructed in 1897, the Ocean Road Hospital was, during the German period, used almost exclusively for Europeans. Interestingly, it has a special historical significance because it was here that Robert Koch, one of the founders of modern bacteriology (and recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1905), carried out his research on tropical diseases, including malaria and sleeping sickness. The hospital is presently the Ocean Road Cancer Institute.

Other things I liked about Dar es Salaam included:

However,  my most fond memory of Dar es Salaam is of being given the opportunity to change my posting from Tanganyika’s Village Resettlement Agency to a forestry position in the northern part of the country. This completely unexpected event set the pattern for the rest of my life. Read my book, Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika. to find out why.