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ON A SPARKLING blue-gold-green tropical morning in 1953, the Union Castle liner Rhodesia Castle steamed into the harbor of Dar es Salaam on her regular run between Europe and Capetown. Among the passengers on the upper deck was von Lettow. He was paying his first visit to the old battleground in nearly four decades, and he saw at once that the torpidly busy East African seaport had undergone little outward change in his long absence. Apart from a few new steamer berths and commercial buildings- and, of course, the Union Jacks which flew from rooftops in the capital of the British territory of Tanganyika-the place looked much the same. The coco palms and casuarinas on the shorefront seemed never to have stopped their contented sighing in the Indian Ocean breezes. The tiny, lateen-rigged coastal dhows called jahazis, with their ancient cargoes of mangrove poles and simsim, came and went as they always had, lurching with awkward grace over the harbor's short chop. One of the first things that caught von Lettow's eye was the spire of the Lutheran Church that his countrymen had built when the colony was still theirs. And he probably smiled to himself when Rhodesia Castle changed course in the channel to avoid the wreckage of a sunken floating dock; a German naval officer under his command had scuttled that dock to discourage Admiral King-Hall's cruisers at the start of the East African campaign. It was almost as if a time machine had carried von Lettow back to 1914.
But he was not likely to be deluded by surface appearances. Once a German and now a British colonial capital, Dar es Salaam would soon be neither. The Second World War had left in its wake a ferment of nationalism that bubbled with angry vigor in all the hot countries of the world that were still ruled by white men from harsher climates. Britain had already handed over India. The Dutch had been ousted unceremoniously from their Indonesian islands. France was about to get the same treatment in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. And Africa had to be next. Harold Macmillan had not yet coined the expression "the wind of change," but the wind was blowing. Like any thinking man of the 1950s, von Lettow could hardly have failed to feel it.
Ilboru
ON A SPARKLING blue-gold-green tropical morning in 1953, the Union Castle liner Rhodesia Castle steamed into the harbor of Dar es Salaam on her regular run between Europe and Capetown. Among the passengers on the upper deck was von Lettow. He was paying his first visit to the old battleground in nearly four decades, and he saw at once that the torpidly busy East African seaport had undergone little outward change in his long absence. Apart from a few new steamer berths and commercial buildings- and, of course, the Union Jacks which flew from rooftops in the capital of the British territory of Tanganyika-the place looked much the same. The coco palms and casuarinas on the shorefront seemed never to have stopped their contented sighing in the Indian Ocean breezes. The tiny, lateen-rigged coastal dhows called jahazis, with their ancient cargoes of mangrove poles and simsim, came and went as they always had, lurching with awkward grace over the harbor's short chop. One of the first things that caught von Lettow's eye was the spire of the Lutheran Church that his countrymen had built when the colony was still theirs. And he probably smiled to himself when Rhodesia Castle changed course in the channel to avoid the wreckage of a sunken floating dock; a German naval officer under his command had scuttled that dock to discourage Admiral King-Hall's cruisers at the start of the East African campaign. It was almost as if a time machine had carried von Lettow back to 1914.
But he was not likely to be deluded by surface appearances. Once a German and now a British colonial capital, Dar es Salaam would soon be neither. The Second World War had left in its wake a ferment of nationalism that bubbled with angry vigor in all the hot countries of the world that were still ruled by white men from harsher climates. Britain had already handed over India. The Dutch had been ousted unceremoniously from their Indonesian islands. France was about to get the same treatment in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. And Africa had to be next. Harold Macmillan had not yet coined the expression "the wind of change," but the wind was blowing. Like any thinking man of the 1950s, von Lettow could hardly have failed to feel it.
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Arusha Clock Tower, Arusha City, Tanzania
The tower was built by a Greek named Galanos and marked the site of the first German headquarters in Tanganyika in the late the late 1800s. Currently, the Arusha Clock Tower marks the exact midpoint between Cairo and Cape Town, as well as the centre of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania making a point of interest during your visit to Arusha