Bagamoyo Historic Town - Africa Natural Tours ( africanaturaltours.com )
Bagamoyo Historic Town: Africa Natural Tours
AFRICA
NATURAL TOURS
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Bagamoyo Historic Town
At
once beautiful and disturbing, Bagamoyo’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
coral buildings, specific to Swahili construction, served as a backdrop to East
Africa’s slave trade. Slaves from the interior of Africa were gathered at
Bagamoyo port by native, Arab, and Portuguese traders for shipment on to
Zanzibar, which, in the 1700s, began providing slave labor for local
plantations, European colonies in Africa, and a small number of American
plantations. Omani sultans came to the area in the mid-seventeenth century to
fight at the side of Queen Macena Mwema against the Portuguese at Zanzibar and
Pemba. By 1668, they controlled the coast all the way down to Mozambique. By
1840, Zanzibar had become the Sultan Seyyid Said bin Sultan’s court and the
population had swelled with immigrants from India and Arabia. The Omani ruling
class established date and clove plantations on Zanzibar and Pemba, which, by
World War II, accounted for nearly four-fifths of the world’s production.
Bagamoyo
resembles other East coast towns – Lamu, Pale and Mombasa in Kenya – whose
narrow streets are lined with grand houses built by wealthy Arabs and Indian
merchants in the nineteenth century. Massive, plain outer walls frame large,
ornately carved front doors, behind which rooms are arranged along galleries
overlooking an inner courtyard. Peculiar to Bagamoyo,
however, was the
nineteenth-century arrival of Germans, who also left their imprint on the
city’s architectural style. This confluence makes the Bagamoyo’s heritage
absolutely unique.
Swahili buildings constructed
from local coral stone and sand mortar are very porous, and thus by their very
nature damaged over time by the damp climate and twice yearly rains. Some
properties have been neglected by absentee owners, some of whom have even sold
off roofing material. A public awareness campaign is needed to encourage the
preservation of these historic buildings; a plan for their long-term
conservation is long overdue.
Since the Watch
In 2006, Tanzania added the
Central Slave and Ivory Trade Route, with Bagamoyo as its terminus, to the
country's Tentative World Heritage List. In October 2009, the Fifth African
Diaspora Heritage Trial Conference was held in Tanzania, a sign of the growing
awareness of the significance of sites like Bagamoyo.
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