Bagamoyo Historic Town

Bagamoyo's name means "take a load off your heart" in Kiswahili. The phrase is meant to make you feel at ease by removing your burden. This is in reference to Bagamoyo's 19th century reputation as a town of porters. The historic hamlet served as the final stop for thousands of porters who carried, on average, 70-pound burdens held across their shoulders, mostly ivory tusks, along the caravan route. Bagamoyo beckoned as a location of rest and enjoyment, trying to reward the men after a taxing voyage after trekking for months across hazardous terrain.^[3][4]

August Leue, a district officer to Bagamoyo in the late nineteenth century, interpreted a song chanted by the Nyamwezi porters as they marched into the town as a means of supporting the later interpretation of the town's name. "Be happy, my soul, surrender all worry/soon the place of your desires will be reached/the town of palms – Bagamoyo," sings the hymn, praising the town as a destination that upcountry Africans desired to visit. "Be still my heart, all worries are gone/the call to rest thunders out, and with jubilation/we reach Bagamoyo," the poem concludes, is similar in tone. The second meaning of the town's name—to be at peace—is evoked by both lines. There were other settlements in Tanzania's interior with the name Bagamoyo, according to Walter Brown, a pre-colonial historian of the town.^[5][6]

In the 15th century, early Bagamoyo was a little satellite town of Kaole, a few kilometres south, and originally a Zaramo settlement. The Shomvi, whose ancestors arrived in the area in the middle of the eighteenth century from a location further north along the shoreline at Malindi, established the surviving Bagamoyo Historic Town, according to oral tradition. The settlement began as a fishing and farming community that traded small amounts of local goods, slaves, copal, and ivory for Indian fabric industry as early as the 1810s. In the early 1800s, the Omanis turned adjoining Zanzibar into the main commerce hub of the western Indian Ocean, and Bagamoyo's fortunes improved at the same time. Bagamoyo dominated the trade on the Mrima, the coastal landmass of central East Africa, until the later half of the nineteenth century. Each year, thousands of African porters arrived in Bagamoyo with cattle or loads of other goods from as far away as the Great Lakes region, including ivory, gum copal, rubber, and many other goods.^[7]

The porters brought these with them back to the interior to sell or keep for their own use after exchanging them for fabric, guns, copper wire, and other commodities in town. The local economy would benefit further if the porters stayed in Bagamoyo for up to three or four months. Bagamoyo is described by Tanzanian and Bagamoyo historians as having a fairly diversified population without any strong ethnic groups. Being a commercial hub, Bagamoyo historically served as a home for traders, financiers, farmers, slaves, porters, fisherman, sailors, and artisans.^[8]

Bagamoyo, a little settlement before 1850, could not have provided the Indian Ocean commerce system with large numbers of enslaved Africans; Kilwa, considerably farther south along the Tanzanian coastline, was known for doing so. Southeast Africa developed into the heart of the world's slave trade during the 1780s and 1870s, serving both the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean markets. Four factors contributed to this phenomenon: first, the growth of French plantations in the Mascarene Islands; second, Brazilian planters' demand for new slave sources in the wake of the expansion of British anti-slavery patrols in the Atlantic Ocean beginning in 1807; third, the expansion of the clove plantation economy in Zanzibar; and fourth, the cultivation of sugarcane and rice on the mainland.^[9]

Kilwa was still recognised as the "principal slave-exporting port of the East African mainland" even after 1850, when Bagamoyo started to rise to economic dominance. This status persisted until 1873, when the British started enforcing the abolition of the foreign slave trade from the eastern coast. The main objective of British anti-slavery naval patrols was Kilwa. Slave their routes northward through land as a result, using the numerous creeks and inlets for shipping to avoid being discovered by the British navy. This extraordinary slave trade through Bagamoyo eventually became just one of numerous sales and exports. However, British observers in Zanzibar never stated that Bagamoyo was worthy of slavery. After the slave trade was outlawed, Pangani, to the north of Bagamoyo, became the primary slave market along the coast.^[10][11]

According to a survey done by the German government in the late 1890s, Bagamoyo had one of the smallest populations of coastal towns, with roughly 15% of its inhabitants being slaves. Even the capital of German East Africa, Dar es Salaam, had twice as many slaves as Bagamoyo in 1891. Bagamoyo had frequent slave smuggling in the late nineteenth century when parti caravan porters were there.Even as late as 1900, the Germans were unable to prove that slavenapping had taken place; younger, less experienced Nyamwezi were the victims. Despite this, the archives have no information regarding the distance from Bagamoyo before or after 1873. This is likewise true of the European explorers that entered or exited Bagamoyo's interior in the late nineteenth century. Although these guys saw slave caravans and the destruction in the interior, a slave market is not mentioned in their journey accounts. Henry Stanley, who made three trips there between 1871, described the port as a hub of the slave trade in his well-known travelogues.^[12][13] Father Anton Horner, the mission's founder, stated that Kilwa and Zanzibar were the epicentres of the East African slave trade in 1869, about a year after the mission was founded, but he made no similar remarks about Bagamoyo. In fact, the majority of freed slaves who the missionaries converted and assisted in raising in Bagamoyo were either bought at the Zanzibar slave market or were liberated slaves given to them by the British anti-slavery naval partrol. The reality, however, has more to do with the town's ties to the thousands of porters – the Nyamwezi – who travelled to the coast each year from their homeland in the interior than slaves. There seems to be a current popular misconception that the French Catholic Mission's goal in Bagamoyo was to end the slave trade. As long-distance traders, these individuals were thought to be more likely to convert to Christianity than the coastal Muslims, which the missionaries hoped would help the religion grow into the East African interior.^[14]

Despite historical records to the contrary, the Bagamoyo Catholic Museum of the Tanzanian Tourist Board has largely contributed to the development and perpetuation of the myth in Tanzania that Bagamoyo was an important port for the African slave trade.^[15][16]