Chapter 163: End of the Year
Late 1868.
East Africa's population has circled around and now reached 1.75 million. Apart from new immigrant arrivals, there's also been the colony's first baby boom. Thanks to two relatively stable years, plus the colony's policies favoring female immigrants, improvements in immigrant marriages, and newly formed families comprising the majority of households, couples naturally want children. East Africa continues to reap the benefits of war, with territorial expansion and increased farmland, all stimulating childbirth. In this era, child-raising costs are minimal. Combined with the immigrants' customary view of having many children, they reproduce freely – just working a bit harder is enough to feed more people.
Outside of this immigrant population, the number of native laborers isn't reflected in East Africa's demographic statistics; by this year's estimate, they number around 1.3 million. The African continent is hardly short on natives. Even as the East African home tribes are kept under control – forced into hard labor or even sold off – the losses are large. But whenever East Africa advances west, they seize another batch of people to make up the workforce. In typical slave-economy style, there's a circulation of buying and selling, forming a closed loop.
Under slavery, basic infrastructure across East Africa arises at visible speed. Roads connect towns and villages, and widespread slavery allows colonists to open multiple times more land, substituting for livestock and machinery, sustaining large-scale agriculture.
Harvested grain is divided in three ways: immigrants' rations, slaves' rations, and exports. Immigrant rations take the largest share, not because they eat more but because brand-new arrivals arrive destitute and cannot produce food right away – so the colony covers their rations at first. The colony's farmland development, settlement building, and external warfare require a huge supply of grain to support them.
The share for slaves is likewise substantial – so many heads mean considerable intake. To feed them, the colony plants large areas of corn, cassava, and other high-yield, low-maintenance crops. Throw them in the soil, and they mostly grow on their own – hence feeding slaves is straightforward.
As for export grain, that's the colony's main financial resource. Yet because grain farming is cyclical, and immigrants keep pouring in, East Africa hasn't had surplus surpluses for exports – but, thanks to its vast arable acreage, the quantities it does ship remain sizable. It carefully selects high-quality grains for export, thus staying competitive in European markets. Due to cheap labor and land costs, East African exports reap decent profits.
Compared to cereal crops, cash crops are bound to be more lucrative, but East Africa is too new. Many cash crops haven't reached harvest stage. For instance, Kenyan coffee plantations need three to five years from planting to yield; rubber along the Great Lakes can take six to eight years; and other specialties like cinchona also need time. Only sisal, cloves, peanuts, etc. have entered stable production and export.
In the second half of the year, East Africa's territorial expansion wasn't huge, mostly dealing with a cursory clearing of tribes west of the Mitumba Mountains. This extends the earlier northwestern campaign. Because that zone has rough terrain, primeval forests, and few inhabitants, the East African government doesn't pay it much mind. Yet it effortlessly pockets around 200,000 square kilometers of land – basically the (future) North and South Kivu regions across the Mitumba Mountains. At this time, the old Congo Kingdom along the Atlantic coast can't project any influence, while the main power in the Mitumba area was the "Northwestern Eight Nations" that the colony already drove away. As their inheritance, East Africa folds the Mitumba Mountains into its domain; beyond that lies a vast tropical rainforest ill-suited for habitation. Congo's interior has no real states, only scattered tribal groups collectively labeled the "Northwestern Bantu," paralleling the "Eastern Bantu" that East Africa wiped out. Only later would Belgium invade, forming the Free State of the Congo, building what was once "Congo-Kinshasa." But with East Africa now occupying the Mitumba area, Belgium will find no foothold there. And next year, East Africa plans to seize the Katanga Plateau in southern Congo and eastern Zambia, leaving Belgium only the deep Congo Basin's rainforests. Anywhere mildly suitable for humans – highlands or mountains – East Africa claims or earmarks, inevitably affecting future colonial partitions.
For now, Ernst has no appetite for pushing deep into the Congo Basin. Tropical rainforest is notorious as a "human no-go zone." So this year's expansions total some 500,000–600,000 square kilometers, chiefly in the northwest. Wiping out or expelling the Northwestern Eight Nations was the hardest part, but that success let the colony securely hold the region. Apart from Egypt to the north, there's no power that could threaten it.
Meanwhile, the colony also made progress in establishing traditional handicraft workshops to meet immigrants' needs: saltworks, brickyards, lime kilns, small workshops, and so on, deriving from the original industries seized in Zanzibar's territory and gradually spreading inland. Although low in technology and capacity, they solve the "we have nothing" stage. Low technology also makes them easier for a mostly illiterate population to learn; more advanced machinery would be too challenging to maintain.
Certainly, East Africa did build a few modern factories this year, but on a small scale – importing every piece of machinery and parts from Europe, plus relying on hired Europeans to manage everything from construction to production. The biggest obstacle is that East Africa lacks a full industrial supply chain. In Europe, lacking a certain part means you can import from next door. Even small countries can piggyback on Europe's comprehensive industrial system. East Africa, by contrast, has no such environment, only seeing the nearest industrial half-steps in Egypt, which is itself constrained by Britain, France, and the Ottomans. Mozambique next door is a Portuguese "profit pump," and Portugal's own industrial level is unimpressive. So East Africa's industrial situation remains unripe.
Of course, if one poured in unlimited funds, you could build skyscrapers in the Poles. But the Hechingen consortium isn't a welfare group, and Ernst's consortium is already constantly "giving blood" to East Africa, purchasing the colony's present scale and population at great cost. In global history, no second entity has done quite the same; if the East India Company in its day had bled money for India, Britain would have long abandoned it. Colonial expansion is never free – operating a colony costs resources and money.
The biggest fear is that after all the hardships of developing East Africa, someone else might claim it. Hence building up population and the armed forces is central. Manpower ensures more recruits and taxes; a strong, well-equipped army ensures security. Meanwhile, for a colonizer like Ernst, population is itself a resource: so long as quality is poor, quantity can still generate wealth for the House of Hechingen. India in the old world was a classic example: no matter how bleak its common folk's lives, the large population and vast market still fueled local enterprises.
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