Bukoba

The hills behind Bukoba were the country of the Haya, whose small kingdoms — Kiziba, Kyamtwara, Ihangiro, Bugabo and others — were ruled by royal clans with close ties to the kingdoms of what is now Uganda, and who are credited with making carbon steel two thousand years ago in pre-heated furnaces. The lake shore was a landing place for canoe traffic between the western bays long before any European arrived.

Emin Pasha founded Bukoba in 1890 as the first German military station on Lake Victoria, and it became the administrative centre of the north-western corner of German East Africa, with a harbour, a fort built in 1901 and Catholic and Protestant mission stations that gave the district its long reputation for schools. In June 1915 British forces crossed the lake from Kisumu to destroy the town's wireless station and sacked Bukoba — the first Entente victory in German East Africa.

Under British rule Bukoba grew as a coffee port: the Haya cooperatives of Kagera sent robusta out by lake steamer to Mwanza and on by rail, and the town became a byword in Tanganyika for education and for producing clergy, teachers and civil servants. Independence, the Kagera war with Idi Amin's Uganda, which began with the bombing of Bukoba in October 1978, the arrival of several hundred thousand Rwandan refugees in the region in 1994, and the first documented AIDS cases in Tanzania, recorded in Kagera in 1983, all marked the district. A magnitude 5.9 earthquake on 10 September 2016 destroyed 840 houses in the town and seriously damaged more than 1,200 others, killing 19 people across the area. It remains a modest regional capital, tied to the lake, the border and the coffee trade.

Bukoba is the town of the Haya, whose language belongs with those of southern Uganda rather than with Swahili's coastal relatives, and whose culture is built around the banana garden — the kibanja, a permanent plot of bananas, coffee and fruit trees handed down within a family. Coffee itself carries meaning beyond the cash crop: cooked and dried cherries, chewed and shared, have long been a gesture of welcome and a part of ceremony and reconciliation.

Christianity is deeply established. The Catholic church has been the dominant institution in Kagera for more than a century, with Lutheran congregations alongside it, and the calendar of church feasts, choir competitions and school events shapes much of public life. Bukoba's schools and seminaries have sent a steady stream of graduates into the professions, and the town's self-image rests on that history of education as much as on the lake.

Music and dance draw on the old court traditions of the Haya kingdoms, with drums and flutes at weddings and public celebrations, while younger people listen to the same Bongo Flava heard across Tanzania and to Ugandan and Congolese music that crosses the border easily. Football is followed closely, Kagera Sugar being the local club. Greetings are unhurried, elders are addressed with shikamoo, and the pace of the town is deliberately slow.

About 145,000 people lived in Bukoba at the 2022 census, far fewer than in Mwanza across the lake. It is a government and service town: the regional administration, hospitals, schools and church institutions are among the largest employers, alongside trade, transport and fishing.

The countryside around it is densely farmed and the town lives from it. Bananas and beans come in daily from the hills, and coffee is the cash crop, bought, processed and exported through cooperatives and private buyers. Fishing brings in tilapia, Nile perch and dagaa, dried on racks along the shore. Cross-border trade with Uganda to the north, including daily commuting into Rakai District, moves goods in both directions, and money sent home by people working in Dar es Salaam or abroad matters to many families.

The day starts early at the fish landings and the market and slows through the hot middle hours; the late afternoon brings people onto the beaches and the football pitches. Current concerns are familiar ones in Kagera: rain and flooding in the low-lying wards near the water, the price paid for coffee, pressure on the lake's fish stocks, and the long-term effects of the earthquake on older buildings.

Bukoba eats differently from most of Tanzania. The staple is matoke — green cooking bananas, peeled, steamed in their own leaves and mashed — served with beans, groundnut sauce, meat stew or fish rather than with the maize ugali that dominates elsewhere. A meal without bananas is barely a meal in the Haya countryside, and dozens of banana varieties are grown for cooking, roasting, juice and beer.

Fish from Lake Victoria is the other pillar. Sato, the tilapia, is fried whole or simmered in tomato and onion; sangara, the Nile perch, is cut into steaks; and dagaa, small silver fish dried in the sun, are fried with tomato and onion and eaten with ugali or matoke. Grills along the shore cook the day's catch over charcoal.

The town's best-known delicacy is senene — bush crickets that swarm in the rainy months and are caught at night, cleaned, and fried with salt and onion until crisp. They are sold by the bag in the market and at bus stops, and are a Kagera gift to relatives elsewhere in the country.

To drink there is chai with milk and sugar, fresh banana and passionfruit juice, and the home-brewed banana beer and distilled spirit of the villages. Kagera coffee, the district's export, is increasingly roasted and drunk locally as well.