Kigoma

Ujiji, just south of today's town, is the older place: a Swahili-speaking port where Arab and coastal traders settled in the 19th century at the western end of the central caravan route, dealing in ivory and enslaved people carried between the lake and the Indian Ocean. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke reached it in 1858, and in November 1871 Henry Morton Stanley found David Livingstone there, the meeting that made the town's name known far beyond Africa.

Kigoma itself was a German creation. The colonial administration chose the deep, sheltered bay a few kilometres north as its lake harbour, and drove the central railway west from Dar es Salaam to reach it in 1914, building a substantial station and port at the terminus. The Graf von Goetzen, later the MV Liemba, was assembled here in the same period. In the First World War Belgian forces from the Congo and British troops contested the lake, and the ship was scuttled in 1916.

Under British rule Kigoma remained the end of the line and the gateway west, its trade tied to the lake and the railway rather than to the rest of Tanganyika. In 1960 a young researcher, Jane Goodall, arrived by boat to begin work in the forests north of the town, and Gombe became one of the best-known field sites in science. From the 1970s onwards Kigoma has repeatedly received refugees from conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and cross-border trade, aid operations and the camps have shaped the town's modern character.

The countryside around Kigoma is Ha country, and the Ha language belongs with those of Burundi across the border rather than with the languages of central Tanzania; cattle, drumming and elaborate greetings all have their place in Ha custom. Swahili, however, is the language of the town, and Kigoma is one of the more cosmopolitan small towns in Tanzania, mixing Ha, coastal, Congolese and Burundian ways of doing things.

Ujiji's character is Swahili and Muslim, with mosques, coastal-style houses, kanga and kanzu worn in the street and the rhythm of Ramadan observed publicly. Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, predominates in the surrounding hills and in much of Kigoma itself, and mission schools and health centres are long established. The two communities live side by side without much friction.

Music comes across the water: Congolese rumba and soukous have been popular here for decades and are played in bars and on buses alongside Tanzanian Bongo Flava. Decades of refugee arrivals and of aid agencies working in the region have left the town used to outsiders and to several languages at once, and Kiswahili is the common ground. Greetings precede everything, elders are addressed with shikamoo, and business is done slowly and politely.

About 232,000 people lived in Kigoma at the 2022 census, and the town has a working rather than a touristic feel. The port, the railway, government offices, the regional hospital, trade with the borders and the presence of international agencies are the main sources of paid employment.

Most households, though, live from the lake and the land. Fishing crews go out at night with lamps for dagaa, the small sardine-like fish that are dried in the sun on racks and mats along the shore, and boats also bring in larger lake fish. Inland, families grow cassava, beans, maize, bananas and oil palms, and the red palm oil pressed in the villages is sold across the region. Cross-border trade moves goods between Tanzania, Burundi, the DR Congo and Zambia.

The day begins before dawn at the landings and the market, slows in the heat, and revives in the evening when the lake breeze comes up and people walk along the shore. Current issues include the long-term hosting of refugees in the region's camps, deforestation in the hills behind the town, pressure on the lake's fish stocks, and the isolation that comes from being the better part of two days' travel from Dar es Salaam by road or rail.

Kigoma's kitchen is the lake's. Dagaa, tiny silver fish caught at night and dried on the shore, are fried with tomato and onion and eaten with ugali, which here is often made from cassava flour rather than maize. Larger lake fish are grilled over charcoal or simmered in tomato sauce, and the catch changes with the season and the depth the boats work.

Red palm oil is the distinctive local ingredient, pressed from oil palms in the villages around the town and giving stews of beans, greens and fish a deep colour and a strong flavour that is unusual in Tanzania. Cassava is eaten as flour, as boiled root and as leaves cooked into a relish — a habit shared with the Congo across the water — and bananas, groundnuts and beans fill out the everyday plate.

Street food follows the national pattern: chapati, mandazi, samosas, roasted maize and skewers of grilled meat, with chai brewed strong and sweet in the morning. Congolese-style dishes appear in small restaurants near the port, and Kigoma's name is attached across Tanzania to its dagaa and to the oil-palm products sent east by train and road.