Mtwara

Mikindani, at the head of its creek a few kilometres west, is the old town here. It was a Swahili port trading ivory, gum copal and enslaved people with Zanzibar and the wider Indian Ocean, and it was from Mikindani that David Livingstone set out on his last journey into the interior in 1866. The Germans made it a district headquarters, and the stone German boma above the harbour still stands; it was restored in the 1990s as a hotel and training centre, along with the old market, the old bank and the house reputed to have been Livingstone's, now the town museum.

Mtwara itself is a planned town of the late 1940s. The British colonial administration chose the deep water of the bay for a new port to serve the East African Groundnut Scheme, an ambitious plan to clear vast areas of the southern bush for mechanised peanut farming. A harbour, a town laid out on a grid for a population many times larger than ever arrived, and a railway inland to Nachingwea were built. The soils, the rainfall and the machinery all defeated the scheme, which was cancelled in 1951; the railway was later dismantled, and the town was left with a harbour and far more space than it needed.

What saved it was cashew. Mtwara Region became the country's largest producer of cashew nuts, and Mtwara its main town and port. Natural gas found offshore and at Mnazi Bay brought a second wave of investment from the 2000s, and a 542 km pipeline carrying gas from Madimba, south of the town, to Dar es Salaam was built between 2013 and 2015. Since 2017 the insurgency across the Ruvuma in Mozambique has made the border country tense.

The coast around Mtwara is Swahili and Muslim, with mosques at the centre of village and town life, Kiswahili spoken with a southern accent and the rhythms of Ramadan and the two Eids shaping the year. Inland, on the plateau behind the town, live the Makonde, whose sculpture in African blackwood — mpingo — has made the name known far beyond Tanzania. Figures, masks and the intricate ujamaa "family tree" carvings are worked by hand, and the mapiko masked dance, performed with drums at initiations and celebrations, belongs to the same tradition. Makonde carvers and traders have long communities in Dar es Salaam, but the plateau above Mtwara is where the work comes from.

Yao and Makua communities also live in the region, and the older generation still remembers the Maji Maji war of 1905–07 and the years when the south was a corridor for fighters supporting Mozambique's independence struggle.

Manners are conservative and formal. Elders are greeted first and at length, modest dress is expected away from the beach, and photography of people, mosques or the port is a matter for asking rather than assuming. Football, taarab and Bongo Flava fill the evenings, as they do all along the coast.

About 141,000 people live in Mtwara and Mikindani, the biggest town on Tanzania's far southern coast, in a place laid out for as many as 200,000. The rhythm of the year turns on cashew: from about October the crop comes in from the plateau and the coastal villages, the warehouses fill, the market and the port grow busy, and money circulates. Fishing supports the bay villages, with boats going out in the early morning and the catch sold before the heat builds. Cassava, coconuts, sesame and rice are the other crops.

The gas industry has given the town a second economy of contractors, engineers and service companies, visible in the newer buildings and the vehicles on the Msimbati road, though it employs relatively few local people and the expectation that it would transform the region has not been met. Government offices, schools and the port are the other large employers.

Life is spread out. People live in single-storey houses among the coconut palms of Majengo, Chikongola and the wards inland, travel by bajaji, and gather at the market in the morning and on the seafront in the cool of the evening. Current concerns are the price paid for cashews, the state of the roads inland, the slow pace of the promised gas benefits, and security along the Ruvuma.

Mtwara eats from the sea and the coconut grove. Fish — kingfish, snapper, kolekole and sardines — and octopus and prawns from the bay are grilled over charcoal or cooked in mchuzi wa nazi, a coconut curry thickened with the first pressing of grated coconut and sharpened with lime and chilli. Rice cooked in coconut milk, wali wa nazi, is the standard accompaniment, and ugali and boiled cassava do the same job more cheaply.

Cassava is everywhere in the south, boiled, dried and pounded into flour, or fried in chips and sold hot with chilli salt at the bus stands. Cashews are eaten raw, roasted and salted, and the crop's own by-product, the cashew apple, is pressed for juice in season. Sesame, grown across the region, appears in sweets and in cooking oil.

Breakfast is chai with mandazi, vitumbua — small rice-and-coconut cakes — or fried cassava, and the coast's Omani and Indian inheritance shows in pilau and biryani at weddings and at Eid, and in samosas sold from trays all day. Fresh coconut water, sugarcane juice and tamarind drinks are the usual thirst-quenchers, and bitter black kahawa is poured from a brass pot by street sellers in the evening.