established a series of fortified trading stations, and these were not relinquished until the fall of Fort Jesus at Mombasa in 1698. Thereafter, the Portuguese clung to just the southern part of the coast, what is now the nation of Mozambique, to maintain their communications around the Cape of Good Hope to Goa and their more valuable possessions in the Far East. Arabs from the Middle East long preceded the Portuguese in trading with East Africa, and they vied with the European interlopers. More than a dozen Arab settlements had been planted up and down the
Late in the nineteenth century, German missionaries brought the gospel to East Africa. Arising from their initiative, in 1889 Germany established an administration in what was ro become German East Africa, (later called Tanganyika by the British) . They set up a European-style civil service, with its capital at the new port of Dar es Salaam. The Germans developed a second port to the north atTanga, and railways were constructed leading inland from both places. They built a customs house at Pangani and converted the old citadel into a fine boma to accommodate the District
Commissioner's office. The river mouth was buoyed, and a government tug was put on call from Tanga to assist in navigation. The cruiser Konigsberg paid a visit to Pangani in July 1914, and two weeks later, just before the outbreak of war, she received orders to destroy commercial shipping in the Indian Ocean. It is an interesting indication of how seriously the German administration regarded its mission in Africa that the governor, Dr. Heinrich Schnee, supposed that it would be able to ignore the war in Europe and maintain normal relations with the adjoining European colonies. The local army commander peremptorily disabused him of this idea. Captain Loof immediately rook Konigsberg to sea, adroitly evading three slower British cruisers, which had been directed to keep an eye on his ship. Once war was officially declared, he set about hunting down Allied merchant ships. He sank a British ship bound from Colombo to London with much of a year's supply of tea, and, acting on intelligence, he entered the roadstead at Zanzibar where an ' inferior British warship was unwisely lying disabled to have her boilers cleaned. The German cruiser approached at dusk, stayed well out of their range, and coolly blasted the Pegasus until she was burnt out and had to be run ashore. It was an encouraging coup,
(left) Lamu, and (below) Tug Nyati, at Dar es Salaam, by Ian Marshall coast, many of them on islands for easier defense against the natives. Traders marched inland via the ancient caravan routes, and Arab dhows to this day still follow the pattern of monsoon winds over the sea to Arabia, the Gulf, and to the west coast of India. The Sultanate of Zanzibar held sway over the coast long after the Portuguese evacuation, until eventually British intervention led to extinction of the slave trade. Many Muslim settlements survive in East Africa, notably on the island ofLamu on the coast of Kenya north of Malindi. Some 200 miles south of Mombasa, Arabs built a massive citadel and mosques in the town of Pangani, situated at the mouth of the river of that name, which for a time served as the port linking the caravan routes from the interior with the sea. They also built the fort whose bones still stand guard over the harbor entrance.
26
SEA HISTORY 141 , WINTER 2012- 13