The tiny Tanzanian fishing village of Bagamoyo is set to become Africa’s largest port in a US$10 billion Chinese development. Are locals right to be optimistic?
By Nick Van Mead
As their hand-built wooden dhow approaches the shore, Ibrahim Chamume and his fellow fishermen take in the sail and prepare to sell their catch to the small huddle of villagers waiting on the white sand. He has been making a living like this on the Indian Ocean since he was 14. His father was a fisherman, too.
Now in his 30s, Ibrahim says earning enough from traditional fishing is tough, but has its compensations. There is the view across the tranquil lagoon to the mangrove swamps; the unspoiled beaches and bays; the lush vegetation and smallholdings growing maize, cassava, cashews and mango. Such scenes must have played out in the tiny Tanzanian village of Mlingotini for centuries.
In a decade, however, the mud-and-thatch homes of Mlingotini, and a further four villages along this coastline 48km north of Dar es Salaam, will be gone — razed to make space for a US$10bn Chinese-built mega-port and a special economic zone backed by an Omani sovereign wealth fund.
The area south of Bagamoyo — once notorious as a key staging point in the slave trade and unsuccessfully proposed 12 years ago as a world heritage site — is seen by China as a new Shenzhen.
Before former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) designated Shenzhen as China’s first special economic zone in 1979, it, too, was just a small fishing town. Now it is a high-tech hub and one of the world’s biggest cities.
Bagamoyo, if the project goes ahead as planned, will be transformed into the largest port in Africa. That is looking ever more likely: After years of delay, the Tanzanian government says it is in the final stages of talks with state-run China Merchants Holdings International.
The lagoon will be dredged, to allow access to the vast cargo ships that will line up many kilometers out to sea. As for the special economic zone, the original masterplan shows factories in a fenced-off industrial area and apartment blocks to accommodate the estimated future population of 75,000.
There is even talk of an international airport. Many of the villagers have already accepted compensation for the loss of their homes.
The comparison with Shenzhen may not be so far-fetched, China-Africa specialist Lauren Johnston of New South Economics said.
“Would visitors to Shenzhen in 1980 have believed what would be unlocked by that sleepy port?” she said.
“Bagamoyo could become an industrial gateway not only for youth-filled Tanzania, but half a dozen landlocked African countries. There are parallels,” she said.
The proposed radical transformation of the Bagamoyo coastline is an unofficial extension to east Africa as part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) Belt and Road Initiative — and is just the latest in a long line of China-in-Africa projects. Ahead of next month’s China-Africa summit, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) is inviting African leaders to “get on board the fast train of development.”
It is now nine years since China overtook the US as Africa’s largest trading partner. Although Kenya and Ethiopia were the only two African nations among the 30 nations signing economic and trade agreements at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May last year, China has been busy on the continent.
The flagship Belt and Road project is Kenya’s 467km railway from the capital, Nairobi, to the port city of Mombasa, which opened to the public last year. There are plans to extend that network into South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi; it was already the nation’s largest infrastructure project since independence.(jft/TaipeiTimes)