Ujiji

The inland end of the caravan route

Ujiji sits on the shore of Lake Tanganyika immediately south of Kigoma, with which it shares a municipality. For most of the nineteenth century it was the most important town in this part of Africa: the last major trading centre of the central caravan route, and the point at which slaves and ivory brought across the lake from the eastern Congo, Rwanda and Burundi were gathered for the long walk east to the coast.

Tanzania’s own submission to UNESCO’s tentative list makes the scale clear. The Central Slave and Ivory Trade Route, submitted by the Antiquities Department on 20 February 2006 under reference 2095, is defined as running from Ujiji to Bagamoyo, a distance of over 1,200 kilometres, and the submission describes it as what many experts consider the main route of the three documented for East Africa. Six centres are identified along it: Bagamoyo, Mamboya, Mpwapwa, Kilimatinde, Kwihara near Tabora, and Ujiji.

What the record says about Ujiji

The tentative list document is worth reading in its own terms because it is specific in a way that most accounts are not.

It places Ujiji within Kigoma township, about five kilometres from the Kigoma railway station. It records that Stanley estimated the town’s population at 3,000 in 1876. And it names what survives: the site of the former port, which no longer exists; avenues of coconut and mango trees; the Usagara grounds, where slaves were held and auctioned; and the site of the house used by the slave trader known as Tippu Tip.

It also describes a path still legible in the landscape — running between the Ujiji seminary and Kaluta Primary School, through Kagera village to Luiche and beyond, marked on both sides by large historic mango trees. Mango avenues along the caravan routes are a recurring feature of the record, and they are among the most tangible physical traces the trade left.

On the trade’s end, the submission states that it was officially forbidden in 1873 under British pressure but continued secretly for several years afterwards. Kigoma Ujiji Municipal Council’s own history gives 1884 as the date of abolition. The two refer to different steps in a long and deliberately porous process rather than contradicting each other outright, and neither should be read as the moment the trade actually stopped.

The rest of the route

Ujiji is one end of something, and the tentative list submission is the best available map of the rest. The six identified centres along the central route run, from the interior to the coast: Ujiji, Kwihara near Tabora, Kilimatinde in Manyoni District, Mpwapwa in Dodoma Region, Mamboya in Kilosa District, and Bagamoyo on the Indian Ocean.

Each has different survivals. Kwihara has the Livingstone Tembe, built by an Arab trader in 1857, given to Livingstone and declared a historical monument in 1957. Kilimatinde was a resting place at a well, and retains small abandoned Arabic houses, a market and the later seat of the German administration. Mpwapwa keeps part of the path still visible and in use at Vinga’we village. Mamboya has mango plantations, a Wanyamwezi graveyard and the remains of an Anglican church. Bagamoyo has the Caravan Serai, the old fort, the customs house and the freedom village at the Catholic mission.

The submission notes that descendants of both slaves and slave traders remain part of the present communities at several of these places, and that the intention behind the listing is not only to protect the physical remains but to intensify research, document memory and support the communities along the route. It also raises the possibility of a transnational nomination with Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Mozambique.

For a traveller this is useful mainly as a frame. Following the whole route is a serious undertaking through country with little tourism infrastructure, but knowing that Ujiji and Bagamoyo are two ends of one thing changes how both read.

Livingstone and Stanley

Ujiji is best known internationally for the meeting between Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in 1871, and the town carries a memorial and a museum on that account. TANAPA lists a Dr David Livingstone Memorial Museum among the antiquity sites in its care, describing a museum that honours Livingstone’s role in mapping central and east Africa and carries a substantial exhibition on the East African slave trade, using artefacts, documents and multimedia to convey what it caused, alongside material on resistance and abolition.

The museum is also described as showing the wider history of east and central Africa through cultural artefacts and tools from local communities and early explorers. The site is run by Tanzania National Parks, whose own brochure for it carries a tanzaniaparks.go.tz address. The National Museum of Tanzania’s list of its eight centres does not include one at Kigoma or Ujiji.

The honest framing for a visitor is that the Stanley and Livingstone encounter is the hook, and the slave trade is the substance. The slave trade history tours and museum tours guides are the relevant reading. Anyone following the route further east will find the other end of it at Bagamoyo, where the Caravan Serai museum occupies the coastal terminus.

Visiting

Ujiji is reached from Kigoma in minutes, and there is no reason to stay in Ujiji rather than in Kigoma. It fits comfortably into a day that also takes in the Kigoma lakefront, and it combines naturally with a boat trip to Gombe on another day.

Ujiji adjoins Kigoma, which the Central Line railway and a regional airport both reach — the guide to the long routes west across Tanzania covers what that journey involves from the coast. Expect a working lakeside town rather than a heritage precinct. Several of the sites the UNESCO submission names — the former port, the Tippu Tip house site — are sites rather than standing buildings, and a guide makes the difference between seeing something and walking past it. See historical walking tours.

Seasons

Ujiji is in Kigoma Region outside the Kakonko and Kibondo districts, which places it in the Tanzania Meteorological Authority’s unimodal zone: one wet season from about November into April or May, then a long dry period. Kigoma Ujiji Municipal Council describes a modified equatorial climate with annual rainfall between 800 and 1,600 millimetres, and notes that peak temperatures fall in September and October. The seasonal guide to the country covers how the western regions differ from the northern circuit.

Common questions about Ujiji