The Nature of Christianity in Northern Tanzania by Munson Robert B.;

Author:Munson, Robert B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1524039
Publisher: Lexington Books

Neu-Moshi was new, exciting and had opportunities to attract the Chagga and other Africans. This was a place of quantity, a place of transportation and a new type of settlement on the Kilimanjaro savanna. The presence of many Europeans, Indians and East Africans offered the chance of jobs and other opportunities while the city itself gave the Chagga residents freedom from the traditional life at home on Kiliman-jaro.

Nevertheless, Neu-Moshi had been planned as a modern European city and colonial officials envisioned that a new boma with both military and administrative functions should lie at its center. The Germans wanted to build a defendable, modern boma with an independent water supply. The town planners proposed several locations within the city but the first few did not pass muster for the parcels had no water sources. The two-year delay caused by the boma hunt frustrated many of the businessmen who wanted to build in Neu-Moshi; they were most concerned about the administrative functions for which Alt-Moshi was still responsible. The construction of the boma finally began about June 1914 without a certain determination of a water supply.85

Construction of the residential city proceeded quicker than the boma. As detailed above, the surveyors created a spacious building plan for the European area of the city, situated 500 meters away from the African and Indian quarters. The European quarter consisted of 95 lots centered on a star-shaped axis of streets. The plan for this section included wide, straight streets and plenty of room for public buildings. The city planners drew out 30-m-wide major streets and minor ones of 20 m. On each side of the street they planned a walkway for pedestrians, lined by a double row of trees (by July 1912, some of these trees had already been planted). Additionally, the plan called for a trolley to be built along some streets in the town.86

By early 1912, all 95 building plots in the European section had been reserved and planning continued on some large projects—a hospital and a courthouse for the Bezirk. The government issued fairly strict conditions of construction in the European and Indian quarters: inter alia, the purchaser must build a stone house of at least two larger rooms with a tin roof within two years. The stipulations succeeded fairly well in guiding construction for by the end of the 1912/13 year, the government reported many private houses and businesses being constructed, most of solid stone and covered with tin roofs or tile (Ziegel).87

We again return to Father Franz Albrecht’s May 1913 description of Neu-Moshi in which he paints a complex picture of the immigrant population:

We find the Europeans in the railway and postal service, as hotel owners, as independent businessmen or managers of branches of European companies, as building contractors, craftsmen (carpenter with a machine shop, metal worker), shipping agents, and employees of the workshops. The Goans are business people or railroad employees, and tailors, shoemakers, etc.; all of them are Catholic. The Indians who are so disreputable in G.E.A. [German East Africa] are yet indispensable merchants.

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