Bagamoyo

The name is the town's history in three words. Bwaga moyo — lay down your heart. It has been read two ways, and both are probably true: relief, for porters at the end of a march of hundreds of miles carrying loads of around thirty kilos; and despair, for the people walking the same road in chains who understood that reaching the coast meant the sea and no return.

There was a Swahili settlement here long before the town. Kaole, a few kilometres south, dates to the eighth century and its surviving mosques and tombs to the thirteenth and fifteenth — a reminder that this coast was urban, literate and trading with the Gulf and India while the interior was still, to the coast, unknown country.

Bagamoyo proper grew from the late eighteenth century, settled by Omani families living on trade and taxation, developing under the sultans of Zanzibar. In the nineteenth century it became the most important trading entrepôt on this stretch of coast — the terminus of the caravan routes that ran to Lake Tanganyika and beyond, dealing in ivory, and in people. Historians still argue about which trade mattered more in volume; neither is a comfortable inheritance.

It was also the door Europeans used. Burton and Speke set out from here in 1857 on the expedition that reached Lake Tanganyika. Stanley left from here. Livingstone never set foot in the town alive — but after he died inland in 1873, his body was carried to the coast and laid in the tower of the mission church here before being shipped to England. The Catholic Fathers of the Holy Ghost had founded that mission in 1868, the first in East Africa, and it began as a settlement for children bought out of slavery.

In 1886 Bagamoyo became the first capital of German East Africa. It held the title for five years. In 1891 the administration moved to Dar es Salaam, which had the deep-water harbour that steamships needed and Bagamoyo did not — and the town simply stopped. That abrupt ending is why so much of the nineteenth century is still standing here.

Bagamoyo is the seat of the Bagamoyo Arts and Cultural Institute — TaSUBa — the national college for music, dance, drama and fine art. It gives a small coastal town a permanent population of performers and students, and it is the reason the annual Bagamoyo Arts Festival draws companies from across the country and the region. This is where a great many Tanzanian professional performers trained.

The town is Swahili and predominantly Muslim, with the coastal rhythms that implies. The architecture is the familiar coastal grammar — carved doors, coral-rag walls, deep verandas, inner courtyards — but weathered, half-restored, and lived in rather than curated. It is what Stone Town looks like without the visitor economy.

The difficult part of the history is handled directly here rather than avoided. The mission museum at the Holy Ghost Fathers' compound holds one of the more serious collections on the East African slave trade, assembled by the order that spent the nineteenth century buying people out of it. It is a small museum and a heavy one.

A note on how to be here: Bagamoyo is not a resort and does not read as one. It is a working town with extraordinary things in it, and it rewards walking slowly and asking rather than arriving on a schedule.