Kigoma

Kigoma is the newer town. The old one is Ujiji, eight kilometres south along the shore, and it is the oldest town in western Tanzania. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was the lakeside terminus of the caravan route from Bagamoyo — some twelve hundred kilometres east — under the nominal authority of the Sultan of Zanzibar, and the place where ivory and captives from the Congo basin were gathered for the march to the coast.

It was also where European exploration of the interior kept arriving. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke reached the lake here in 1858. And in 1871 Henry Morton Stanley, sent by the New York Herald to find a missionary the world had lost track of, walked into Ujiji and found David Livingstone — ill, short of supplies, and very glad to see him.

Two parts of that story are less certain than they are usually told. The meeting is conventionally dated 10 November 1871, but Livingstone had been seriously ill and had lost track of the calendar, and his own record does not agree. And the line everybody knows — Dr Livingstone, I presume? — does not appear in Livingstone's account, and the page of Stanley's diary where the greeting should be was torn out. The phrase first appears in print in July 1872. Stanley's biographer Tim Jeal argues he invented it afterwards. It is probably the most famous sentence in the history of African exploration, and it may never have been said.

Kigoma itself grew with the German Central Railway, which reached the lake in 1914 — just in time for the First World War to be fought on it. The German ship Graf von Götzen, launched here in 1915 to control the lake, was scuttled in 1916, raised by the British, and put back into service in 1927 as the MV Liemba. Out of service since 2018, she has been through a major refit and is due back on the lake from September 2026.

The Ha are the principal people of Kigoma Region, farmers of the hills behind the lake with a history of chiefdoms closely related to those of neighbouring Burundi. Kiswahili is the working language, but the region's cultural geography looks west, across the lake, as much as east towards Dar es Salaam.

Ujiji keeps a strong Swahili and Muslim character from the caravan period — the coastal influence that arrived with the traders never left. The Livingstone Memorial stands on the site of the meeting, with a modest museum and a mango tree said to be grafted from the one that shaded it. It is a national historic site, and a quiet, slightly melancholy place.

For most visitors Kigoma is a staging post rather than a destination: the base for Gombe, an hour or two north by boat, and the gateway to Mahale further south. But the town rewards a day. The lake is clear enough to swim in, the sunsets over the Congolese mountains are extraordinary, and the station at the end of a line that starts at the Indian Ocean has a sense of arrival that flying in cannot give you.