Tanga

Tanga's history begins with the Swahili towns on this shore. At Tongoni, about twenty kilometres south, the ruins of a medieval trading settlement include a mosque and one of the largest collections of pillar tombs anywhere on the East African coast — tall, carved monuments that were the Swahili elite's way of marking status in death, some of them once set with imported Chinese porcelain bowls.

The modern port grew under German rule, and the German colonial period left the town its grid, its railway — the Usambara line inland to Moshi — and its greatest economic legacy. In 1893 the agronomist Richard Hindorf brought sisal agave from Mexico's Yucatán, by way of Florida and Hamburg, and the first 62 plants were set out near Pangani, just south of Tanga. Twenty years later there were more than fifty plantations and German East Africa was exporting over twenty thousand tonnes of fibre a year.

Then, on 3–5 November 1914, the war arrived. A British Indian expeditionary force landed to seize the port and was thrown back by a much smaller German force under Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. The fighting was badly disrupted by swarms of African bees, disturbed by gunfire in the hives in the trees, which attacked both sides indiscriminately and at times stopped the shooting altogether. It is remembered as the Battle of the Bees, and it was a humiliating British defeat that set the pattern for four years of campaigning in East Africa.

The coast here is Swahili and largely Muslim, and the pace is notably slower than Dar es Salaam. Pangani, south of Tanga at the mouth of the Pangani River, is a small historic town with carved doors and old traders' houses, and it is the easiest way into the quieter coast beyond the city.

Inland, the Shambaa people farm the Usambara Mountains — part of the Eastern Arc, the same ancient chain as the Uluguru and Udzungwa, and home to a remarkable number of endemic plants, including the African violet, first described from these hills. Lushoto, the German hill station the colonists called Wilhelmstal, sits among them at around 1,400 metres, and the walking there is some of the best in the country.

The Amboni caves, eight kilometres north of the city, are the most extensive limestone caves in East Africa. They were declared a conservation area in 1922, and local tradition has long held them sacred — people still come to them to make offerings and to pray.