WE STAYED HERE

Firefly Lodge: You can camp for US$10 per person (about R120), or get a backpacker-style bed in a communal room for US$16 per person (R193), including breakfast. A private double room starts at US$45 (R544), including breakfast. Their restaurant serves good meals and they have luxuries like Wi-Fi and a pool. fireflybagamoyo.com

Ibreathe a sigh of relief when I turn the Fortuner off the tar road at Mlandizi, just before the crush of Dar es Salaam begins. Behind me are four hectic days on the tar road from Tunduma – the border post between Zambia and Tanzania. Now I’m barely 35 km as the crow flies from the Indian Ocean. My tracks go further back than Tunduma – all the way to Cape Town, where my journey began two and a half weeks ago. I’ve driven this route before, a few years ago. Back then, however, I made the mistake of continuing along the tar road into Dar es Salaam itself, where the gridlock traffic of Tanzania’s biggest city quickly squashed my free-wheeling spirit. I won’t make the same mistake today. The gravel road I’ve turned onto will lead me to Bagamoyo, 60 km up the coast from Dar, almost opposite Zanzibar. The name of the ancient town first entered my consciousness back in 1998, when Obie Oberholzer published his well-known photography book Beyond Bagamoyo. It’s one of those place names that piques your curiosity, teasing you with the musical flow of all those vowels. So here I am, but ambivalently so. I’m looking forward to reaching the sea, to kicking back for a few days before my journey continues. In the years before motorised transport, trade relied on a human supply chain – people who bore heavy loads from the interior to trade ports like Bagamoyo. They, too, looked forward to shedding their load at Bagamoyo, and kicking back – albeit briefly. My ambivalence stems from the darker side of a place like Bagamoyo. Many East African port towns also played a pivotal role in the slave trade. For many slaves, Bagamoyo would have been the last glimpse of Africa, the last place where the familiar smells would reach their nostrils and where familiar birdsong would fill their ears. This sadness lies just below the surface of history, slumbering but alive. I follow my GPS to the beach, to Firefly Lodge, in a renovated old building that dates from the era of German colonialism. Nearby, the “German Boma” – their administrative building and accommodation centre for highranking officials – is still intact. The Germans weren’t the first colonisers. From the 18th century until the late 19th century, Bagamoyo was largely controlled by families that had originally hailed from Oman on the Arabian peninsula. When the Germans moved in, they briefly made Bagamoyo their capital but moved it south to Dar es Salaam in 1891, favouring the deeper harbour there. Before Bagamoyo even existed (pre-1700s) the settlement here was called Kaole. It took a while before it became an important trade port: first salt, then coconut products, ivory, wood and slaves. Long before all of that, the people of Kaole farmed and fished. That lifestyle continues in modern-day Bagamoyo, with only slight alterations: an outboard engine on a boat, maybe, or a farmer riding his motorbike down to his fields. I pitch my tent at Firefly, have a drink next to the pool, then I grab my camera as the light softens and head into the streets. In Bagamoyo you don’t have to go searching for photographs, they come to you: a red scooter against the backdrop of a ruin, or the rough texture of a wooden oar on the beach. Soak it all up and slowly, Bagamoyo will start spilling its stories…