Chapter 42 Immigration Boom

There are many preachers like Wang Dazhi who go deep into their hometowns to promote the benefits of the East African colonies and dispel the concerns of the Chinese.

Of course, it also found a way for these illiterate and uninformed suffering people. Ordinary people would not easily step into a field they are not familiar with without contact or support.

Who wants to go hungry in their hometown? They didn’t know it before, or they didn’t have the means, but now they know it. As long as they have food to eat, it doesn’t matter if they sell their lives!

The most exaggerated among them was a preacher named Zhang Gensheng. His hometown was suffering from drought. When he returned, the response was very strong, including villagers from several neighboring villages, who took the initiative to report.

The people affected by the disaster don't know what the situation is like in the East African colonies, but Zhang Gensheng doesn't look like he has suffered. In this era, how a person is living can be determined by his appearance. Most ordinary people have a complexion. The muscles are yellow, the bones on the body are clearly visible, and there is no fat at all.

And where Zhang Gensheng is going is the kind of strong state that people in this era are pursuing, which means having enough to eat.

And Zhang Gensheng! Who doesn't know that when foreigners came here to recruit workers, life could barely survive at that time, so everyone just watched Zhang Gensheng on the "pirate ship" for fun. After all, what good ideas could foreign devils have?

There were even rumors that the Western Japs were man-eating demons and that Zhang Gensheng would definitely never come back. But now that a year has passed and Zhang Gensheng is back, the rumors have been disproven.

Seeing Zhang Gensheng in gorgeous clothes and full of energy, the people who had been affected by the disaster naturally asked questions. As for Zhang Gensheng shaving his braids, everyone didn't care much. Didn't they see that the village officials almost bowed their heads when the group of people came?

It shows that people are not afraid of the government at all. After all, in the Qing Dynasty of this era, only the revolutionary party would shave their braids, or make their hair disheveled like the long-haired people in the south.

The government will never talk to you nicely if they meet this kind of person. They will directly take you away according to a set of procedures, which can range from being jailed to being shot.

Zhang Gensheng obviously did not fall into these two categories, so when he met the villagers and asked Zhang Gensheng what was going on, Zhang Gensheng naturally told him everything.

Hearing Zhang Gensheng's description, the group of villagers were excited. There was such a good thing in the world. The villagers who couldn't even eat naturally ran to each other to tell each other.

So the nearby villages also learned about this, and the large number of people emboldened them. These villagers thought that everyone would go to this East African colony together, so that they could be taken care of.

It is understandable for these immigrants to think this way. Unfortunately, the East African colonies will not put these people together. They will still have to be scattered and distributed throughout the colonies. Naturally, these villagers will not know about it.

As a result, more than a thousand people signed up to go to East Africa in the area Zhang Gensheng was responsible for that day. This made it difficult for the staff in Jiaozhou Bay. They arranged for these people only after urgently dispatching a batch of food and medicine.

In this way, we can only report to the superiors and ask for a few more ships, and at the same time notify the East African colonies to prepare more rations to prepare for receiving this group of immigrants.

Ernst also bought a batch of grain from Europe and sent it to East Africa for hoarding in preparation.

In this way, many people from the Zhili area of ​​Shandong Province north of Jiaozhou choose to go to Guandong. People south of Jiaozhou, especially those at the junction of Huizhou, Henan and Shandong provinces, choose to go to East Africa. One thing that is very effective in recruiting people from the East African colonies is that they can also go to the harbor on the way. In charge of food, free rations were provided all the way to East Africa, but when they arrived in East Africa, they had to participate in labor.

Those who really don't want to leave their homeland will naturally have nothing to do with them, but they will regret it in the future. It doesn't matter whether East Africa is a paradise or not. What matters is that East Asia is a hell now.

Later, according to the population registration of the East African colonies, more than 50,000 immigrants came to the East African colonies in the next three months just after the Chinese returned to the country to persuade immigrants.

The skyrocketing population quickly filled the land gap in the coastal areas of the East African colonies. Zanzibar next door had only a few hundred thousand people, while the Binhai New Area quickly approached 60,000 people after this immigration event.

That is to say, the Ernst family has a great cause now, otherwise who would be able to accept 50,000 people in a short period of time!

Another winner of this immigration was the Dutch, with whom Ernst signed a long-term agreement and these commissions were basically fixed.

This sudden surge in immigrants will require temporarily renting more ships from the Dutch, so the price will naturally increase.

After that, the Dutch fleet was divided into three batches, and they would go to the East African colonies every six days. After unloading the population at the port of Dar es Salaam, they would immediately return to East Asia for the next trip.

After these immigrants arrive in the East African colonies, some of them will be assigned to areas under construction in the west, such as the Great Lakes (Lake Victoria) area and the Lake Solon (Lake Tanganyika) area...

Most of them first filled in the blank areas in the coastal area, and then drove away the indigenous people, leaving the land here uncultivated.

Now as soon as the manpower arrives, we will immediately organize into groups to open up wasteland in the hinterland of Binhai District, starting from the north and going south to the vicinity of the first town.

The continuous flow of immigrants did give the Zanzibaris in the Port of Dar es Salaam a little shock. After the Sultan of Zanzibar heard about the huge noise caused by the immigrants, he did not do anything. Instead, he lay down even more flatly. It can be said that the East African colonies now have a firm foothold.

Even the union of Zanzibar and Portugal cannot shake the local rule of the East African colonies. In the past, the threat of force was only a short-term means. Now that the population has increased, real long-term peace and stability can be achieved.

With the help of these immigrants, more than 100 villages were formed in Binhai District. These villages roughly have a population of several hundred people. The three strongholds built later were upgraded to three town-level administrative districts due to population expansion, with each town-level administrative district having one to two thousand people.

As long as the population of these towns increases, Ernst plans to put some simple primary industries here to form some prototype cities with some industry.

Moreover, this time the immigrants are no longer the majority of individuals as in the past. Affected by natural disasters, some small families have also come collectively to East Africa to make a living.

In order to facilitate governance and management, these immigrants were dispersed and immigrants from various regions were mixed together to form new villages.

Therefore, the residents in these new villages may even have different dialects and are unfamiliar to everyone. Naturally, they rely more on the coordinated management of the colony.

Brand-new iron farm tools were distributed to these immigrants. The immigrants who received the production tools were very motivated and used advanced farm tools and some indigenous captives, as well as horses and cattle.

The immigrants developed nearly 500,000 acres of land, accounting for 10% of the entire coastal area, 30% of the arable land, and 70% of the irrigated arable land.

Among them, the area of ​​paddy fields reaches 200,000 acres, and it is expected that 30 million kilograms of rice can be harvested in a single season. After subtracting the rations (one kilogram of rice produces about six taels of rice), there will still be a surplus of 8 million kilograms. The remaining land is cultivated with sisal and other crops.

The grain is used for further immigration and expansion needs, so there are no plans to export it. Five percent of the value brought by sisal exports is used to distribute wages to colonial immigrants and managers, although colonial residents have no use for it. , after all, there are no entertainment venues or other consumption places in East Africa, so Ernst does not need to pay them too much salary, which means the symbolism is greater.

In this way, the average land cultivated by the East African colonial immigrants was more than eight acres per capita, which required a lot of physical labor. However, Ernst did not treat them badly in terms of food rations, which was almost close to the per capita staple food consumption of later generations, so even if he did not give it to them Paying wages Ernst felt no burden at all.

After all, in the Far East, you worked so hard that you couldn't even get enough to eat. But when you arrived in the East African colonies, although you were still very tired, the food was far better than all the countries in East Asia today.

And although there is a lot of land cultivated, the intensity is not as high as expected. For example, the quality of the agricultural tools shipped from Europe is much better than that of the Far East. The use of livestock, indigenous labor and collectivized operations have reduced labor intensity.

And there is no need for intensive farming like in the Far East. Pesticides and fertilizers are shipped from Europe, and farmland management is relatively rough.

Of course, in order to improve the production enthusiasm of these immigrants, the colony also established an effective reward and punishment system. If they work well, they will be well fed, especially in the distribution of meat. If they do not do well, they may go hungry and have to work voluntarily as punishment.

During the off-season, the East African colonial Binhai District organized and built 196 kilometers of original dirt roads, basically connecting the six most important towns in the Binhai District.

By the end of October 1866, the total number of new and old immigrants plus Germans in the entire East African colony exceeded 97,000, and the important locations and land in the Tanganyika part of the East African colony were basically controlled.

There is also a vast area of ​​land between these immigrant strongholds occupied by local indigenous people, whose number may exceed more than three million. Except for the coastal area, there are still large-scale indigenous tribes in other areas.

Compared with these large numbers of indigenous people, the East African colonies can be said to have initially completed the strategy of cities (towns) surrounding rural areas (tribes).

However, immigrants are still coming to the land of East Africa from the Far East, which provides conditions for the further expansion of the East African colonies.