Chapter 823 West Coast Development
Delka focused on this issue and said pointedly: "No matter what method is used, the surrounding rainforest must be solved first, but the biggest shortage in Cabinda now is manpower. It is impossible for you to station troops to complete this task, and you There aren’t many people.”
Balco said: "Mr. Delca, you can rest assured that our primary goal now is to solve the problem of receiving supplies in Cabinda around the port. After the problems around the port are solved, food and supplies can be guaranteed, and follow-up government personnel We will move in and organize manpower to clean up the surrounding rainforest.”
So far, East Africa has not established a government in Cabinda, so Balko, a military personnel, will take over the work of Dilka's team.
Of course, in the future, Cabinda's military attributes will not be weakened. Cabinda, as the end point of the Congo River and the end point of northern defense in East Africa, will still have troops stationed here.
On the entire right bank of the Congo River, East Africa will deploy certain forces, although the Belgians on the border are not strong and have no hostility towards East Africa.
"In this case, it is better to take advantage of the small population of Cabinda. We can carry out large-scale burning of the tropical rainforest area to reduce the difficulty of future work. Of course, this requires your coordination. After all, setting fire is also a technical job. If you are not careful, Burning it to the opposite Belgian area may cause some misunderstandings," Dierka said.
"Mr. Delcar, burning is indeed a method, but it is not easy to accomplish in the tropical rainforest area. You used to work mainly in the east. You also know that savannah and tropical rainforest are completely different climates. There are too many rainy weather here, even if It is impossible for people to make the fire grow too big, and even the burned forest requires manpower to clean up, so we should wait until the population is transferred from the country to solve this problem. "
"You are right, Lieutenant Balco, but we are encountering too many problems now. Cabinda is completely an isolated island in the rainforest. Our connection with other areas can only rely on sea transportation. There is no clean water source here, and There is no electricity, and because of the rainforest, it is difficult to complete my survey work and all kinds of work are difficult to carry out. It is not ordinary to build a city here. "
The Belgians definitely agree with what Dilcar said. When they built Pointe-Noire in Belgium, they encountered exactly the same problem. Until now, Pointe-Noire has only a few thousand people.
The East African government positioned Cabinda at the same level as those big cities on the eastern coast. Descartes could not understand this. In his opinion, developing Cabinda would be worse than vigorously building Luanda.
Of course, there are many people who think the same as Descartes, but Ernst knows that Cabinda is inconspicuous now, and that is just a limitation of the times. What is really important in Cabinda is its rich oil resources. The oil resources alone are worthy of gratitude. Steve put Cabinda on the list of important cities in East Africa, so the sooner Cabinda is built, the better.
…
As time passed, in May, the first batch of government personnel and slaves arrived in Cabinda, and the Cabinda City Government was officially established.
Subsequently, the grass-roots team of the Cabinda City Government began to cooperate with Delca to repair Cabinda's port.
At the same time, manpower was organized to cut down the rainforest around Cabinda, and a large amount of wood was transported to Walvis Bay, Orangemond and other areas in the south through Cabinda, allowing the least valuable "timber" in the tropical rainforest to be reused.
Southwest Africa is dominated by a desert climate, so it lacks raw materials such as wood, and the development of Cabinda effectively solved this problem.
By this time, shipping on the west coast had resumed, so there were more and more East African ships on the west coast. However, unlike in the past, which were mostly slave ships, these were all serious merchant ships.
In just a few months, Cabinda has more than quadrupled in size than before, surpassing Portugal's efforts in several years.
At the same time, the foreign trade between Cabinda and Belgium has also achieved preliminary results. The construction of Cabinda can completely borrow from Belgium. Although Cabinda is not rich in products at present, there are still some specialties, such as the famous "Cabinda Bark" ".
East Africa sold part of the resources produced during the development of Cabinda to Belgian businessmen in Pointe Noire at low prices, thus obtaining some funds. Although it was a drop in the bucket, it was still of some value.
While Cabinda was being developed, Luanda and Benguela were being constructed at a faster pace. Of course, benefiting from the excellent basic conditions of Luanda and Benguela, East Africa's investment in these two regions was actually not large.
The city also maintains its original appearance during the Portuguese rule, mainly repairing the houses and roads that were destroyed during the war.
East Africa's development of the west coast is gradually getting on track. Of course, the most important thing is the construction of the Central Railway. At present, the west line of the Central Railway has entered the geological exploration stage.
This also made East Africa even more tense and scarce in terms of labor, and the black forces, who caused major trouble to the 331st Division and other units during the South African War, suffered.
A large number of blacks from the former Kingdom of Congo were incorporated into East Africa's slave army to develop the west coast. East Africa adopted harsher measures against these Angolan blacks who had caused trouble to East Africa than against blacks from other regions.
East Africa completely learned from the Kingdom of Belgium in the north. Black people in Angola became the main force in developing the west coast of East Africa, and for "retaliation" reasons, they did not enjoy "labor" treatment.
After the Ndebele people, they have become another black group that has been treated differently in East Africa. The result of the Ndebele people is that this ethnic group of more than 100,000 people has completely disappeared in the long history of history. Most of the Ndebele people are building the eastern part of the country. The canal physically dies in the process.
The number of black Angolans is much greater than that of the Ndebele people, so they have been hit harder, especially in the development of rainforest areas.
At this time, East Africa was actually a bit hungry. Although the population of East Africa was growing at a very fast rate, it could not keep up with the growth rate of East Africa's land.
Moreover, the problems caused by territorial expansion have become more prominent. At this time, even the so-called "densely populated" areas in East Africa are actually far from the standards of normal countries in the Eurasian continent.
The population density of Angola and Mozambique is almost comparable to that of Siberia under Tsarist Russia.
Under such circumstances, East Africa could only use a large number of black slaves. Coupled with the strong hostility and conflicts of black Angolans towards the East African army during the war, East Africa showed unprecedented "retaliatory means" when overseeing the work of black Angolans.
Of course, compared with the United States' methods towards Indians, East Africa still has some shortcomings. Even the Belgians in the Belgian colony next door think that East Africa's methods are too "merciful".
At this time, although the East African government, especially the military on the west coast, had sentiments towards black Angolan people, their main purpose was to make full use of the value of these black people to develop the western region.
Naturally, we cannot really kill all these black people. If it is really easy to deal with them all, then it will require people from East Africa to do it, which is very uneconomical.
In the past, of course, this could be done. At that time, East Africa had a large number of immigrant resources that could be used. However, since the population in the German region stopped flowing out, this model has become unusable.