Travel to Kigoma

a key outpost in the slave and ivory trades

Kigoma is a remote town on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the western region of Tanzania.

For centuries this place was the inland capital of slavery, a bridgehead for Tippu Tib’s immense trading empire inside the dark continent.

To the west of the nearby village of Ujiji, an avenue of ancient mango trees marks the start of the great caravan route, along which slaves were forced to march over 1000 km to Bagamoyo on the coast, from where they were ferried to the great slave markets on the island of Zanzibar.

Ujiji was also the place, on 10th November 1871, that ‘explorer’ and newspaperman Henry Stanley famously ‘discovered’ missionary David Livingstone and there is a small museum here to commemorate that famous moment in history. A wonderfully threadbare life-size diorama of the two men is predictably captioned : “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”.

German colonists also made Kigoma the head of their great inland trade route, distinguishing it with a disproportionately grand railway terminus that mistakenly foretold bigger things to come.

These days the town is a relaxed and mildly interesting place, but far too far out of the way to attract many international visitors.

We very rarely include Kigoma in trips these days, since the main highlights of the Tanzania West region, Mahale Mountains and Katavi, are now usually accessed by direct flights from Serengeti.

The small trickle of hardcore travellers that do pass through Kigoma tend to arrive either by the air or train services from Dar es Salaam, both of which are notoriously unreliable. After perhaps visiting the nearby chimpanzee reserve of Gombe Stream, the dream ticket is to catch the MV Liemba (built in Germany in 1913 and thought to be the oldest working passenger ship in the world) southward down the lake. But this is really hardcore travelling and not something that we could ever include in trips.

“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”