Tanzania's oldest port — slave-trade ruins, the oldest church, and Freddie Mercury
Bagamoyo is one of Tanzania's most historically charged towns — 70km north of Dar es Salaam on the Swahili coast, it was the main terminus of the Arab slave-trade caravans from the interior and the headquarters of German East Africa before Dar es Salaam took over. The name itself means 'lay down your heart' in Swahili — the crushing phrase spoken by enslaved people from the interior on seeing the sea for the first time. Freddie Mercury of Queen was born here in 1946 (as Farrokh Bulsara, into the Zoroastrian Parsi community) before his family moved to Zanzibar. The German colonial district, th…
Bagamoyo was established as a trading post in the late 18th century by Omani Arab merchants and grew rapidly as the terminus of the central Africa caravan routes (ivory and slaves from Ujiji, Tabora, and beyond). At its peak in the 1870s it was the most important port on the East African coast — David Livingstone's body was brought here after his death in 1873 before being shipped to London. The German East Africa Company chose Bagamoyo as its first administrative capital in 1888; the capital moved to Dar es Salaam in 1891. The post-independence neglect that followed is precisely what preserv…