Ujiji

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the spatial order in the Lake Tanganyika region was repeatedly and thoroughly redefined. The frontier character of the lake at the crossroads where resources, produce and skills met, was overshadowed by the westward moving frontier of an expanding global market under the guise of an Arab-Swahili-led trade network, which was in turn overrun by European colonization and the drawing of territorial borders. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kigoma-Ujiji also experienced massive immigration from around and across Lake Tanganyika, including waves of refugees from Burundi and East Congo in the past decades. Although this process started long before national territories and boundaries were defined, the continued arrival of newcomers cultivates narratives depicting Kigoma-Ujiji as a town of foreigners or of 'Congolese'. Remarkably, the descendants of the first inhabitants, dating back to the establishment of an urban area in the nineteenth century, sympathize and identify with refugees of contemporary conflicts. This paper argues that the succession of spatial orders in the area provides the historical context to distinguish between successive groups of urban settlers, but also to understand their sense of a common destiny under the dominant territorial/national spatial order of today.