joe lobo wrote:
> I must thank you for revealing history to me that many us goans from
>Dar were oblivious of !!
-
Joe,
D.B. Pereira of Zanzibar owned a ship in the 1880's. You may remember that
there used to be a huge picture of the ship, the S.S. Somali in the Pereira's
house in Vuga. None of the family members, in the 1960's, knew what finally
happened to that ship.
In the 1970's I found out that the SS Somali served as the coal collier for the
SMS Konigsberg during WW I. At the time I presumed that the Germans either
commandeered the ship or had bought it for their war efforts.
In 1993 I found myself on a fishing/hunting trip in the mouth of the Rufiji.
Our guide took as to the grave yard of the Konigsberg. The ship had been sold
for scrap iron soon after independence and all that was left were scraps of
iron on the shore that were really rusted. The area is well know for its huge
crocodiles and no one wanted to leave the boat and get onto the shore.
The following day, the guide took us to see a rusting hull of a ship. Yes, the
SS. Somali. Both ships were destroyed by the British. The Rufiji is also
called, "Rivers of Sand." Over the decades the river course had changed and the
S.S. Somali hull was on, for the lack of a better word, "a sandbank," that was
far from the river.
On another thought, those of us who studied in Tanzania may also remember a
picture in the history books which showed a team of labourers pulling a huge
iron wheel thru the bush. The wheel was steel iron plates that had been shaped
and welded so that it could be rolled from Dar to the interior. The steel
plates would then be used to repair/build a ship. Well, a few years ago, I saw
the original picture hanging on a wall here in Toronto. The picture had been
passed down the generations as an ancestor had the contract to send the steel
to the site.
Mervyn
