Arusha - The Geneva of Africa, Arusha, Tanzania

Arusha is where you must go to cool your heels, I was told in a hotel in Moshi, Tanzania. You might be surprised at what you find.

At the end of a hour-long journey on a daladala, I was indeed surprised. Located exactly halfway between Cairo and Cape Town, Arusha, a frontier city, represents the British Empire marked by a gigantic clock tower. Arusha was the A-Town with an energy hard to ignore. But as I soaked in the city’s flavour at Africafe, the waiter handed me two pieces of information with my coffee - about a tailor from Goa who put this former German military garrison on the world map and second, of Mr Khan and his chicken-on-the-bonnet.

While Arusha is not a place most people know of or will ever go except for the safari, Arusha, I soon discovered, was a place of excitement and opportunity.

A-Town is a ‘nickname’ given by the locals which shortens Arusha to A. The official name remains Arusha and comes from the waAarusha ethnic people who lived in the region of northern Tanzania.

In the 1830s, Arusha was occupied by Maasai people and the town itself had no buildings to speak of, except for a handful of mud and stick homes to suit the semi-nomadic Maasai people’s lifestyle. In 1896, following the murder of two missionaries, the area was overtaken by German military force. A German Boma (fortress) was built and later at the turn of the 20th century, Galanos, a Greek millionaire, built the Clock Tower which continues to stand today. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).