Historic Dar es Salaam

Take a tour of Dar's ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE

Dar es Salaam is one of the world’s fastest growing cities and its towering modern skyline is testament to its rapid development. But Tanzania’s commercial capital also has a storied history and there are many far older buildings that remain to tell it. City guide Bernard Ntahondi has devised a tour that connects some of this ancient architecture and here he shares his favourite historic oceanside buildings while the Dar-based artist who goes by the Instagram handle of Trailing Sprout provides the illustrations.

1 OLD BOMA

You’ll find the city’s oldest building at the junction of Sokoine drive and Morogoro road. It was built from 1860 to 1866 under the Arab sultan Majid as an official hotel for his prestigious guests. During their colonial occupation, the Germans used it as a base, enlarging it and securing its fortifications, although it still sustained damage in the Abushili war in 1889. Until 1916 the Old Boma was used by German Imperial Navy as a barracks. After WW1, the British administration turned it into a police station and the site also housed the naval headquarters with a prison behind.

In the late 1970s it looked like the Old Boma was going to be demolished to make way for a multi-stored hotel, but it was saved at the last minute by the high court injunction to preserve the monument of the city. It currently serves as the architectural museum under Dar es Salaam Centre for Architectural Heritage.

2 ST JOSEPH CATHEDRAL

Located at the corner of Sokoine Drive and Bridge Street is St Joseph Catholic Cathedral. The Benedictine missionaries order of St Otillien of Bavaria laid the foundation stone of their substantial church on June 1, 1897. There was an earlier Benedictine church in Pugu, just outside the city, but it was destroyed in the Abushili War in 1889 with several Benedictine brothers and sisters being killed. The war also held up the building of St Joseph. The Gothic-style church construction completed in 1903 on the site of Dar´s first mosque – seen by the clergy, no doubt, as a symbolic replacement. Now it serves as the cathedral.

3 WHITE FATHERS (ATIMAN HOUSE)

This building was originally built as a harem for sultan Majid of Zanzibar. But after a time as a base for German officers it was given in 1922 to the White Fathers, now known as the Missionaries of Africa. The building has been the seat of their Roman Catholic mission ever since. The alternative name references Adrian Atiman, an African physician who was freed by the missionaries in Algeria after he taken by slave traders in Mali. He later served as a physician in Tanzania until his death, in 1956 aged 90 years.

The building is currently undergoing renovations and it believed the building will soon be opened to the public.

4 THE OLD POST OFFICE

When this building was built in 1903 during German colonial times it was filled with ground-breaking technology. It was the first building to include both a telephone and telegraph offices, as well as a sorting room and postal hall. Although it has been remodelled to give it a modern appearance, the pointed arches of the windows on the ground floor give its age away. Just inside the entrance there is a plaque to the memory of members of the signal corps who lost their lives in the WW1. There are 200 names; their loyalty to Britain drew them to the conflict. The building is still being used as a post office.

5 KALIMJEE JIVANJEE BUILDING

Most people in Dar now know this property in Sokoine Drive as the International Motors building. It was built by the Karimjee Jivanjee family, traders who moved in Zanzibar from India in 1824 and then later established themselves on the mainland. The original house on that site was owned by Paul Devers, a German businessman. A few years after WW1 it was sold and eventually bought by the Kalimjee Jivanjee Family.

6 NBC BANK

National Bank of Commerce (NBC) was built by the (South African) Standard Bank on the site of the first Old German post office. This impressive building was then nationalised. Its façade red, white and blue marble has led many to claim it resembles a strawberry and vanilla ice-cream block.

7 AZANIA FRONT LUTHERAN CHURCH

At the junction of Sokoine drive, Azikwe Street and Kivukoni Road is a neo-gothic Lutheran church built by the German missionaries from 1899 to 1902. Its red-tiled roof, tiled canopies over the windows, bright white walls, turreted tower and numerous steep tiled roofs are typical of the Bavarian style of the time.

The architect who designed this church was Friedrich Ludwig Karl Gurlitt, who was employed as Director of Public works in German East Africa from 1895 to 1906. Before he designed this church, he visited places including Latin America and India to study buildings designed for a hot climate. Currently the church is open to the public.

8 FORODHANI HOTEL (COURT OF APPEAL) DAR ES SALAAM CLUB

This club at the junction of Kivukoni Front and Ohio Street was founded in 1903 as a social club exclusively for Europeans. The building is in the style of a German villa and was designed by Gurlitt as his own residence from 1900 to 1901. In 1903 he agreed to transfer the building to the Club in exchange for an adjacent plot of land. It became the first hotel in Dar es salaam and at the same time being used as club. Prior to independence it was owned by the British and known as the Dar es Salaam Club. The novelist Evelyn Waugh stayed here in 1959 and described his experience the following year in his travel book ‘A Tourist in Africa.’ After independence the building was turned into a school for hospitality and hosted the first gala dinner of the young nation. Despite its current use as the Court of Appeal, the building is still popularly known as Forodhani Hotel. In 2014, this historically significant structure was taken off Dar es Salaam’s list of protected buildings.

9 HYATT KILIMANJARO HOTEL

While studying for a degree in architecture in Israeli, student Beda Jonathan Amuli started working for the Israeli architecture firm Zevet in the holidays. When he graduated in 1964, Zevet had started planning the Kilimanjaro Hotel in Dar es Salaam. Amuli became the project manager and a local associate in Tanzania. Before its modernisation in 2005 the hotel façade was designed to provide comfortable ventilated rooms without air conditioning. The former US President Barack Obama stayed in this hotel during his three-country trip to Africa in 2013.