ABSTRACT
In 1950 Bukoba was a pretty little harbour town situated half-way up the western shore of Lake Victoria. It was a regular port of call for the two steamers that circulated the lake, one in a clockwise and one in a counterclockwise direction, each taking about a week for the four-hundred-mile round trip. Bukoba was roughly equidistant by either route from the terminus of the Uganda Railway at Kisumu. Southwards, it was much closer to Mwanza, whence the Tanganyikan Central Railway led via Tabora to the coast at Dar es Salaam. To the north of the harbour the curve of the bay was marked by a fine sandy beach, from which it was then considered quite safe to swim, except between six and seven o'clock in the evening, when the hippopotamuses came ashore to crop the grass around the government offices and to spend the night calling to each other from a series of reed-filled pools that encircled the government rest house. The north end of the town housed the Swedish Church mission, which had an impressive array of schools and hospital buildings; at the southern end the French-Canadian White Fathers had built their cathedral on a rocky promontory that jutted into the lake just beyond the harbour. Much of the social life seemed to turn on the comings and goings of the lake steamers, when the white population, both lay and clerical, would gather to meet or see off friends and stay to drink in the ship's bar. For our accommodation we tried the government rest house but we found the hippopotamus nightlife rather overpowering, so we retreated to the greatly superior comfort of the Swedish mission, to which we had been given an introduction by the missionary scholar Bengt Sundkler, who was soon to return there as bishop.
