Ujiji

"Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" are perhaps the most immortal words ever spoken in the history of African exploration, and they were spoken at Ujiji on Friday, November 10, 1871 when British-born American explorer Henry Morton Stanley greeted an exhausted Dr David Livingstone.

This famous platitude does little justice to the town's true historical significance, however. Ujiji was a port of massive significance for trade with Congo and Arabia, dealing mainly in salt, ivory and slave caravans.

Today, not much remains at Ujiji to commemorate the meeting of Livingstone and Stanley - a small plaque and an amateurish museum with some crude paintings to mark the scene. You would have to be an intrepid traveller and fanatical history buff to travel here just to visit Ujiji, which is something of a backwater.

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