African Entrepreneurship Record-Chapter 739 - 43: In-depth

"Our surveillance targets have shown unusual movements. These Portuguese merchants are incredibly well-connected individuals. Their recent actions fully illustrate the issue, like year-end retailers trying to earn the last bit of business by continually running promotions and discounts to go home for Christmas. However, it's only March, indicating that other factors are causing their business to become unsustainable."

As an intelligence officer in East Africa, Eureka keenly observed the abnormal actions of the Portuguese merchants. They increased the volume of goods from East Africa and transported them with maximum capacity. These were East African specialties, notably rare items such as crocodile skins and ivory, unique to East Africa.

Of course, Mozambique itself does not lack these, but its production is smaller than East Africa's. After all, they have insufficient manpower, so it is most cost-effective to import from East Africa.

All that is needed is to prepare cash and vehicles to directly haul semi-finished goods to the eastern ports, and then ship them back to Europe for sale.

"Eureka, in the past year, it feels like our assignments have been the most frequent yet, but I have a hunch that these are about to end," his colleague Rice said.

"It seems that the other side is ready to lay its cards on the table. How do we continue to go deeper and relay the information back?" Eureka asked.

"We just need to follow them. We are now seen as Portuguese, so as long as we follow other caravans, we can further learn about the detailed reasons behind this change." Rice aimed to further unravel the mystery, so he planned to directly follow the Portuguese caravans through Mozambique's hinterland, then exit to the east, and return to East Africa.

"This is indeed a risky operation. After all, we are not real merchants, so it's easy to make mistakes on the details. To avoid misunderstandings, it's best to act like newcomers." Eureka advised.

Eureka and Rice's advantage lay in their youth, and young people are generally inexperienced, making them less conspicuous in the eyes of the shrewd Portuguese merchants.

"That said, there's one unavoidable problem: if the situation suddenly changes, we might not be able to convey the messages back to our homeland," Rice stated.

"These Portuguese are to blame. No wonder they've grown weaker over the centuries; they never thought to repair their domestic roads. Even new inventions like telegraphs are neither popularized nor promoted. Consequently, they cannot compete with us in Africa." Eureka commented in exasperation.

Just a simple comparison between East Africa and Mozambique shows why the Portuguese were utterly defeated in the last war.

That's because their focus on their colonies was completely insufficient. Infrastructure was limited to a few coastal cities that barely met the eye, with almost no inland development.

Forget about building railways like East Africa. Even muddy paths were insufficient, so it's understandable why Mozambique and Angola saw little change for over a century. If you exclude some modern industrial items, the Portuguese colonies essentially maintained their ancestral state.

And this also brings significant inconvenience to conducting intelligence work in East Africa, which is why Eureka and Rice were complaining.

Had they been at home, they could have long since conveyed messages back to East Africa in a timely manner through the telegraph network built in East Africa. The Portuguese have yet to construct even a telegraph line to their homeland, instead having to reach cities like Dar es Salaam in East Africa to pay for using the telegraph system, which also contributed to Dar es Salaam becoming Africa's most significant commercial intelligence hub.

Eureka: "The Portuguese military is mainly along the coast. In these inland peripheral areas, they can only carry out some meaningless reconnaissance nine to five each day. So we should apply to superiors to explore Mozambique's hinterland. As for intelligence transmission, due to Mozambique's poor state of development, this is a hurdle we cannot overcome. We can only manage for now, at least transmitting much of the hinterland's data back home, so we shouldn't rush."

"It makes sense—unless the Portuguese regain their past glory, even if they launch a war during this period, they can't quickly make progress. After all, our blockade against them is stricter, but East Africa only knows Mozambique five or six parts out of ten, and Mozambique probably knows East Africa only one or two parts out of ten," Rice said.

Rice was actually already giving the Portuguese enough credit. Over the years, their intelligence system on East Africa hadn't achieved, if not yielding little for great efforts, then at least nothing substantial.

Because there's no precise intelligence system even in Portugal, let alone in colonies like Mozambique.

Actually, this goes beyond Portugal; during this era, most European countries' intelligence systems were ineffective. Take the last Franco-Prussian War, for example—Napoleon III's crucial line of information on German troops at the front was actually newspapers from the rear.

Of course, this is understandable. Europe lacked a residency policy, and people moved between countries, especially during wartime. When a war broke out, it prompted mass migrations across Europe. Furthermore, European countries are small, any disturbance is easily detected, so in such cases, intelligence work needs little emphasis.

Spending more on budgeting cannot compare in effectiveness to making a few more friends or family connections in Europe. Given the complex relationships among European nobles, they remain the easiest source for gathering information.

From central to local levels, nobles ran everything in Europe, especially at the grassroots level—the noble landlords directly connected with local residents and controlled every aspect of life, including population data.

Back then, East Africa managed to get so many Germans to migrate from Southern Germany through relationships with southern German nobles. In rural areas where the population exploded, people became merely numbers, harvested as one batch after another.

And with Germany's population density, it's even more so. So absorbing this excess population in East Africa proved beneficial for both sides.

After all, when the population exceeds the manageable range, it inevitably causes social issues. While Germany doesn't own vast colonies like Britain, if Brits could produce more children, the British government might be delighted, always having places to settle them since even criminals had a continent to be exiled to.

German population overflow will inevitably drift towards "culturally akin areas" like East Africa. Of course, this process ceased once Germany industrialized and became a new population-importing country globally.

However, the relatively slow-developing Austria-Hungary has yet to escape this state, although its annual population outflow remains within a reasonable range, with exceptions during wartime, like the last Italo-Austrian War that led to significant population loss in Venice.

This was beneficial for Austria-Hungary, as East Africa absorbed many Austrian immigrants, mostly Slavs and Italians, greatly easing ethnic tensions within Austria-Hungary.

Of course, East Africa's actions also caused some negative effects: Germany and Austria-Hungary no longer acted as aggressively as in the past. As social contradictions eased, it averted a governance crisis to some extent, negating the need for drastic war means for distraction.

The primary reflection of this fact was in the recent Russo-Turkish War, where Austria-Hungary didn't exhibit the opportunistic and ugly demeanor seen in the past timeline. Now, Russo-Austro relations are far less acute than in the past, allowing Bismarck to maintain the relationship within the European Three Kingdoms alliance.