Drawing on a wide range of archives, historical publications, oral history, graphic, audiovisual and web sources, Geert Castryck presents Kigoma-Ujiji as both shaping and being shaped by global transformations. On the surface, the book offers almost two centuries of urban history on Lake Tanganyika in western Tanzania, close to the Burundian and Congolese borders, in a place that has been a transport hub throughout that time. Beneath the surface, it is also about major transformations on a global scale, and about people dealing with and coping with these global challenges far from the supposed global powerhouses.

Urbanization and infrastructure, colonization and decolonization, liberalization and democratization, war refugees, world heritage and translocal identities are the entry points for interpreting transformations that are local and global at the same time. The author uses the analytical categories of "liminal space" and "portal of globalization" to link the marginality and uncertainty that characterize the successive transformations in Kigoma-Ujiji with the urban resilience and creativity used to manage these transformations.