The war on the Western Front was the first conflict in history in which the majority of casualties were victims of the battlefield rather than disease. In Africa, the old rules of war remained in force, and here the mosquito and the tsetse-fly killed far more men and animals than the bullet or the bayonet. At times, dysentery killed 40 per cent of those infected. Whole units were decimated by malaria and, to a lesser extent, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Others fell victim to black-water fever, a deadly complication of malaria, or were infected with Guinea worms, whose ravenous larvae gather, agonizingly, in the lungs, eyes, joints or genitals, leaving men permanently crippled. The figures are stark. In July 1916, for every one combat casualty, thirty-one men were put out of action by sickness, disease, exhaustion or other non-combat-related factors.22 The 9th South African Infantry were able to field 1,135 men in February 1916; by October, only 116 men were fit for service.23 The 2nd Rhodesians recorded 10,626 cases of sickness, 3,127 of them malaria-related; they lost a mere 36 men killed in combat, yet by the end of 1916 only 30 of their number were designated fit for active service.24 Meinertzhagen, a fierce critic of Smuts’s campaign strategy, summed up the situation in September 1916: ‘Our battlefield casualties have been negligible. What Smuts saves on the battlefield he loses in hospitals, for it is Africa and its climate we are really fighting, not the Germans.’25
The strategy began to disintegrate – in particular the notion of a mounted campaign. The virus and bacillus that had decimated his army had an equally devastating impact on the horses and mules they had brought with them. On the Western Front it was the machine-gun and fast-firing artillery that bought the age of cavalry to an end. In East Africa it was the tsetse-fly. Swarming down from the vines in their millions, and infecting horses with nagana fever, this tiny parasite proved itself a far more effective killer of horses than anything that had ever been produced by the great armaments factories of the Ruhr. In 1916 the monthly losses of horses ran at 100 per cent.26 This bleak reality was one that the South Africans were disastrously slow to accept. Aware of his enemies’ reliance on horses, Lettow-Vorbeck had calculatedly drawn the South Africans into regions in which the tsetse fly was most prevalent. Cavalry quickly became infantry, and supply trains ground to a halt. In the rains of spring 1916, the supply lines that were supposed to have fed and watered the advancing army became streams of black mud, littered with the bodies of tens of thousands of horses and mules.
Seasonal rains compounded the other problems, resulting in a campaign punctuated by periods of inactivity, in which armies were unable to reach one another. When forces did clash, they were often so depleted and exhausted by long marches that the fighting was short, as pursuit or encirclement across difficult terrain was beyond the capacity of even the victorious force. Nevertheless, despite the distances and the difficulties, there was a handful of set-piece battles. Although minuscule by the standards of the Western and Eastern fronts, such engagements were, in both tactics and spirit, of a piece with those being fought in Europe. When armies clashed over established positions in East Africa, the rapid fire of the Maxim machine gun and fury of artillery bombardments forced men to shelter in trenches and to protect those positions behind barbed wire. As in Flanders or Picardy, trenches in Africa had strongpoints and redoubts, and they witnessed frontal assaults, trench-raids and night-attacks. Despite the enormous logistical difficulties of massing a meaningful number of guns in any one place, there were still, on occasion, ferocious bombardments. At the end of 1916, at the Battle of Kibata, Lettow-Vorbeck besieged a force that was dug into entrenched positions. Using the guns stripped from the Königsberg, the Germans pounded the men of the British Gold Coast Regiment and the 129th Baluchis for days. Major Harold Lewis, who had served with the 129th Baluchis in France, now wrote to his mother on Boxing Day 1916 describing it:
We have had a very hard time, and for some days it was touch and go whether we should be able to hold our own against the Huns… all day long my left piquet [line of troops] was subjected to desultory bombardment from several guns, and also from heavy machine gun fire. An hour before dark, this developed into an intense bombardment, and except for the size of the shells, I never experienced such a hot one, even in France…
Fighting alongside the King’s African Rifles, Major Lewis and the 129th Baluchis sought to defend their lines by launching a night attack against the German positions. Lewis’s vivid account of it could well have come from any of thousands of similar incidents on the Western Front:
We planned it so as to leave our trenches, and creep up to the Huns in the inky blackness, and to have moonlight as soon as we had the trenches. Accordingly at 11pm the line of bombers crept over the parapet and formed a line in the darkness… Bombs were thrown, the guns and machine-guns opened up and the still black night became pandemonium.27
DAR ES SALAAM, 2014. Tucked away between a new office block and an industrial works on the edge of Dar es Salaam, in modern Tanzania, lies the city’s War Cemetery. It is as well-tended and verdant as any in France or Belgium, and it is the resting place of 1,764 Allied victims of the East African campaign. Another 1,500 are remembered on a series of memorial walls. The long columns of neatly engraved names speak of a truly global conflict fought by men from opposite ends of the African continent. The names of men from Nigeria and Benin with Yoruba prefixes like ‘Ade’ and ‘Olu’ flow into clusters of Ashanti, Grunshi and Fante names – ‘Kofi’, ‘Kobli’ – men who left their homes in what today are Ghana and Burkina Faso to fight the Germans. The lists of the Indian dead – Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus – evoke the whole breadth of the subcontinent. Alongside them are the names of Arab riflemen from Zanzibar, poor peasant farmers of the Chinese Labour Corps, troops of the locally recruited King’s African Rifles, engineers from the East African Railways, and translators from the East African Intelligence Department. Peppered among the soldiers is the occasional sailor – men who died on their transport ships while in transit or fell sick in Dar es Salaam. Beneath the symmetrical lines of headstones, clustered around a huge stone cross in the centre of one of the world’s most multi-faith cemeteries, lie the remains of officers and men from the Burma Police, the South African Mounted Brigade, the East African Medical Corps and the Indian Veterinary Corps.
The defence of Kibata had fallen, in large part, to Indian and British African troops, and in this respect it was indicative of the way the war in German East Africa was developing. Although often thought of as the ‘South African’ phase, 1916 witnessed the increasing internationalization of the African conflict. As the campaign became more costly and logistically complex, and as more men became available from theatres elsewhere, the British drew in soldiers and labourers from across their empire – and even beyond. Alongside the South Africans were Indian units that had spent 1914 and 1915 on the Western Front. Among them were the 40th Pathans, the so-called ‘Forty Thieves’, who had fought at the Second Battle of Ypres and at Loos in 1915: hardened veterans of the war in Europe.*3 Despite the heavy casualties they had already endured, especially among their officers, the Pathans were still among the very toughest regiments in the Indian Army. They had been recruited from ethnic groups in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan which the British still confidently regarded as true ‘martial races’. Alongside them were the 129th Baluchis, the regiment of Major Harold Lewis and Khudadad Khan, the Victoria Cross recipient and hero of the First Battle of Ypres. The Baluchis brought to Africa the lessons they had learnt in the Ypres Salient and at Neuve Chapelle in 1915. But by 1916 they had a somewhat dubious reputation. After their withdrawal from the line in France, and following the murder of a British officer, they were suspected of having fallen under the influence of Ottoman propaganda, and they had refused to fight against the Turks in Mesopotamia, whom they saw as fellow Muslims. Weakened by their experiences in the trenches and, as far as the British were concerned, contaminated by enemy propaganda, they were nevertheless deemed suitable for East Africa, a theatre in which they m
ight be useful, if not much more than that. As it turned out, the men of the 129th excelled in East Africa, as the letters of Harold Lewis demonstrate. Indian units like the Pathans and Baluchis found themselves in Africa serving alongside white Rhodesians, white South Africans and white volunteer units from British East Africa, for whom the concept of the Indian ‘martial races’ was at odds with prevailing racial attitudes in their home colonies, where both whites and black Africans had come to regard Indians as ‘coolies’ rather than soldiers. Early examples of Indian heroism under enemy fire went some way to undermining these prejudices.
As well as becoming more imperial in composition, the army that confronted Lettow-Vorbeck over the course of 1916 became more African. In July, the Gold Coast Regiment – men from modern-day Ghana – were deployed in East Africa. In November, four regiments of the West African Frontier Force arrived from Lagos, their deployment having been delayed by concerns over internal security in British Nigeria, where conscription of men as military labourers had begun to grate. Other Africans, recruited into the King’s African Rifles, came from Sudan, Rhodesia, Ethiopia and Nyasaland. These men, brought to a distant, multicultural, multiracial military zone, hundreds of miles from their homes, were – like most of the combatants from outside German East Africa – displaced and dislocated. Yoruba, Ibo or Hausa Nigerians, or Ashanti, Fante and Grunshi men from the Gold Coast were now as far removed from their own nations and cultures as any British soldier in the trenches of Belgium – arguably more so. Perhaps most displaced of all were the men of the Caribbean islands.28 In 1916, the West India Regiment, after having defeated the German-led forces in Cameroon, were dispatched to East Africa. There, along with elements of the recently formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR), created in the face of War Office hostility, they found themselves now on the other side of an alien continent, about which they knew very little and from which their ancestors had been taken centuries earlier.
Among the longest of the lists of names etched into the memorial walls of the Dar es Salaam War Cemetery are of the men of the King’s African Rifles (KAR), the indigenous armed force of British East Africa. Throughout 1916, and in the face of constant objections and complaints from sections of the white settler community in British East Africa, Britain expanded recruitment into the KAR. Long neglected, and looked upon with suspicion by the authorities in Nairobi before the war, the regiment had been only 3,000-strong in 1914. By 1918 it had expanded to over 35,000 men. As with the German Askari, the KAR had been formed to put down ‘risings of the native population’.29 Both the KAR and the Askari were mercenary forces, members of a respected profession. Both were relatively well paid and far better rewarded and treated than the hundreds of thousands of their fellow Africans recruited or press-ganged into service as carriers. Military service offered an income, an impressive uniform and the chance to gain respect in their communities. For these reasons, and others, many young African men saw the war, even though it was not their war, as opening the door to possibilities – just as for the thousands of young Europeans who had rushed to the recruiting stations of 1914. But these colonial subjects were not being asked to fight for their nation, their liberty or their freedom. They were not the citizens of nations but the subjects of empires, and second-class subjects at that.
Understanding their true position, and fully aware that the colonial authorities showed little loyalty to Africans, there were those who made tactical and rational decisions about which side to fight for. When the 2nd KAR had been disbanded in 1911, a number of its former soldiers crossed the border into German East Africa and joined the Askari. This pattern was to be repeated throughout the war in East Africa, with men choosing to fight with the Askari for one season only to leave and change sides the next, if by doing so pay, prospects and conditions looked better. There was therefore an unknown number of African soldiers who fought for both the German and British empires.
The complex racial and cultural make-up of the force that Britain amassed for the invasion of German East Africa has been largely forgotten, however. It has been overwhelmed in historical memory by a popular narrative that focuses on the military talents of Lettow-Vorbeck.
Dar es Salaam – long abandoned by Schnee as German East Africa’s capital – finally fell to the Allies in September 1916. It not only became the key port feeding men and materials into the war, it was also designated the logistical centre of the war in East Africa. A cluster of hospitals sprang up, despite the fact that the city was an infamously sickly and malarial settlement. Its capture helped ease British supply problems, but also concentrated thousands of men in a city where disease was easily incubated and infection spread rapidly. Among the most tragic stories of how disease and climate conspired to wreak tragedy is that of the 800 men of the Seychelles Labour Battalion. Representing 15 per cent of the entire population of those tiny islands, they arrived in Dar es Salaam in December 1916 to work on the docks and in the supply lines. Within six months, 335 of them had died, mainly of malaria and bacillary dysentery.30 Their deployment was so short, and so disastrous, that little is known of them. The governmental records themselves seem unable to agree even on units’ official names. Only one of the Seychelles labourers has a known grave within the city. The remains of three others lie in cemeteries in Bombay, while 289 have no known grave.
By September 1916, Lettow-Vorbeck’s force had been pushed into the southern fringes of the colony, and by now the ports of Tanga, Lindi, Kilwa and Sudi had all fallen, in addition to Dar es Salaam, as had the Central Railway on which the Germans had long relied. Smuts’s own East African war was almost over too. On 27 December 1916 he was summoned to London to take up a seat in the Imperial War Cabinet, and the remaining South African forces were evacuated and later readied for deployment on the Western Front. Smuts left for London on 20 January 1917, having effectively declared victory, and with it – in his eyes – demonstrating the supremacy of white soldiers over the Askari, whom he had dismissed back in March 1916 as a force of ‘damned kaffirs’. Not only was this a misrepresentation of his own multinational force, but when the South Africans arrived home, their emaciated frames and harrowing stories led to a public outcry against Smuts, who was accused of having allowed his men to starve and permitted medical facilities to slip into a state of crisis. What success there was had been achieved at a high cost – indeed, much higher than the welcoming crowds in Durban and Pretoria yet knew. The virtual collapse of the lines of supply and the scandalous state of the army’s medical infrastructure had exacted a terrible toll on the fighting men. The catastrophic losses of horses and mules had resulted in whole units going days without food. Rations were constantly short, and sick men died because they were not evacuated fast enough. The obliteration of the cavalry mounts and pack animals by the tsetse-fly not only undermined Smuts’s campaign strategy; it was the prelude to the greatest human tragedy of all, which stemmed from the fact that the war could only now be carried to the enemy on the backs of human beings.
The largest ‘army’ of the East African war was neither the Askari, nor the South Africans, nor the King’s African Rifles, but the enormous forces of carriers who laboured for all sides. Their conditions were for the most part far worse than those endured by the soldiers, and their death toll can be measured not in thousands, or tens of thousands, but in hundreds of thousands. It was a war in which the vast majority of victims were civilians – either the men drawn into the conflict as labourers or people through whose villages and fields the war passed, leaving devastation and famine in its wake. Even by 1916 the war had become what we would today call a ‘humanitarian disaster’.
In the first months of the conflict, the British had been able to recruit carriers on a voluntary basis from among the peoples of British East Africa. They were needed only in relatively small numbers and were at this stage paid comparatively well. In those confident days, when the distances over which the war was fought remained manageable and almost everyone felt that the conflict would so
on be over, the rations given to the carriers were mostly adequate and there was some effective oversight of their conditions. Things quickly began to change in 1916, when Smuts’s campaign led to a renewed war of movement across the often inhospitable terrain. In anticipation of such an eventuality, the British in 1915 had passed the Native Followers Recruitment Ordinance, a law that allowed for compulsory recruitment of men from across British-ruled Africa to work as carriers.31 It was in theory a wartime contingency measure, but few provisions of the conflict were as effective at servicing the needs of the war while simultaneously also tightening European domination over Africans and advancing the economic interests of the white minority. The ordinance allowed the military authorities to press-gang into service all African men except those already working for Europeans. This had the effect of funnelling the required 3,000 men a month into what was now officially called the Carrier Corps.
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