The new law had another consequence, too – pushing thousands of men to attempt to escape the Carrier Corps by seeking employment on European farms, thereby abandoning their independence and their own plots. The law took men away from their homes, ripped African communal life apart, and was bitterly resented. With so many men seeking employment, laws of supply and demand came into play. Africans were compelled to accept longer, less-advantageous contracts from white civilian employers. Rather than three-month contracts, many had to accept year-long ones. The ordinance also slashed the wages paid to carriers by two-thirds, from 15 rupees per month at the start of the war to 5 rupees; carriers even had to pay 2 rupees for their own metal identification tags, which were introduced as a means to manage the huge numbers of men conscripted. (The tags were uncomfortably similar to those issued by the Germans to the inmates of their concentration camps in South West Africa a decade earlier.) The whole carrier system rapidly became a form of compulsory labour that was distinguishable from slavery only by its derisory wages. The decision, in 1916, to confront Lettow-Vorbeck across a potentially vast battlefield, with a large multinational force, ushered in an enormous rise in the size of the Carrier Corps. Government recruiters now scoured the continent looking for eligible men. Some black Africans sought escape by leaving their villages, squatting on European farms, or heading to the cities. Chiefs were threatened with fines or imprisonment if they attempted to evade the attentions of the recruiters.
Once the invasion of German East Africa was under way, the death toll among the carriers quickly rose. They were expected to march hundreds of miles, bearing loads of 40–60 pounds, over improvised roads and tracks beaten through the bush. The supply lines took men across different landscapes, forcing them to endure huge climatic changes. In the cold highlands men froze. It was not unknown for carriers to die from pneumonia while crossing the hills, while others, in the same column and on the same expedition, would later fall prey to tropical malaria when they reached the warmer, wetter regions. Things were made worse because of failures to supply the suppliers. From the earliest campaigns of 1914, sickness rates among porters had been worryingly high and sanitation poor. Carriers, weakened by exhaustion, were made yet more vulnerable by inadequate rations. Those for carriers were often of an especially low quality. Mealie meal that contained particles of grit caused diarrhoea, which in turn led to often-fatal dysentery, especially hundreds of miles away from medical assistance. Sudden changes in rations could be just as disastrous. Men used to eating green vegetables were given maize, badly cooked rice or mealie meal and beans. The history of European involvement in Africa, and the work of European anthropologists, had long demonstrated the potentially devastating effects that radical changes in diet could have upon men undergoing such arduous journeys. Yet these lessons were unlearned, and warning voices went unheeded.
The scale of recruitment to the Carrier Corps was vast. By the end of the 1917, the majority of men in the British colonies that bordered German East Africa had served as carriers. Nyasaland sent 86 per cent of its available manpower to carry the arms and materials of the British forces, while distant Nigeria was required to produce 4,000 porters each month. By the end of the war in Africa, over 1 million men had been forced – one way or another – to work on the British supply lines. From March 1916 onwards, as Lettow-Vorbeck was pushed back from the north of the German colony, the conquered regions became additional recruiting grounds as men who had served the Germans as carriers were now seized by the British.
There was a direct link between the enormity of the recruitment drive and the enormity of the battle zone, and here the cruel arithmetic of military supply stoked the fires of a human catastrophe. A carrier in East Africa had to bear not only the load he was supposed to deliver to the front, but his own food too. It meant that at a certain point, the law of diminishing returns made it virtually impossible to supply a distant army. This had two immediate consequences. The first was that the rations of carriers were maintained at levels that were inadequate for human health. The other was that in order to get food and ammunition to the most distant battle zones literally thousands of men were required for each ton of supplies, which increased the demand for men and widened the scope and scale of the recruitment drives. The vast size of the Carrier Corps had other unintended consequences. The greater the number of men on any march, the greater the risk that outbreaks of communicable disease would decimate their columns. The more men living together, and sleeping in the fields and forests at night, the more they polluted their own water supplies, spreading disease. The greater the distances marched, the higher the number of men who died because they were unable to reach distant medical centres.
The effect of mass mortality among the carriers was felt far beyond the supply lines, too. The greater the number of men who failed to return from their periods of service, the more their depleted communities at home struggled to work their fields and feed themselves. The inevitable and predictable consequence of the imposition of mass recruitment on communities whose food security was tenuous at the best of times was that when the rains failed – as they did in parts of East Africa in 1916 and 1917 – there was widespread famine.
Despite these immense depredations visited upon the British Empire’s African subjects, for historic reasons the British were always fearful of being accused of slavery. In German East Africa, too, for political reasons they hoped to avoid, as much as was possible, offending the local population in a region they hoped to take control of after the war. Derisory wages for carriers offered the British a moral fig-leaf; but the Germans often did not even bother with this, resorting to the open use of forced labour. Moral qualms seem to have little troubled the minds of Lettow-Vorbeck and Schnee.32 The Germans repeatedly, and in the end routinely, resorted to forced recruitment. While the carriers who were directly linked to each fighting company – often specialists who knew how to transport key pieces of military kit – were paid, the thousands of African men who found themselves forced to work the German supply lines were not. In the latter stages of the war, when Lettow-Vorbeck’s Askari were increasingly prone to desertion and food was scarce, the Germans descended on villages and simply abducted men. There are accounts of carriers being tied together with rope and other reports of men being shot dead for attempting to escape their bondage. Schnee kept poor records of the number of carriers ‘recruited’ by the German forces. As most were not being paid, the incentive to even record names, dates of work or dates of death for them was minimal. Records of others – the forced conscripts as opposed to the virtual slaves – offer a far from complete picture. This lack of documentation allowed Germany after the war to confect ludicrously low official estimates of men press-ganged into service and those who died – a fiction maintained in the face of evidence to the contrary between the wars, when Lettow-Vorbeck and his apologists were mythologizing the conflict as one characterized by chivalry and decency, and in which Africans had willingly and loyally served their German masters. Behind closed doors there was more honesty, though. One post-war German estimate put the number of porters who had died servicing the Germans at between 100,000 and 120,000. The same source believed 250,000 had perished supplying British imperial forces.
The British kept some records, but then suppressed them after the war. The scale of the losses strongly suggests that carriers were treated, at times, as a disposable resource, far less valuable that fighting men. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the high casualty rates were regarded by some as an acceptable and inevitable cost of the war. One colonial official admitted that the British record in East Africa ‘only stopped short of a scandal because the people who suffered most were the carriers – and after all who cares about native carriers’.33 In 1922 the British governor of what was by then known as Tanganyika Territory argued that for the dead of the Carrier Corps to be remembered with individual graves, as white soldiers were, would be a waste of public money. The notes of a meeting between representatives of the Impe
rial War Graves Commission and the governor recorded that he ‘considered that the vast Carrier Corps Cemeteries at Dar es Salaam and elsewhere should be allowed to revert to nature as speedily as possible & did not care to contemplate the statistics of the native African lives lost in trying to overcome the transportation difficulties of the campaign in East Africa’.34 Such an unwillingness to grant individual graves was influenced by ideas of race and religion, by a belief that as ‘people of nature’ Africans would not understand the significance of individual burials. But it was also motivated by a desire on the part of the British authorities and government not to draw to public attention, in Africa and elsewhere, to the numbers of carriers who had died in East Africa.
Yet even in the midst of war, there were British soldiers, missionaries, doctors and officials who were aware of the suffering of the Carrier Corps and regarded it as scandalous. And overall, it is difficult to read the history of the Carrier Corps as anything other than a scandal of neglect for their lives, conditions, and – after the war – for their memory.35
Lettow-Vorbeck’s press-ganging of Africans was the darker side to what was trumpeted then and later as his capacity to live off the land. The legend created was that he fought what one commander described as ‘the cheapest war in the world’, in which his army took self-sufficiency to new and undreamed of levels – a make-do-and-mend war, that was fought at cost price. At the same time as the British naval blockade was forcing German civilians to drink coffee made of ground acorns, and tea made from linden blossom (and thereby bringing the word ersatz – ‘substitute’ – into common usage on the German Home Front), Lettow-Vorbeck and his army were learning how to create ersatz war materials. They fabricated the insulators for their telegraph wires from empty beer bottles with the bottoms removed, as well as from bones; they distilled a form of quinine, in drink form, that became known as ‘Lettow Schnapps’. Although repulsive to taste, it was nonetheless effective. The undoubted resourcefulness of Lettow-Vorbeck’s men allowed him to overcome many of the challenges posed by the British blockade (though that was far from airtight), and such ingenuity was celebrated both during and after the war.
This colourful tale of human creativity in the face of adversity has a darker sub-plot, though, not limited to the procurement of forced labour. The British Carrier Corps system, calamitous as it was, had been deemed by London to be a lesser evil than a British attempt to live off the land. For what the term meant in East and Central Africa during the First World War was the wide-scale confiscation of food from civilians. Armies on all sides requisitioned food from the villages they marched through. British units were known to pay in cash for it. For the more remote communities, cash for their precious food supplies was not much use, especially when, with so many of their men already serving as carriers, their food security was already dangerously fragile. But, as the Germans had few other means of supply, the demands they placed upon civilians tended to be more costly. At times, the German columns paid for supplies with promissory notes given to village leaders, assuring them that all debts would be repaid after a German victory. But on other occasions food was simply stolen.
Lettow-Vorbeck’s travelling contingent of doctors attempted, at times, to make up for requisition demands by helping to treat the sick in the villages they passed through. Their lack of medical supplies limited the effectiveness of these ‘acts of kindness’ (and were in any case outweighed by the underlying self-interest). However, alongside his self-sufficiency, the war-time and post-war mythologizing of Lettow-Vorbeck focused on the ingenuity of his medical staff. Although the rates of ill health between the two armies were not that divergent, historians of the East African campaign have been rightly impressed at the capacity of the German forces, without access to proper supplies, to control the levels of disease. Medical care within Lettow-Vorbeck’s army was very well maintained and advanced. His doctors were not only competent, they were even innovative, exhibiting a professional curiosity and always rising to the challenge of extremely testing circumstances. The Schutztruppe had the advantage of inheriting a large medical staff present in the colony when war broke out. A research programme into sleeping-sickness was under way, and these civilian doctors were added to the Schutztruppe, giving Lettow-Vorbeck a total of sixty-three medical staff.36
Their expertise was much needed, given that disease and epidemics played such a critical role in this conflict – and that the war of movement itself became the means of the transmission of disease across a great swathe of the continent. There was a widespread belief among the colonial powers that all Africans possessed some degree of immunity to tropical disease. But as the death rates on all sides demonstrated, this was a fantasy. Men recruited from West Africa, or from the dry south of the continent, were just as vulnerable to the diseases of East Africa as any European. Immunity, as much as it existed, was highly localized, and once men were forced to leave their own regions they died in vast numbers from malaria and dysentery. There had been a similar strain of climatic determinism in the decision to deploy the South Africans to East Africa in 1915: the belief that Boer commandos, used to the arid lands of the South African veldt or the acacia scrub of South West Africa, were somehow naturally adapted to the tropical conditions of East Africa went largely unchallenged. And as the armies marched, the diseases marched alongside them, conquering new territories, such that the war changed the disease map of a continent, introducing diseases into areas where they had never previously existed. Sleeping sickness, which originated in West Africa, was spread into new regions, beginning an epidemic that lasted until the 1940s.
The cat-and-mouse game of Lettow-Vorbeck and his pursuers – and all that it entailed – had another two years to run after the capture of Dar es Salaam. Yet the First World War in Africa has often been dismissed as a ‘side show’, a minor footnote in the story of a European conflict. While the outcome of the First World War was unquestionably decided on the battlefields of the Eastern and Western fronts, the war’s impact on Africa was enormous. For millions of Africans the war was a disaster. Two million Africans were dragged into the conflict; the number who died is unknowable. At least 100,000 of the 1 million carriers recruited by the British died; some suspect the actual figure was at least double that number. Around another 200,000 Africans died of the effects of the Spanish Flu – spread across their continent by the war. Millions more were affected by the fighting, their crops seized and their men conscripted by force and taken from their communities, leaving women, children and the elderly struggling to plant and harvest crops. At times, the forced conscription of men into the ranks of the European-led armies became disturbingly redolent of the slave raids of past centuries, while the scorched-earth policies followed by the German forces in East Africa were horribly in keeping with the decades of repression, exploitation and extermination that had characterized the Scramble for Africa.
By some estimates a million Africans died directly or indirectly as a consequence of the First World War. Disease, the famines that followed forced conscription, and the requisition of food stocks all killed far more Africans than the actual fighting. An official post-war German estimate suggested that around 300,000 civilians had died from starvation attributed to the conflict.37 In 1917 it was estimated that one in twenty of the entire population of Africa had died as a result of the war.38 Ludwig Deppe, a doctor who fought alongside Lettow-Vorbeck, admitted in his account of the campaign that the European-led armies had become a scourge on the continent, a force for devastation and death comparable to those that had ravaged Germany and Central Europe three centuries earlier. ‘Behind us,’ he wrote, ‘we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own enemies in the Thirty Years War.’39
Between 1914 and 1918, Africa and its people were viewed by the European powers primarily as a resource, as they had been for much
of the previous century, and as they were to be again once the guns fell silent. One consequence was that from French North Africa, through the French and British colonies in West Africa, down as far south as British Nyasaland, the war sparked a series of uprisings and revolts as people attempted to resist the increasingly repressive policies of their colonizers. The end of the war in Africa did not herald a return to normality but rather ushered in another great carve-up of land and peoples. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and beneath a legalistic fig-leaf provided by the League of Nations, Africans of the former German colonies found themselves and their lands transferred to the empires of the victorious powers after 1919. New rulers arrived with new languages, customs, racial theories and their own interpretations of the civilizing mission. Often this meant little more than the local administrators wore a different uniform and spoke English or French rather than German; but these transferred territories, stripped from Germany and repackaged as ‘mandates’, were enormous in scale. ‘Little Togoland’ was certainly little compared to other African colonies; but it was larger than Belgium and the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine combined.40 German Cameroon was about the same size as pre-1914 Germany. German South West Africa was one-and-a-half times the size of the fatherland, and German East Africa twice its size.
In both its costs and its consequences the First World War in Africa was far from being a meaningless side show in Europe’s war. It became the last phase of the Scramble for Africa.
*1 For a long, if self-interested, list of such articles, see ‘English Pre-War Tributes to German Colonialisation Work Before the War’, in The Treatment of Native and Other Populations in the Colonial Possessions of Germany and England: An Answer to the English Blue Book of August 1918, 1919.
*2 This action is often reported as having been the work of the British cable ship the CS Telconia, reiterating a mistake that first appeared in Barbara Tuchman’s 1959 book, The Zimmermann Telegram.
The World's War Page 17
