A History of the East African Coast

by Charles Cornelius

  Part of the problem was the inability of the sultan's representatives to do anything to contain German and British actions, so the Swahili took matters into their own hands. The leader of the uprising was Abushiri bin Salim el-Harthi, after whom the uprising, the Abushiri War, was named. Abushiri quickly drove the Germans out of Pangani and Bagamoyo, but even he soon lost control of the uprising and within a short time mob rule had taken over, spreading into the British-controlled region with European mission stations becoming as much a target as trading and administrative posts. Thousands of Africans, as well as many Europeans, died in the uprising.

  An Anglo-German blockade of the coast, supported by the Italian and Portuguese, began early in 1889 on the pretext of suppressing the slave trade. The German army under Major Hermann von Wissmann began the fight back, suppressing the revolt north of Dar es Salaam and chasing Abushiri around the countryside, and by the end of 1889 the uprising had been contained. Abushiri was captured and hanged at Bagamoyo on 15th December.

  Following the sudden death of Khalifa in February 1890, another son of Seyyid Said, Ali, became Sultan of Zanzibar. Within five months, Ali found himself stripped of even more of his authority when the British and German governments negotiated a new treaty between themselves. Germany bought the ten mile wide coastal strip south of the Umba River from the sultan for four million marks, while a British protectorate was declared over the northern coastal strip, together with the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, effectively confirming a situation that had existed in all but name for years. The Germans also agreed to hand Witu over to the British in return for Heligoland, a tiny island in the North Sea.

  Zanzibar was now just a pawn in the great game of international politics and the treatment meted out to successive sultans even met opposition in the British parliament. One MP scoffed at the idea of protectorates, denouncing the British and German governments as robbers who, “having stripped a man of all that belonged to him, discussed who should protect him.” Another MP, Labouchere, accused the British government of being the most thorough land grabbers in history, asserting that “Africa belongs to the Africans”.

  The new agreement changed little as far as the Swahili were concerned, so it's hardly surprising that resistance continued. In 1890 a group of Germans set up a camp near Witu and started chopping down the forests that surrounded the town. This may not have seemed much of a crisis, but the fact that they were heavily armed and spending much of their spare time engaged in military exercises led the Witu sultan, Fumo Bakari, to fear they were about to launch a coup attempt. So he stole their weapons. Naturally this upset the Germans, so they marched on Witu and with their remaining guns opened fire. In the ensuing battle, two Swahili and ten Germans lost their lives.

  Soon a full scale uprising was in motion with Fumo Bakari determined to overthrow the so-called British protectorate that had been established earlier that year. Facing 3000 armed Swahili, the British mobilised no less than 13 ships and in October 1890 landed 1000 troops at Kipini from where they advanced on Witu. The British sacked the town when they got there, burning everything including the sultan's palace which contained the ancient court chronicles of Pate. Unrest in Witu continued for four years until Fumo Bakari's successor was arrested by the British.

  Then the Mazrui took up arms. The remnants of the family that had once ruled Mombasa and resisted the Omani so successfully were still an influential power, but they had been remarkably quiet as German and British power grew, perhaps happy that it was being done at the expense of Zanzibar's sultans. But when the British intervened in a Mazrui succession dispute, the rejected claimant, Mbarak bin Rashid, decided that enough was enough and took up arms against the British authorities. By the end of 1895 he had an army of 1600 troops which roamed the coast attacking European mission stations, trading bases and British troops. The uprising was only put down by an Indian regiment brought to Mombasa in March 1896, forcing Mbarak to flee into the German protectorate.

  Then things suddenly got much worse for the British. Up till now, the uprisings had been confined to the mainland, while Zanzibar had quietly succumbed to British dominance. However, anti-European sentiments on the island were growing and when the sultan, Hamid, died suddenly on the morning of 25th August 1896, these tensions erupted into open rebellion. The British had already decided upon a successor to Seyyid Hamid but one of those passed over for the sultanate made an attempt to seize the sultanate for himself. He was one of Hamid's cousins, Khalid, and the popular choice for sultan amongst the island's population. Khalid's attempt to seize the sultanate was, of course, what any worthy Omani royal was expected to do, but in the wake of the Witu and Mazrui uprisings, the British were in no mood to play along.

  When the British authorities heard the news of Hamid's death, the acting consul marched with General Mathews to the main palace, the Beit al-Sahel, only to find Khalid and fifty of his supporters with their guns trained on them. With a threatening mob gathering, the consul and general made as dignified a retreat as they could in the circumstances.

  Khalid was in a reasonably strong position. He could count on the assistance of the sultan's personal army consisting of 2500 troops and the support of most Zanzibaris, while in the harbour he had his own gunboat, The Glasgow. He stationed some troops in the Omani fort and trained his guns and cannon on the English Club, where most of the Europeans had now gathered, and on two British gunboats, The Thrush and The Sparrow, anchored in the harbour. However, the following day two British warships arrived including the St George, commanded by Rear Admiral Rawson and at 7am the following morning, Rawson issued an ultimatum to Khalid to pull down his flag from over the palace, have his followers lay down their arms and present himself at the Customs House. Failure to do so by 9am would lead to the British ships opening fire.

  Perhaps Khalid had not expected the British to resist with force. They had always preferred negotiation and in recent months had been displaying more of a laissez-faire attitude in Zanzibar. But the ultimatum did not leave Khalid with any doubt as to British intentions. At 8am he sent an envoy to Rawson requesting negotiations, but the admiral was not moved.

  As the palace clock struck at 9am, The Thrush and The Sparrow, and a cruiser, The Racoon, opened fire. The American consul, Dorsey Mohun, described the scene:

   

  “Shells and splinters of shells were screaming and whistling through the air ... great volumes of smoke were now being wafted lazily away in the light breeze which had sprung up and I feared the town had caught fire but it was only the harem. Every five or ten minutes there would be a cessation in the fire to allow the Arabs a chance to haul down their colours but it was not until 9.45 when the flag came fluttering down that the fire ceased.”

   

  The bombardment of Zanzibar, lasting 45 minutes, was the shortest war in history, but it was also a massacre. The palace and the square in front of it had been packed with people, many armed but many simply bystanders expecting little more than some kind of fireworks display, but within 45 minutes, 500 of them had been killed, The Glasgow lay at the bottom of the harbour and two palaces, the Beit al-Sahel and the Beit al-Hakm behind it lay in ruins together with a lighthouse in front of the House of Wonders. Miraculously, the House of Wonders suffered only minor damage - even its chandeliers were intact - but the devastation elsewhere was on an horrendous scale. According to Dorsey Mohun,

   

  “the scene in the palace square was utter ruin. The small palace, old palace and harem were in flames ... the new palace had hundreds of shot holes in its walls and at the south-west angle in the third storey a shell had made a hole big enough to drive a coach through ... inside the [old] palace was a scene beyond description ....”

   

  Khalid fled to the German consulate where he was given asylum, boarded a German warship and fled to Dar es Salaam. By 1.30 in the afternoon, the British choice for sultan, Hamoud bin Muhammad, had been declared sultan, but at a terrible cost.
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  This appalling act of aggression in Zanzibar was proof to all that the British, like the Germans, were now very much in charge of the coast. And by then, control was no longer being enforced by the trading companies. The British and German governments now ruled the coast and its hinterland directly as imperial colonies.

   

   

  PART 5: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Colonial Rule

  The cost of running the mainland spheres of influence and maintaining a military presence along the coast proved to be, by the mid 1890s, too much of a burden for the British and German trading companies and by the time of the Zanzibar bombardment, both companies had folded. IBEA had been underfunded from the start and made little headway in developing commercial opportunities inland, although it did succeed in building a rough road from Mombasa into the Kenyan Highlands known as the Mackinnon Road to help stimulate trade. Travel along it was still slow, so in 1891 IBEA undertook its most ambitious venture of all, the construction of a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Within months rails had been shipped in and construction began. A few miles inland, all work was halted. IBEA was bankrupt.

  The Company was only saved by donations from missionary societies keen to see its work in Uganda continue, but three years later even Mackinnon was forced to admit that IBEA was in a hopeless situation. By then the dream of a railway line had been abandoned, its tracks pulled up and relaid in Mombasa to form a trolley service for the expatriates there. It was now clear that if Britain was to develop East Africa and build a railway through it, the task would have to be carried out by the British government, financed by the British taxpayer. In June 1894, IBEA sold its assets to the British government and the Sultan of Zanzibar was forced to repurchase the mainland sphere of influence for £150,000. On 1st July 1895 the mainland sphere of influence was declared a British protectorate, administered by the consul in Zanzibar. Once again the sultan had no say in the proceedings.

  The German East Africa Company had enjoyed more success, but it had been operating within a government protectorate for longer than IBEA and so had less of a military burden. Able to concentrate on developing commerce, it had by 1888 established thirty plantations along the coast growing sugar, tobacco, coffee, vanilla and, in 1892, sisal, a plant whose fibres made excellent rope and sacks, was introduced from Florida by the German botanist Richard Hindorf. It quickly became a huge money spinner and by 1908 there were ten million sisal plants in Tanzania, mainly around Tanga.

  In 1891, the German East Africa Company transferred its headquarters from Bagamoyo to Dar es Salaam, a town which, in the aftermath of the Abushiri War, was regarded as a much safer place to be. It gave the town created by Seyyid Majid a rebirth and under the control of Major Hermann von Wissmann, Dar quickly expanded, rising from a population of 350 people in 1889 to one of 24,000 by 1905. The town was now set to become one of the foremost on the coast.

  In May 1896, the British government began the construction of a railway line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects of the Victorian era. It traversed the arid Taru Desert, the lion country of Tsavo, the climb into the Kenyan Highlands and the precipitous slopes of the Rift Valley, courting diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness. The railway, built by over 32,000 Indian labourers, took over five years and £5½ million to build. At the same time, the Germans were constructing a railway from Tanga to Moshi and in 1905 started building another line from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, a town they would reach in 1914.

  The railways had a profound impact on the coast. To build them meant expanding the harbour at Dar es Salaam and, since there was no room to expand the old harbour in Mombasa, a new, deep-water port was constructed at Kilindini on the southern side of Mombasa Island. With rapid, direct access deep into the African interior made possible by the railways, the ports of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa, and to a lesser extent the one at Tanga, began to dominate trade along the coast. From 1897 to 1947 the population of Mombasa rose from 25,000 to 100,000 people. The growing importance of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam led to a decline in trade through such ports as Lamu, Malindi, Bagamoyo and Kilwa, but the port most seriously affected was Zanzibar since the railways meant its position offshore now isolated it from trade with the interior.

  The construction and maintenance of the railways were expensive affairs. In order to make them pay for themselves, traffic on the railways would have to increase and so the British and German governments encouraged Europeans to settle in the interior and farm the land in order to produce agricultural exports that could be conveyed to the coast on the railways. Ultimately this meant that the European authorities came to regard development of the interior as more important than development of the coast. In 1904, Britain began to administer the mainland protectorate separately from Zanzibar and in 1907 the protectorate's capital was transferred from Mombasa to Nairobi, a town which a few years earlier had been little more than a railway shunting yard. Nairobi now became the focus of attention for British colonial officials, whose main concern was to assist in the development of agriculture in the Kenyan Highlands.

  A quarter of a century earlier, the main concern of British officials had been the suppression of the slave trade. Having abolished the trade in 1873, the British had not taken direct action to wipe out the actual use of slaves for many years, realising that such an action might undermine the local economy. However, from 1897, slaves on Zanzibar who wanted freedom could be granted it through the courts, their owners receiving compensation. The same decree was issued along the rest of the coast in 1907, but the cost of this was such that in 1911, a Slavery Decree was passed which announced a deadline for compensation payments. Consequently, there was a sudden rush through the courts which led to the virtual disappearance of slavery along the coast.

  Imperial rivalry had grown steadily in East Africa, and in 1914 it plunged the European powers into a war of global proportions that included East Africa. British and German colonists quickly abandoned their farms to enlist as soldiers. And in Dar es Salaam, the Germans had an ace up their sleeve that might see them take control of the whole coast. The Konigsberg, one of a new generation of modern ships built in the first decade of the twentieth century, had arrived in Dar es Salaam in June 1914 under the command of Captain Max Looff to replace the colony's ageing steamship. When war broke out two months later, British shipping across the western Indian Ocean, plying the routes between Zanzibar, Mombasa, Aden and Bombay, suddenly came under direct threat.

  Sure enough, the day after war was declared, British fears were realised when The Konigsberg, sailing off the coast of Oman, captured and sank a British freighter, The City of Winchester. The situation would have been much worse for the British had it not been for The Konigsberg's chronic shortages of coal which was only temporarily relieved by taking on board The City of Winchester's coal stocks. When these ran out at the end of August, The Konigsberg was forced to retire to the sanctuary of the mangrove creeks of the Rufiji Delta opposite Mafia Island and await fresh supplies from her collier ship, The Somali. Once replenished, she was ready to pounce again.

  Looff had actually been planning a return to Germany once he had taken coal aboard, but as he was about to sail south towards the Cape of Good Hope he learned that a British cruiser, The Pegasus, was anchored at Zanzibar. Not one to let an opportunity slip by, Looff instead sailed north and sank The Pegasus with the loss of 38 lives. Then Looff set a course back to Germany, but within hours his ship had developed serious engine trouble, forcing her to limp back to the Rufiji Delta. The damaged parts were stripped from the ship and sent overland to Dar for repair, while Looff hid from the enraged British who, once realising that The Konigsberg was still somewhere in East African waters, launched a huge operation to find and destroy the cruiser.

  Five miles upstream, The Konigsberg was so secluded that the three British cruisers charged with finding her were unable to do so. Within a few weeks, Lo
off’s repaired engine parts had returned from Dar but, just as he was about to set sail, the British finally located the ship. However, with no knowledge of the tides and shallows of the Rufiji, the British could not mount a seaborne attack with their cruisers, so instead a blockade was mounted at the mouth of the river to prevent The Konigsberg from escaping.

  With The Konigsberg trapped, the British launched an attack on Tanga on November 2nd 1914. The British commander, General Aitken, expected to take Tanga in a day, but in the end the attack was a complete debacle. The outnumbered Germans ambushed the advancing British near the railway line, scattering the British amongst the thick plantations near the town. Those not killed by the Germans either got lost amongst the trees or stung by bees, and after three days Aitken ordered his bruised army back to Mombasa after taking 795 casualties. Tanga remained in German hands until 1917.

  More farce surrounded the continued blockade of The Konigsberg. The British had attempted to attack the ship from the air, but all they had to accomplish this task were two small seaplanes whose tiny bombs failed to even dent the cruiser. But in July 1915, the British captured Mafia Island, giving them an air and naval base from which to mount a concerted effort to destroy the ship. On 6th July, two former Brazilian Navy shallow-water monitors entered the Rufiji after having been towed from the Mediterranean, while reconnaissance planes took off from Mafia Island to pinpoint The Konigsberg. They eventually found that the German ship had moved a further seven miles upstream and immediately reported the ship's position to the two heavily armed monitors which began shelling the cruiser, their targeting becoming more and more precise with the help of the planes. As the tide moved out, the monitors pulled back, returning five days later to finish the job. With his ship fatally damaged, Looff scuttled The Konigsberg in the mud of the Rufiji. She was still visible there nearly fifty years later, until being salvaged for scrap.