by Edward Paice
In western Uganda, there was also a history of resistance to British rule that would become significant in wartime. In Kigezi district an uprising in 1911 was led by the prophetess Muhumuza, she too claiming that British bullets would turn to water when fired at her ‘army’, and the influence of her nyabangi cult lasted beyond her capture and throughout the war. But Kigezi was different in that clan warfare had been endemic for decades before the arrival of Europeans. As one historian of the district put it, ‘among the Bakiga, the Basigi fought against the Batimbo, and sometimes against the Baheesi. The Bahundu sometimes fought against the Barihira, and at other times against the Banyangabe. The Bagyeri fought against the Barihira . . . The Bainika sometimes fought against the Bagyeyo and at other times against the Bakongwe around Lake Bunyoni. The same was true in other clans.’4 The war merely exacerbated an already unstable state of affairs, as did the fact that Kigezi’s 2,000 square miles were sandwiched between the territories of three colonial powers – Belgian Congo, German Ruanda and British Uganda – and its boundaries had only been demarcated as recently as 1910. Up until then, according to the elders of Kigezi, ‘a German called it his, a Belgian also called it his, as well as the English’.5 Given this situation it is hardly surprising that a further rebellion against British rule occurred in southern Kigezi when Nyindo was told by his half-brother Musinga, the Watusi Mwami (sultan) of neighbouring Ruanda who had been armed by the Germans in 1914, that the Germans would soon control his land.
Control of Kigezi was vital to the Allies, as Captain Max Wintgens, the shrewd and highly capable German administrator of Ruanda, well knew. It was through this inaccessible district of lakes, rivers, mountains and forests that the main line of communication ran from British East Africa to the Belgian base at Rutchuru; and he did everything in his power to frustrate the Belgian military build-up – even to the extent of encouraging the anti-European sentiments of the local nyabangi. It was no coincidence that Wintgens’s visit to Nyindo at the end of 1914 was swiftly followed by the latter attacking ‘loyalist’ chief Chahafi, and at least one German officer was actually killed assisting with the attack. Nyindo was thwarted and fell back into Ruanda until he reappeared in May 1916 to surrender; but the pro-German Bahorohoro of the Kyogo Valley took up the fight, as did Chief Katuleggi’s Batwa pygmies until he too was forced to flee to German East Africa. In central Kigezi as well, a ‘usurper’ from Belgian territory, Ntokiibiri, fought the Muganda chief Abdulla Muwanika until he fled in 1917. Ten of his accomplices were captured and hanged, but Ntokiibiri was ‘to be seen no more’6 in the district (though he was planning a further incursion when finally captured at the end of 1919). For the first two years of the war a small number of Anglo-Belgian troops were almost constantly occupied in dealing with this turmoil threatening their lines of communication, and the first attempt at collecting hut tax in the district was not surprisingly ‘met with resistance and confusion’.7
Elsewhere, in the sparsely populated and barren Northern Frontier District of British East Africa, banditry was such a popular local pastime that pre-war government policy was deliberately ‘passive’. The administrative infrastructure was non-existent, patrols were sent out infrequently, and ‘pacification’ was not undertaken until the 1920s. Nevertheless the NFD was so unstable in early 1915 that an expedition was mounted against the Turkana, who took advantage of government preoccupations elsewhere to show, as one senior policeman put it, ‘a marked hostility and a mounting spirit of truculence when unsupervised’.8 A staggering quantity of livestock was confiscated during the six-month operation – more than 19,000 head of cattle, 8,300 camels, 7,000 donkeys and 123,000 sheep and goats – although much of the booty was returned to the Turkana after the claims of neighbouring tribes were met.
Turkey’s entry into the war also raised grave concerns in Nairobi about the possibility of an incursion into British territory by Muslim Abyssinians and Somalis. No such incursion occurred until 1916, but when it did it coincided with a number of desertions and incidents of self-mutilation among Muslim soldiers in some of the Indian regiments posted to East Africa, and also turned into ‘a very real and costly war’.9 In February 1916, just as British troops were making the final preparations for their invasion of German East Africa, some 500 Aulihan from Somaliland stormed the British fort at Serenli, killing the British officer and sixty-five men of the garrison. The principal British post in the north-east, Wajir, had to be abandoned, and it took two years before Serenli was reoccupied and the Aulihan were defeated. Throughout the war trouble simmered in the north as anyone and everyone in British East Africa’s desolate borderlands sought to ‘take every advantage of the situation resulting from the war’.10
These uprisings and incursions were certainly time-consuming for Belfield’s government. But to draw the conclusion that British East Africa was engulfed by strife, or that ‘native uprisings’ necessitated the diversion of troops from the front line with German East Africa, would be erroneous. The vast majority of the indigenous population bore the arrival of the war as stoically as they had invariably borne intrusions by ‘foreigners’, whether African or British; and many on the German East African border, such as the coastal Wadigo, ‘begged [the British administration] to have patrols sent out to counteract the effect of the enemy’11 when raids by German troops carried off their stock, women and impressed men into the ranks of their ‘Arab’ corps. The man charged with their protection in late 1914 was Major Hawthorn of the KAR who, ironically, had been responsible for the suppression of the Giriama uprising just months before; and in return the Wadigo provided 788 men for service as British carriers during the war from an adult male population numbering no more than 2,000 – a striking contrast to the reticence with which the Giriama treated calls for volunteers.
To say, as did Provincial Commissioner Charles Hobley, that British East Africa’s indigenous population ‘made no demur to the numerous restrictions which a war imposes on the people involved’12 was fanciful, even during the first eighteen months of the war when those ‘restrictions’ were not so onerous. By the end of 1915 there was no community in eastern and southern Africa in which everyday life had not been disrupted to some degree, and the response of each varied enormously. There was some insurrection, but more typical were the displays of collusion. In British East Africa, for example, the Luo chose not to follow the example of their ethnic ‘cousins’, the Gusii, by using the circumstances of the war as an opportunity to demonstrate against British rule; the Nandi, a tribe which had been one of the fiercest opponents of British rule and had been subjected to five major ‘punitive expeditions’ in the first decade of the century, was to provide a higher percentage of its adult male population for the KAR and other military units than any other tribe in the protectorate;* and the Kamba provided manpower aplenty to the military authorities from the outset. Indeed the only apparent anomaly among the larger tribes of British East Africa, given their warlike reputation, was the conduct of the Masai, who ‘declined to take to military discipline’,13 but provided invaluable intelligence services along the border (as did their brethren on the other side of the border for the Germans). Perhaps, as German East Africa’s leading journalist alleged, the explanation for this reticence was that the Masai ‘had grown to know the English . . . as still greater cattle-thieves than they themselves’.14
If these were examples of straightforward collusion, or expedience, there were also numerous expressions of genuine and unstinting loyalty on the part of chiefs and their subjects. Among the former, Daudi Chwa, the Bagandan Kabaka, was determined that his people should play their part in the defence of Uganda, and placed his personal ‘army’ at the disposal of the British authorities, as well as providing porters for IEF ‘B’ and Tighe’s Umba Valley operations in December 1914 and personally directing the formation of the Uganda Transport Corps and Stretcher Bearer Corps from what was described as ‘the flower of the educated youth’ of the country. Among the latter, the war was perceived by many
as offering possibilities of advancement and adventure unimaginable in peacetime. Many a soldier with the King’s African Rifles had been decorated by the end of 1915, and stories of the heroics of Sergeants Woldemariam, Miyoiyou, Williams and Sumani not only filtered back to any young African keen to escape the often rigid confines of their tribe but were a recruiter’s dream. By the same token, those who had joined missions found that the war brought new opportunities: as a child Adrien Atiman had been taken as a slave from his home near Timbuctu, was rescued by the missionary White Fathers, and now found himself a respected medical orderly for the Belgians; and Ezera Kabali’s account of his experiences as a headman in the Carrier Corps not only tells a tale of hardship but displays considerable pride in a job well done. For some, like M’Ithiria Mukaria from Meru district, one of the last surviving veterans of the campaign, enticements such as receiving a uniform, the opportunity to ‘select cattle from other peoples’ when in the field, and learning Swahili, were sufficiently alluring to prompt them to sign up with enthusiasm.* Others, like Aibu Chikwenga, found that recruits were ‘treated very well’. ‘I enjoyed myself,’ he later recounted, ‘[and] I particularly liked target practice.’15
These were not, as has sometimes been suggested, men whose loyalty belied some deep-seated anti-European grudge. The degree of ‘oppression’ the average African experienced in daily life at the hands of British ‘government’ was arguably no greater than that experienced by the average ‘Tommy’ who chose to join Kitchener’s Volunteer Army; and the decision to sign up was often motivated by exactly the same sentiments as those expressed by a young British soldier of Belgian parentage who wrote of his choice to embark on a military career in the following words: ‘war was in my blood. I was determined to fight and I didn’t mind who or what . . . Causes, politics and ideologies are better left to historians.’16 Such bellicose sentiment translated into Swahili as tunakwenda tunashinda – ‘we fight, we march’. Coercion was simply not necessary to maintain an escalating supply of soldiers until much later in the war (and even then to no greater extent than it was required in Britain); and it wasn’t even necessary in the early months of the war for the recruitment of sufficient porters to keep the British forces supplied. But that would change, with devastating results.
In addition to those who reacted to the war with conspicuous loyalty or outright dissent there were many Africans, perhaps even a majority, whose reactions were best described either as fatalistic – amri ya mungu (‘it is the will of God’) – or confused. The consequences of war induced similar reactions in Europe, but in eastern Africa it was even more pronounced due to the unfamiliarity with the paraphernalia that war seemed to bring with it. ‘The African’ wrote Ndabaningi Sithole, a founder member of the Zimbabwe African National Union in the 1960s, many years later, ‘was overwhelmed, overawed, puzzled, perplexed, mystified and dazzled . . . Motor cars, motor cycles, bicycles, gramophones, telegraphy, glittering Western clothes, new ways of ploughing and planting, added to the African’s sense of curiosity and novelty. Never before had the African seen such things. They were beyond his comprehension; they were outside the realm of his experience.’17 This would change too, as it became apparent that what was occurring in Africa was rather more inclusive than the ‘White Man’s War’ that racially conscious European governments had envisaged at the outset.
There was one rebellion in eastern Africa which caused serious alarm, as opposed to minor inconvenience, in British official circles in 1915. It occurred in Nyasaland, the ‘Cinderella’ of the British protectorates and the domain of missionaries galore. Nyasaland’s administration was reputedly ‘benign’, but in reality it was a good deal less benign than that of Britain’s more northerly protectorates. In 1899 Lewis Bandawe began his education at Blantyre Mission, but his home was in Lomweland, three days’ journey away in Portuguese East Africa. He was therefore in a rare position to be able to compare the administration of British Nyasaland with that of the infamously ‘rapacious’ Portuguese. Bandawe readily acknowledged that his people’s traditional life had always involved ‘indulging in petty tribal wars, in destruction of life and property and in slavery’ and that such activities were severely curtailed by the Portuguese occupation after 1897. But then slave-dealing became the preserve of the Portuguese cipais (policemen), taxes and forced labour were imposed, and finally there came an order for everyone to start growing cotton. Punishments for non-co-operation were severe and the Lomwe started to migrate into nearby British territory.
Bandawe was one such migrant. Far from finding the British authorities any different from the Portuguese, however, he soon observed that ‘the [British] boma was a terror to all people’. ‘What depressed me most,’ he later wrote, ‘was when I once saw of a gang of prisoners. They marched in two’s bound by big irons; some four or six prisoners had iron collars round their necks, with a long chain which was passed in loops through each iron collar and attached to each prisoner . . . This reminded me of the slaves with their slave sticks round their necks . . . I found no difference between such Europeans and my people who owned slaves and were selling them to the coastal people at such places as Quelimane, Angoche and other places.’* Bandawe also described the extreme antipathy to paying hut taxes. The treatment of prisoners was, of course, not markedly different to the way prisoners were treated in Britain’s prisons; and taxes are universally unpopular. But the fact that the boma was a ‘terror to all people’ flew in the face of the ‘civilising mission ideology’, as did the humiliation meted out to the indigenous population. ‘To go to the boma for any transaction was no pleasure,’ wrote Bandawe, ‘every African was obliged to take off his hat for any European, whether government or not . . . [and] every European, with the exception of the missionaries, had a chikoti – a whip made of hippo’s hide – which he used on his domestic servants or labourers.’18 The agents of government, such as the African police force, were equally feared: ‘the boma knew that the askari were pure barbarians, and would do brutality on the villagers, yet allowed them to trouble the villagers as much as they could’.19 Such was the background, intensified by escalating wartime demands by the government for labour and foodstuffs, to the ‘Chilembwe Rebellion’ of 1915 – which coincided almost to the day with the arrival of the ubiquitous Major Hawthorn to command 1/KAR in Nyasaland.
John Chilembwe was the founder of the Providence Industrial Mission at Chiradzulu. Born in the 1860s, he had been educated at the Church of Scotland Mission in Blantyre and, unusually for the time, in the United States at Virginia Theological College. According to Bandawe, Chilembwe had been planning a potent demonstration of his increasingly anti-European sentiments even before the outbreak of war and the war simply galvanised him into action. In November 1914, Chilembwe launched his opening salvo, writing the following words to the Nyasaland Times: ‘It is too late now to talk of what might or might not have been. Whatsoever be the reasons we are invited to join in the war, the fact remains, we are invited to die for Nyasaland. We leave all for the consideration of the Government, we hope in the Mercy of Almighty God, that some day things will turn out well and that Government will recognise our indispensability, and that justice will prevail.’* Chilembwe’s very public protest was in stark contrast to the more localised discontent in British East Africa, and his use of a newspaper as a vehicle of dissent was more sophisticated than armed rampage. Alarm bells did not, however, ring immediately in official circles; and as a result, when Chilembwe went a step further and acted on his grievances, colonial officials in Nyasaland were more taken aback than their counterparts in British East Africa ever were by their uprisings.
On the night of 22 January 1915 John Chilembwe’s adherents left the church at Mbombwe, some for European estates to the north, some for Blantyre and Limbe, and some to the estates to the east of Magomero belonging to the Bruce family. Three Europeans were murdered on the Bruce Estates, the telegraph line between Zomba and Blantyre was cut, and in the ensuing panic all Europeans in outlying
areas were called in to Zomba and Blantyre for their own protection. For a short time the situation ‘looked very black’, according to one KAR officer, ‘and it was thought that a general native rising had taken place’.20 But Chilembwe’s men in the south and north failed to act decisively and the rebellion was quickly suppressed by the Nyasaland Volunteer Force, African ‘loyalists’, and troops sent from Portuguese East Africa.
Chilembwe himself was killed on 4 February 1915. At least one ringleader experienced terminal sentencing by a ‘hasty court’21 in the field, and by the end of March some forty rebels had been tried and executed and over 300 imprisoned. Battery Quartermaster Sergeant Maker, newly arrived in the country from South Africa, witnessed the aftermath: ‘These hangings were more strangulations than anything and the bodies, at first, were left hanging from sun-up to sun-down as a warning to others of the penalty of rebellion. The love of a gamble,’ he added, ‘is so deeply rooted in the human that bets were even made on which of the bodies would give the last kick’; and the very short, bandy-legged hangman, ‘a down and out blown in from the bundu ’,† was paid per capita and became rich overnight.
