Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  Although remarkably little is known about Lij Iyasu – as if a polity which had been Christian since the fourth century later wished to erase an acutely embarrassing memory – his behaviour certainly became increasingly eccentric as the war went on. After his fellow Abyssinian potentates refused to crown him Negus Negusti (the ‘King of Kings’) Lij Iyasu had taken to wearing the dress of Abyssinian Muslims and was reputed to have displayed great enthusiasm for acquiring additional ‘wives’. But in 1915 what might have been dismissed as a fit of pique on the part of a headstrong teenager began to assume the trappings of something more sinister: Lij Iyasu began spending most of his time in Harar and the Ogaden, in the Muslim east of the country, and even gave the order for the demolition of the Coptic church in Harar. ‘Unstable and self-indulgent, ambitious yet lacking both the energy to achieve his ambitions and the personal magnetism or charm which would induce others to sacrifice themselves for him’13 was the official verdict of the British Consul in southern Abyssinia on Lij Iyasu, coupled with disapproval of his ‘devotion to Venus and Bacchus’.14 But behind this dismissive ‘school report’ lay a genuine concern about Lij Iyasu’s friendly overtures to the ‘Mad Mullah’ and rumours that German skulduggery was afoot in Addis Ababa, the Abyssinian capital since 1889.

  The new capital, as the nexus of Abyssinia’s assorted feudal warlords, was renowned for intrigue. Isolation was one key ingredient, as were unrelenting internal political rivalry and antipathy to any outside incursion into the empire’s affairs. The effect was a replication of the bizarre and bewildering world of Alice in Wonderland. To an outsider, Addis was – and would remain – a ‘politically watertight compartment, with distorting mirrors at every turn’;* and the Abyssinian empire was an unwieldy agglomeration of disparate groups, the most powerful of which were still organised along resolutely feudal lines. But there were at least three constant determinants in the empire’s labyrinthine history: a determination to preserve a high degree of territorial integrity and to combat any foreign control of its affairs, and the preservation of its Christian heritage. Such was the background against which the European colonial powers had for decades jockeyed for position.

  Wilfred Thesiger, the British Minister, was a diplomat from the same mould as Errol MacDonell, his counterpart in Portuguese East Africa. Mindful of the possibility of severe unrest in Abyssinia following the death of Menelik II, he had sensibly incorporated various design features into his newly constructed official residence that were aimed at withstanding siege conditions. It was the marked improvement in Abyssinia’s pre-war relations with Germany that most concerned Thesiger. Menelik II had once suggested that Germany might like to send a million German settlers to Abyssinia, an overture clearly aimed at counterbalancing Anglo-French influence in Abyssinia’s neighbouring territories; and in 1902 consideration was given to a proposal by Karl Inger, an Austro-Hungarian convert to Islam who styled himself Emir Abdullahi Ibn Suleyman Inger, to set up his own sultanate in the Somali-Danakil borderlands of eastern Abyssinia. With Menelik having also declared his intention to ‘restore the ancient frontiers of Ethiopia as far as Khartum and Lake Nyanza’,15 both well inside British Africa, the prospects for Germany’s most daring attempt to stir up a jihad were, on the face of it, not entirely inauspicious; and Britain had to bear in mind that Abyssinia could field over 100,000 armed men, as it had done less than two decades earlier when Menelik II had routed the Italians at Adua (inflicting over 11,000 casualties in the process). With the Ottomans in control of the entire Arabian Peninsula opposite the Horn of Africa except the Aden Protectorate, Abyssinia was most certainly not a power that Britain wished to see as a new and islamicised enemy dancing to a German tune.

  The man approved by the German General Staff to foment unrest in Abyssinia was Leo Frobenius, a prominent rather than eminent African scholar (and personal friend of the Kaiser) of whom Britain was intensely suspicious. In pre-war years, Frobenius had been labelled ‘a thieving scoundrel’16 in Whitehall for having removed important artefacts from West African chiefs during an expedition, and although he had agreed to return them after an official enquiry into his conduct he was thereafter branded as ‘one of those scientific Germans to whom the word “Hun” can be applied without controversy’.17 The plan was for Frobenius to carry top-secret documents to the German Legation in Addis Ababa ordering von Syburg, the German Consul, ‘to [incite] the Abyssinians to invade Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and to annex territories in the Blue Nile region’.18 Von Syburg was also authorised to contact the ‘Mad Mullah’ in Somaliland and encourage him to pursue further insurrection against the British. In Cairo, Allied Intelligence were quickly on to the ‘Frobenius Mission’ and urged ‘the extreme importance of preventing this mission from reaching Abyssinia where they will find a fertile soil for the sowing of intrigues and will almost inevitably raise serious trouble in the Sudan and East Africa’.19 Ras Mikael, standing in for the absent Lij Iyasu, appeared to be ‘not very anxious for the arrival of the mission’. But Thesiger was far from sure where the real sympathies of Abyssinia’s elite now lay; and he agreed wholeheartedly with the view of British Intelligence that Frobenius be sent home the minute he arrived in the Horn without being given ‘any opportunity of observing the [Suez] Canal’s defences’.20

  After many travails en route from Istanbul, the five Europeans and thirteen Turks and Arabs of Frobenius’s ‘Fourth German Inner-African Research Expedition’ were duly thwarted in their mission by Anglo-Italian vigilance. The Italian authorities in Eritrea were particularly suspicious of ‘scientific’ expeditions emanating from Germany, and forbade Frobenius from proceeding any further than Asmara, Eritrea’s highland capital. Frobenius had no choice but to head back to Germany,* and was put on the British Colonial Office’s blacklist for being a man ‘whose reputation for decent behaviour seems to be as second-rate as his scientific reputation’.21 But one of his party, Solomon Hall, the son of a German missionary and an Ethiopian mother, made another attempt to reach Abyssinia later in 1915 ‘carrying secret documents on his body by a special device’.22 Once again he was intercepted by the Italians in Eritrea and languished in prison there for three years, to the great relief of British Intelligence and Wilfred Thesiger at the British Legation in Addis Ababa. Somehow the ‘documents’ did reach Addis Ababa by October, because a reply from von Syburg was received in Berlin in March 1916 indicating that Lij Iyasu was making ‘military preparations’ and had even agreed to destroy Italian wireless stations in Asmara and Massawa, in Italian Eritrea, and Mogadishu, in Italian Somaliland.23

  In Berlin, the Reichskolonialamt remained adamant that ‘in the interest of relief of German East Africa an insurrection in the Sudan is very important and urgent’,24 and its hopes of unleashing a jihad in East Africa received a colossal boost when General Townshend’s army, 10,000-strong, was forced to surrender after a five-month siege to the Turks at Kut, in Mesopotamia, in April 1916. Kut was a disastrous setback for the British attempt to counter ‘the Mussulman problem’. In trying to relieve Townshend, the Allies incurred 21,000 casualties; more importantly, the plan to capture Baghdad as a crucial counter to German pro-Islamic posturing lay in ruins. In East Africa the outlook was once again decidedly bleak after the initial success in stymieing German scheming. As one official put it, Kut had ‘queered the local pitch pretty badly’.25

  But just at the moment when Lij Iyasu, Berlin’s ‘trump card’ in the Horn of Africa, might have fulfilled German hopes he was to prove their undoing. Powerful forces, both religious and secular, began gathering in the Abyssinian Highlands (from which Iyasu was increasingly and conspicuously absent). The religious duality of his flirtation with Islam and foreigners may have been reminiscent of Emperor Dawit II’s close ties with the Portuguese and ‘western’ Christianity in the sixteenth century (which were aimed at countering Islamic incursions), or Emperor Fasilidas’s with Islam in the seventeenth century (which were aimed at countering Portuguese and Jesuit influence). But by 1916 those who sa
w him as having overstepped the mark were in the ascendant. To them Lij Iyasu was not engaging in some delicate balancing act between foreign powers for the good of Abyssinia, but invoking the enduring and horrific memories of its abasement at the hands of the Muslim ‘Galla hordes’ of Ahmed Gragn four centuries earlier – an event which ‘went down in the collective awareness of the [Abyssinians] as the single most traumatic event in their history’.26 The nemesis of German machinations was therefore a seemingly naïve miscalculation: to highland Abyssinians any ‘campaign to Arabize the Muslims of the Horn’, whom they regarded as their ‘inferiors’, was ‘tantamount to an effort to destroy their country’.27

  In August 1916, it was widely believed that Lij Iyasu was about to launch his joint Abyssinian-Dervish invasion of Somaliland (and marry the Sayyid’s daughter). Britain, France and – somewhat incongruously – Germany reacted to the rumours by sending a message of protest to the Abyssinian government. A revolution in Addis Ababa ensued, an occurrence which is generally regarded as having been ‘a direct result of the combined Turkish-German attempt to get Ethiopia on their side’,28 and Lij Iyasu was deposed in absentia. After an inconclusive initial battle, Shoan ‘loyalists’ decisively defeated Iyasu’s father at Sagale on 27 October – a battle in which more than 100,000 men were involved – and Menelik’s daughter Zauditu was crowned Empress. Neither Germany nor Turkey was represented at the coronation. Zauditu’s twenty-four-year-old cousin, Ras Tafari Makonnen (later Haile Selassie) was nominated as her successor.

  Iyasu, who had never been formally crowned, was excommunicated by the Coptic Church. He avoided capture in the eastern lowlands until 1921 but German hopes that he might seize back the throne, or that at the very least Ras Tafari Makonnen would be unable to establish a strong government, came to naught. As was its wont, Abyssinia – which had been notably successful in maintaining its independence while the rest of the continent succumbed to European colonisation, and whose feudal rulers were not chary of approaching internal affairs with a brutality matching that of the worst excesses of European colonialism – then turned back in on itself. Ras Tafari Makonnen performed a skilful balancing act, not wishing to commit Abyssinia one way or the other, especially while the war in Europe still raged on into 1917, the Allies’ so-called ‘year of crises’ . But with a Christian back on the imperial throne the greatest potential threat to the flanks of British East Africa finally started to recede.

  ‘All’s well that ends well’29 was the phlegmatic verdict of the British Consul to southern Abyssinia when Lij Iyasu was toppled. While this may have seemed a correct judgement of the situation in his own parish, British Intelligence did not rest on its laurels even after the 1916 Arab Revolt against Ottoman suzerainty which pitted Muslim against Muslim. Lij Iyasu, the Sayyid, the Sultan of Darfur and the Sanusi had caused considerable embarrassment and the neutralisation of each threat had required considerable ingenuity on the part both of local officials and of Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton’s Arab Bureau in Khartoum. There was no way of determining the exact mix of religious zeal and other factors, both internal and external, that had provoked the various jihads. What was certain was the gravity of the threat and the realisation that it was necessary ‘to take steps to counteract a Mohammedan proselytising movement before it can actually take place’.30 As evidence of this new proactive approach, the British Minister in Somaliland even resorted to despatching a group of Somali elders to Egypt in 1916 in order to impress them with ‘the full might of the British Empire’31 in the form of warships, railways and POW camps packed with German and Turkish soldiers.

  In East Africa, though it was realised that ‘a Turkish jehad ’ had not caught on, ‘an African jehad ’ remained, in the eyes of British Intelligence, ‘not an improbability’; and the ‘chief danger zone in this respect’ was thought to be German East Africa, where the war had created fertile ground for ‘a conjunction of Islamic propaganda with the cry of “Africa for the African”’.32 The old Arab slaving routes inland from the coast had brought about much greater Islamic influence in German East Africa than was the case with its neighbours, a fact of which the Germans were well aware. A marked surge in ‘the Islamic spirit’ had followed the Maji-Maji Rebellion, with many former askari to the fore as active participants and propagandists; and the ‘Makka Letter Affair’ of 1908, centred on the rumoured discovery of a powerful and apocalyptic text at Medina, had caused huge disquiet among the colony’s coastal population (not to mention their colonial administrators).33 It was therefore unsurprising that the outbreak of war between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies had caused an equally huge stir. The diary of a missionary of the White Fathers in Ruanda, Père Lecoindre, records just how far this penetrated. On 11 January 1915 he visited Kigali and found ‘the Muslims, excited by the news of the Holy War, [pleading] for news of it at the boma’. A week later, a German official visited his mission and seemed ‘preoccupied by the excitement of the Muslims, provoked by the rumours of the Holy War’. And two days after that, Lecoindre noticed ‘a great hubbub among the Muslims during the night’. That night ‘the moon refused to go down and stayed red’; and there was ‘fire in the direction of Bugesera’. But, symptomatic of the different reactions of Muslims throughout the Islamic world, many took this to be ‘a sign that Allah is displeased with the [Ruandan] sultan who is allied to the Germans’;34 and the authorities responded by giving each askari an immediate bonus, and further money to buy pombe and meat (ostensibly to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday on 27 January). It would therefore seem that it was not only the British who were alarmed at the potential of the Islamic ‘powder-keg’, and that Schnee’s decision to fly the crescent flag above all German bomas was prompted as much by fear as opportunism.

  An astonishing German circular fell into British hands when Moshi was captured in March 1916, providing not only further evidence of Schnee’s disquiet but a valuable piece of propaganda for the British campaign to ‘counteract’ the rise of any enmity on the part of East African Muslims. Addressed by Schnee to his district commissioners, the circular read:

  To all stations. You are requested to send out within three months from the date of receipt a report stating what can be done by means of Government servants and teachers to counteract the spread of Islamic propaganda. Do you consider that it is possible to make regulations prohibiting Islam altogether? . . . German experts recommend the encouragement of pig-breeding among the natives as an effective means of preventing the spread of Islam in German East Africa. You must consider this point also.

  By May 1916 the circular had been distributed by the Allies throughout the Islamic world, although its effect was not wholly as desired. In Egypt, Cairenes considered its contents so outrageous that it was suspected of being ‘a pure invention of British diplomacy’; while in East Africa its publication was said ‘to have fallen rather flat’.35 In fact the document was considered genuine enough by many – it was publicly denounced in September 1916 in Mombasa by the Mullah of Moshi himself at a baraza attended by more than 5,000 Muslims – and its importance lies not so much in the preposterous questions it raised but in what it reveals about German naïvety in seeking to foster the ‘Holy War’ against the Allies. Islam was not a monolithic religion to be deployed as the Kaiser and his servants saw fit; and the grievances of Muslims were as heterogeneous as those of disparate peoples anywhere. This is not to say that the threat to Britain was illusory, and could have been dismissed out of hand. It was real enough. But Germany’s ‘evil counsels’ simply lacked the finesse which might have guaranteed a more widespread, momentous and threatening jihad in Africa. Instead, as von Lettow-Vorbeck battled his way southwards, the cloak-and-dagger initiatives of Berlin and Istanbul could offer him no immediate encouragement.

  TWENTY

  ‘The Cannibals’

  Allied troops in the field in East Africa were rather more concerned with the German, rather than ‘Mussulman’, enemy in 1916, and the week after van Deventer reached Kondoa in mid
April the Belgian advance into Ruanda finally began, in torrential rain. Control of Lake Kivu had already been secured with the capture of Kwidjwi Island; and the arrival of more than 7,000 carriers from Uganda and Major Grogan’s 100 ox-carts provided the necessary transport for the Belgian troops from Kivu district demanded by General Tombeur.

  The first priority was to outmanoeuvre Captain Max Wintgens from his base at Kissenyi. For almost two years Wintgens had been a major thorn in the side of the Belgians and the approach to Kissenyi, through the volcanic Mfumbiro region, had proved the undoing of many a Belgian patrol. But in mid April von Lettow-Vorbeck had withdrawn three companies from Ruanda for the attack on van Deventer at Kondoa, leaving Wintgens with insufficient troops with which to continue his stubborn opposition to the Belgians.* Colonel Molitor entered Ruanda from the north, crossing the belt of open country south of Lutobo and pushed straight for Kigali, the Ruandan capital. To the west, Major Rouling’s guns opened fire from the Sebea River to keep Wintgens’s men tied down in their mountain posts overlooking the river. South of Lake Kivu the Rusisi River, with its precipitous mountain backdrop, was in spate. Two battalions under Major Olsen, Tombeur’s former chef militaire in Katanga who had so ably assisted with the defence of Northern Rhodesia, demonstrated on the river, while Major Muller’s 1st Regiment forced its way across the Rusisi just south of Lake Kivu and established a bridgehead at Shangugu. On 3 May Muller turned north-east towards Kigali, taking the capital two weeks later, and by 21 May the Belgian troops had cleared Ruanda of enemy troops and Chief Musinga submitted to the new colonial power in his land.