by Edward Paice
Many young men fled their homes to the towns in an increasingly futile attempt to avoid being caught up in the war; and for those who stayed put the consequences were often worse than being recruited for the Carrier Corps. The Wakasigau, for example, were blamed by the military authorities when Captain Doering’s detachment of Schutztruppe captured the mountain of Kasigau in August 1915; and when it was recaptured they found themselves ‘convicted’ en mass of disloyalty, it being deemed ‘absolutely impossible for the enemy to have attacked without knowledge and active assistance [of the] local natives’.15 Eleven men were arrested, three were executed, and more than 700 members of the tribe were deported to Malindi district. That was not all. Their huts were burnt down by the KAR, their goats slaughtered and cattle ‘placed’ with ‘loyals’, and the inhabitants of two villages were heavily fined. Within two months of their deportation to the coast one third of the exiles were suffering from malaria.
By the end of 1916 there was not a single community in British East Africa that had not suffered in some form from the effects of the war. Tribes on the border with German East Africa lived in constant fear of having their loyalty questioned, stocks of foodstuffs had been reduced to a bare minimum, and men taken for carrier duty were paid less while being required to serve for longer in conditions more strenuous than had ever been envisaged in the early days of the Military Labour Bureau. Worst of all, however, was that there appeared to be no end in sight – either to the fighting or the demands of the Carrier Corps. Seventy-two thousand Africans had been called up in British East Africa for non-combatant military service in the eighteen months leading up to Smuts’s offensive in March 1916; by the end of the year that number had doubled – and more than 4,000 fatalities had already occurred in the Carrier Corps, a considerably greater number than among the combatant troops.
The predicament of civilians recruited for carrier work in other British territories was no better than that of their comrades in British East Africa. In late 1915 and early 1916 120,000 Ugandan carriers were required to transport the Belgian supplies and armaments shipped from Europe to the Belgian HQ in Kivu district, and when Tombeur was finally ready to advance into German East Africa he had made it clear that he would only do so if his troops were supported by British first-line carriers. The Belgian government’s decision that Congolese carriers, 260,000 of whom manned its colony’s internal lines of communication during the war, could not serve in German East Africa resulted in the onus once again falling on Uganda; and once again the Bagandan Lukiiko (parliament) responded positively by authorising the creation of ‘CARBEL’, a carrier unit whose 7,238 men mustered at Mbarara in April 1916 for the Belgian advance.
CARBEL was commanded by Captain Anderson and sundry other officers who were settlers or government officials in peacetime. A nightmare lay ahead. The first seventy miles of the advance towards Kigali took place in almost continual, torrential rain and freezing cold. Several rivers in spate had to be forded en route, and with usable firewood a scarcity there was no way for the men to dry at night, let alone cook. After a pause of almost a month in Ruanda, Tombeur’s advance recommenced in early June and three weeks later the Belgians had reached Lake Victoria. Six hundred sick porters were sent home from here, and new drafts arrived to take their place for the final 220-mile advance on Tabora, undertaken in searing heat. There the five-month assignment ended. But there was scarcely enough food in Tabora to provision CARBEL for the return journey and by the time its survivors reached Mwanza, and the ships that would take the carriers home, many were on the brink of starvation. In all 789 men out of a force 8,429-strong had died, and 402 were missing (and presumed dead). All four interpreters, nine sub-chiefs and forty-nine headmen returned safely to Uganda, but the senior Ssaza( district) chief did not. His body was buried in Mwanza with full military honours.
The death of one in seven of CARBEL’s carriers may seem alarming, but it was not an untypical mortality rate and, given the conditions encountered during the Belgian advance, it could easily have been many times greater. The fact that CARBEL was officered by men with a genuine concern for the welfare of their charges, and that it was accompanied by two doctors with adequate medical supplies, also helped to keep casualties to a ‘minimum’ and brought out the best in the men. Praise was heaped upon them by Captain Fenning, who succeeded Anderson as commanding officer after he was taken sick, particularly for their conduct when required to march ‘for 17 days without rest’ during the final advance on Tabora, when – as often happened – they had ‘to turn out for a long night march just after having settled down from the day’s march’, and when they came under fire. On one occasion ‘a batch of carriers transporting trench mortars’ came under concentrated artillery fire but ‘continued their way towards danger until they were ordered to halt; on another Carrier No. 693 (Nasanairi Kalibwani) ‘refused to leave a Belgian sous-officier who was working a machine-gun, taking an active part in keeping him supplied with ammunition and eventually, when the enemy fire became too hot, assisting in the evacuation of this gun’.
CARBEL’s ‘most praiseworthy conduct’16 would be matched by many other carrier units during the war, especially those that were led by knowledgeable, sympathetic officers (many of whom were missionaries). It was unusual, however, in that it furnished historians with accounts written not only by its European officers but also by one of its African participants; and that he, Ezera Kabali, wrote to the Kabaka of Uganda after his return ‘assuring him that, in spite of [CARBEL’s] great loss, the Baganda would continue to give wholehearted service to the British’.* In general the lot of the carrier was such that enthusiasm for further service was muted, and one glimpse of their columns, comprising mile upon mile of men carrying loads of fifty or sixty pounds on their heads, trudging through the mud and across the rivers, was enough to make most Allied soldiers realise why this was so. Furthermore, although there were plenty of ‘bad apples’ in positions of responsibility with carrier units throughout East Africa, there were many conscientious men on whom the carriers’ plight had a profound effect.† Captain W. Hillbrook, a medical officer with CARBEL, was one such man – and the trauma caused by his unit’s experience was so great that he was sent to an asylum in Nairobi, ‘talking and shouting in an incoherent manner’ and suffering from ‘fleeting delusions, mistaking the identity of those around him’. The diagnosis was that ‘exhaustion bordering on collapse’ had caused ‘acute confusional insanity’, and Hillbrook’s doctor found it impossible to ‘induce sleep . . . or quiet his struggling’.17 Hillbrook died in as troubled a state as a carrier abandoned by the side of the road, his case of insanity the most acute of its kind that the doctor had ever experienced.
CARBEL’s very existence, like that of other British carrier units, was symptomatic of a singular dilemma confronting Smuts in his attempt to encircle von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops. Belgian officers expected their troops to live off the land, and among their units combat troops usually outnumbered carriers. But this was a modus operandi which found no favour with British colonial governments on account of its consequences for local populations. Even if a system of paying a fair price for supplies was in place it would inevitably be open to all sorts of abuse, and it was thought counter-productive to plunder the inhabitants of a German colony which would soon be under British administration. The logic was laudable in theory, and if Tombeur had not requested the services of Ugandan carriers the British military authorities may well have insisted on providing such support, but ultimately it was counterproductive: as British carriers had to carry their own supplies as well as those of the troops to whom they were attached a huge number of men, many of whom would die or suffer permanent impairment due to disease, had to be employed. The mathematics were sobering. For example, in order to maintain troops 450 miles from the railhead in Northern Rhodesia 16,500 carriers were needed to transport a single ton of supplies – enough to feed 1,000 askari and their camp-followers for just one day – for the simple reason that 14,00
0 men were required to carry the food for the 2,500 who carried the troops’ supplies.
By Christmas 1916 the ‘human cargo’ transport system chosen by British forces had, for all its good intentions, involved the recruitment of considerably more Africans than the 100,000 pressed into military labour during the Anglo-South African War. It even exceeded the 180,000 black Americans enlisted in the segregated regiments of the Union during the American Civil War. Yet, with no prospect of an imminent end to the hostilities, the tragedy was only just beginning. Carrier units were still multiplying, like hydra, the toll wrought by disease and inadequate or inappropriate diets was escalating daily, and even the carriers’ already measly pay was so devalued by high prices in German East Africa that their monthly stipend wasn’t even sufficient to buy a packet of ten cigarettes. ‘A carrier is one of the lowest forms of life,’ wrote one motor transport officer, not without some sympathy, ‘and he is always more or less in a state of misery, as well he may be, for his job is to carry forty pounds’ weight on his head, and as he takes no interest in the war, he does not find this very amusing.’18
At the same time it became increasingly difficult for an individual to evade labour recruiters. Chiefs and headmen complied, often with suspicious alacrity, with the authorities under threat of imprisonment or heavy fines; and even for pastoral people there was a singular dearth of places to hide. For a few it was still possible to secure civilian work in Nairobi and Mombasa or to evade the system by ‘squatting’ on the farms of Europeans. For those already in the ranks desertion was possible, but less so the further they were led from home. Even hopes of ‘getting it over with’ evaporated when the terms of service lengthened from three months to nine, and soon there would be no African family in the British colonies neighbouring German East Africa which did not see some – or all – of its menfolk led off to war.
The fate of civilians coerced in vast numbers into carrier service in German East Africa, particularly those who lived in the north-east, was similar to that of their counterparts in British territories – but the way in which they were employed differed significantly. On the one hand they seldom found themselves working far from their homes, which enabled them to return quickly to plant or harvest crops and reduced the likelihood of contact with diseases to which they were not naturally immune. On the other hand carriers not directly employed as ‘professionals’ by a Feldkompanie were not paid for their labours, and women and children were recruited on a scale which, in British eyes, constituted an outrage. Furthermore, no attempt was made to keep proper records for ‘casual’ labour – a surprising oversight which belied the reputation for thoroughness attributed to German colonial governments. The explanation for such an oversight was simple. Schnee and von Lettow-Vorbeck had fewer qualms about the use of forced labour than their British counterparts, and do not appear to have recognised that their actions might expose them to accusations of condoning slavery.
Schnee’s failure to keep proper administrative records conveniently made it impossible to compute with any degree of precision the number of Africans employed in supporting the German war effort. Records of sorts were compiled for the paid carriers who were an integral part of a Feldkompanie, each of which had a standard complement of 322 porters (approximately two men or boys to carry the equipment of each askari) plus thirty to fifty ‘specialists’ responsible for machine-guns and other heavy materiel; and these records formed the basis for an ‘official’ figure of just 14,000 carriers having been employed during the entire war. This was a risibly implausible estimate, even for the number of ‘professional’ carriers; and it ignores completely the recruitment of carriers for work on von Lettow-Vorbeck’s lines of communication and specific wartime projects. The accounts of German combatants indicate that 8,000 carriers were used to establish a network of supply dumps in the north-east in 1914; and that 100,000 – in Looff ’s words – ‘happily undertook’19 the task of distributing the cargo of the blockade-runner Marie in 1916. By the same token, when van Deventer sought to recruit 15,000 carriers in Irangi district for his advance towards the Central Railway in mid 1916, he was only able to gather half that number because the retreating German force which had invested Kondoa had scoured the district before him; and when German troops retreated through the Uluguru Mountains Hans Stache, their transport officer, was said by a fellow combatant to have ‘shanghaied any [African] he could lay his hands on, and was prepared to commit any crime to get them’.20 The carriers attached to each Feldkompanie were, in other words, but a fraction of a total headcount of those who ‘worked for the troops’. Even von Lettow-Vorbeck admitted that the number of Landschaftsträger – ‘casual’ labourers – ran into ‘hundreds of thousands’;21 and subsequent estimates put the figure at 350,000 or more.22 No record of fatalities, let alone casualties, was kept by German officials.
As von Lettow-Vorbeck’s supplies diminished the districts still under German control were denuded of all available foodstuffs as well as carriers; and only in quite exceptional cases was payment offered for either. Such ‘total disregard for the barest needs of the native population’ was, in the opinion of British officers, the principal factor underpinning von Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘ability to keep a large army in the field’; and the ‘wholesale seizure of every vestige of foodstuff throughout the country’ was to have dire consequences. ‘What of those unfortunates who were of no military value – the old men, the old women, and the young children?’ asked a young British lieutenant who advanced through the Ulugurus in the wake of the retreating German troops, before concluding that ‘their lot was a desolate village and starvation’.23
Before the end of 1917 more than 300,000 Africans were to die in German East Africa from the famine caused by war. This represented a death toll of one in twenty of the colony’s total African population; among the populations most affected by the fighting the casualty rate was far higher. Meanwhile, there was no diminution in the numbers seized for military labour, nor in the numbers of fatalities. ‘Our road is paved with the corpses of the natives we have been obliged to kill’,24 wrote one of Wintgens’s officers; and those who survived faced the gruesome prospect of being pounced on by recruiters from the advancing Allied forces. For many it was as if the days when Arab slave-raiders would descend on the tribes of the interior had returned; and even though they were paid, and less frequently roped together or beaten, when serving in British carrier units their duties and the conditions they encountered remained equally repugnant.
‘Can you wonder that [the carriers] suffered,’ wrote one British government official, ‘and suffered terribly? Of course they did. These poor, spiritless, ragged creatures had to hump their heavy packs and follow some of the most active and hardy troops that ever took to the field, over fearfully difficult country, through one of the most prolonged and rapid wars of movement ever known.’25 Such expressions of sympathy for the ‘many thousand of blacks who suffered in uninterpretable silence’26 did little to ameliorate the lot of the carrier. But they were at least common among British troops and civilian administrators. The accounts of German combatants, on the other hand, while universally fulsome in their praise for the ‘loyalty’ of the indigenous population, scarcely express even so much as a fleeting realisation of the consequences – or questionable morality – of the way in which they exploited their colonial subjects. In 1919, at the Versailles Peace Conference, this apparent absence of any vestige of guilt was to have far-reaching ramifications and played directly into the hands of those seeking to establish that ‘in the German colonies . . . the same militaristic system prevailed as in Germany itself ’.* It was an accusation which von Lettow-Vorbeck brushed aside with a simple tu quoque: ‘No doubt, in a long war cases of brutality and inhumanity do occur. But that happens on both sides.’27
There were some Africans for whom service in a carrier unit was an adventure of sorts. Those fortunate enough to own canoes on the Lukulu River, in Northern Rhodesia, were paid five shillings for each run upriver wit
h supplies for the frontline troops, plus six shillings for food and a sixpence bonus for each load reaching its destination intact; the caretaker of the carrier cemetery at Voi earned four times the amount paid to carriers in the field; and literacy could secure a desk job in a labour bureau which might carry a wage up to thirty times that of a carrier in the field. ‘Specialists’, such as carriers attached to a mechanical transport unit or stretcher-bearers, were also far better rewarded, better looked after, and less likely to succumb to disease; and they learnt skills which would, for better or worse, secure them employment in the post-war colonial economy. Mobility also brought the opportunity for those from inland communities to learn Swahili, the language of commerce, and in so doing a whole new vocabulary was spawned including words like daktari, kuli(dockyards), sigara, and papa (literally a shark, and therefore a submarine).
