by Edward Paice
For many years conspiracy theories about the abrupt recall of L59 abounded. Some claimed that the message was a dupe sent from England or Khartoum; some that the message from Berlin was genuine enough but that it was the result of a bogus message from British Intelligence purporting to originate from von Lettow-Vorbeck.7 Smuts’s former ADC, Piet van der Byl, even peddled a fantastic story involving spies in Spain and intelligence masterstrokes by Smuts and an Intelligence officer who had long since left the campaign; and he claimed that L59’s mission was ‘to pick up von Lettow and spirit him away’, thereby ‘increasing German prestige among the African population who looked upon von Lettow with so much awe that they would never refer to him by name’.8 Such hogwash may have derived from the first book to mention L59, Edwin Woodhall’s Spies of the Great War. Woodhall was a veteran of Scotland Yard and British Intelligence who was single-handedly responsible for the wartime capture of Percy Topliss, the infamous ‘Monocled Mutineer’. In his account a British agent named Tony Mortimer, known to Woodhall ‘by personal association’,9 returned from Vienna in September 1917 with the news that a ‘super-Zeppelin’ was about to leave for East Africa, a story that prompted his superiors to send ‘a bogus message . . . to Berlin, purporting to emanate from von Lettow-Vorbeck’.10
Bogus wireless messages aside, what is certain is that British Intelligence was aware of Bockholt’s mission before L59 even left Staaken for Jamboli. Van Deventer informed MacDonell of it in a despatch dated 10 November, and the following day all British troops pursuing von Lettow-Vorbeck towards the Makonde plateau were instructed to be on the alert for ‘a Zeppelin [coming] to East Africa from Palestine’. Aeroplanes were put on standby and two mountain guns were ‘dug in for [L59’s] reception’11 at Kilelo Hill on the Makonde plateau. But the mission had to be aborted due to the bad weather over the Mediterranean, and by the time Bockholt began his second attempt von Lettow-Vorbeck was leading the troops not left behind at Nambindinga towards Newala.
After the war von Lettow-Vorbeck ‘stoutly denied ever having heard of [the mission] except by vague rumour among the natives near Lindi, to which [he] gave no credence’.* Schnee, when he too was first informed by British officers of L59’s attempt to reach the Makonde plateau, also dismissed it as fantasy. And Max Looff, when questioned in captivity about ‘the proposed landing place of the Zeppelin’, thought the whole thing was either a tremendous joke or some cunning ruse on the part of his captors. Sucking reflectively on his pipe, he eventually replied ‘I can tell you, in the strictest confidence, that two Zeppelins were to come, one to bomb Lindi and the other Tabora’.12
THIRTY-TWO
The Propaganda War
L59’s ill-fated mission to relieve von Lettow-Vorbeck demonstrated the extent to which his continued resistance was regarded by Berlin as being of the utmost importance at the end of 1917. The year had witnessed innumerable setbacks to the Allied war effort, and when victory on the battlefield or at the negotiating table was eventually secured the presence of undefeated German troops on African soil would, so it was thought, facilitate the immediate return of all former colonies to the Reich. On the other hand Britain’s views on the matter hardened during the year. As early as February Walter Long, the Colonial Secretary, had publicly declared that no one should think that the struggle in Africa had been in vain because he had no intention of ever returning Germany’s colonies. With that, the battle lines were drawn for a ferocious propaganda war in which Britain sought to counter German territorial ambitions with increasingly forthright criticism of the past conduct of ‘the spiked helmet in Africa’.
The propaganda war marked a dramatic change to the pre-war status quo. Before the war Dr Solf, the German Colonial Secretary, had thought that Germany’s interests, as a latecomer to the ‘Scramble for Africa’, would be best served by assuming the role of ‘England’s junior partner’;1 and as his counterpart, Lord Harcourt, was as germanophile as Solf was anglophile, Britain and Germany had had no difficulty in conducting a series of secret negotiations with a view to carving up the colonies of Portugal and Belgium after their ‘inevitable’ demise as colonial powers. By the summer of 1914 the broad terms of an agreement had been approved, giving the mineral-rich Belgian province of Katanga and Portuguese East Africa south of the Zambezi to Britain; while Portuguese West Africa (Angola), Portuguese East Africa north of the Zambezi, and most of the Belgian Congo (subject to France’s assent) were assigned to Germany. The agreement was never signed for reasons which, on the part of Britain, included the reluctance of the Foreign Office to use Africa as a means of promoting détente, suspicions about Germany’s intentions in Europe, and a reluctance to undermine Portugal; and, on the part of Germany, a nervousness about the likely consequences of the publication of such a formal agreement. The events of August 1914 inevitably precluded any further discussions, but Germany’s appetite for territorial aggrandisement had been whetted and Solf ’s enthusiasm for the creation of a German Mittelafrika, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, remained undimmed.
On the face of it the negotiations, and Solf ’s ambitions, were incongruous. In the immediate aftermath of unification Bismarck had demonstrated no great zeal for securing ‘a place in the sun’ for Germany, but like the equally sceptical Gladstone he soon found that the activities of sundry ‘romantics, dreamers and vagabonds’2 in Africa could no longer be ignored. By 1890 ‘German’ Africa already encompassed an area considerably larger than the Reich itself and Bismarck found himself increasingly drawn into the debate on the merits of colonial expansion by his need to maintain his support among National Liberal and Conservative enthusiasts in the Reichstag, and by the vigorous lobbying of the newly formed Pan-German League, which sought to arouse ‘patriotic self-consciousness at home . . . and, above all, to carry forward the German colonial movement to tangible results’.3 For the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, Bismarck’s stance on the colonial issue was not sufficiently proactive and the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, demarcating Britain’s and Germany’s respective ‘spheres of interest’ in East Africa, attracted criticism from pro-colonialists for compromising the furtherance of Germany’s national interests. In 1890 Bismarck was dismissed, his lack of enthusiasm for colonial ventures being cited by the Kaiser as one of the reasons prompting his decision.
By the mid 1890s Germany’s colonial project had foundered and Bismarck’s successor, Leo von Caprivi, shared his opinion that ‘the less Africa, the better’. The wayward actions of Carl Peters, ‘Germany’s Rhodes’ in East Africa and a man referred to by Africans as mkono wa damu (‘blood on his hands’), played a significant part in creating a crisis of confidence, as did the fact that Germany’s million square miles of Africa were proving a continual drain on funds. They had also failed to fulfil their promise as potential outlets for Germany’s burgeoning population, were widely considered to be a military liability which required continual ‘maintenance’ by the Imperial Navy, and, worse still, were a source of friction with other European Powers. In 1904 an article in the Freisinnige Zeitung encapsulated the general mood in Germany: ‘our power has not been strengthened [by our colonies], our prosperity has not been increased, in short not a single one of the purposes for which colonial possessions were acquired and maintained has been fulfilled’.4
Within two years of the publication of the Freisinnige Zeitung’s article full-scale rebellions in German South-West Africa and German East Africa threatened radically to undermine German ‘prestige’ at home and abroad. But colonial enthusiasts were not prepared to admit defeat, however discredited the methods of some of Germany’s ‘romantics, dreamers and vagabonds’, and the Kaiser’s pursuit of Weltpolitik precluded even contemplating such a thing. In 1906, a programme of ‘reform’ was instigated by Bernhard Dernburg, the Colonial Secretary, and his department was separated from the Foreign Office as a first step towards putting Germany’s colonial house in order. Dernburg was, above all, determined to counter widespread accusations that Germany loo
ked upon its colonies as little more than pools of slave labour; and in German East Africa, Solf (Dernburg’s successor) and von Rechenberg (Schnee’s predecessor) set about replacing a preoccupation with ‘pacification’ with one of ‘development’. There was no attendant resurgence in political or public enthusiasm for colonies in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war, but it did at least seem as though the colony’s strife-torn past had been put behind it, and that German East Africa’s economy might be poised on the brink of a prosperous future. Sisal exports were booming, the ‘native’ economy was growing rapidly, over 1,000 miles of railway were already complete, and millions of Marks had been spent on administrative expansion. The other side of the continent, German South-West Africa also looked set fair, and was producing one quarter of the world’s diamonds.
By the second year of the war Solf finally began to attract greater support for his colonial ‘experiment’ as the mood in Germany became increasingly nationalistic. The desirability of further overseas expansion and the need to combat raw material shortages were issues that had risen to the top of the political agenda, and Germany’s existing colonies seemed to offer the beginnings of a solution to both ‘problems’.* As a result the pro-colonial lobby was able to count on greater popularity in the Reichstag than ever before; and when Solf organised a huge colonial rally in June 1916 he won the endorsement of not only the National Liberals and Conservatives but also the Social Democrats (who had always opposed colonialism in the past). With that, Solf ’s concept of a German Mittelafrika, a counterpoint to Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg’s Mitteleuropa, became ‘the decisive objective of colonial expansion beside Turkey’;5 and, spurred on by the Kaiser and Hindenburg, Solf began to cast his eye over more than just Africa’s Mittel. The two billion Marks (£100m, or c. £5.5bn in today’s money) of German taxpayers’ money spent in the colonies between 1884 and 1914 may have yielded little return thus far, but if the Portuguese territories in East and West Africa, Belgian Congo and French Equatorial Africa – possibly even some of the British possessions in West Africa – were annexed after Germany’s victory in the war, Africa could become ‘Germany’s India’, its ‘Second Fatherland’.†
Britain’s response to Germany’s ill-concealed and mounting ambitions was to launch ‘a vast propagandist gas-attack’6 against her ‘colonial methods’ and fitness to rule in Africa. Germany’s regular and unrestrained use of brute force in the colonies in the years immediately after the Anglo-South African War had never, for obvious reasons, attracted much criticism from Britain; and it was conveniently overlooked once again during the negotiations between Harcourt and Solf. But the war prompted a radical reappraisal of Germany’s colonial past, and when South African troops discovered certain ‘secret documents’ during the conquest of German South-West Africa in 1915 Botha wasted no time in publishing their contents. In the aftermath of the suppression of the Herero Rebellion in 1904–6 Dernburg had admitted that 75,000 Hereros and Ovambos had died as a result of Colonel Lothar von Trotha’s Vernichtungsbefehl (‘extermination order’), and he had gone to great lengths to emphasise that von Trotha’s brutal conduct of the campaign was not sanctioned by the government. But the ‘secret documents’ revealed the death toll to have been as high as 150,000–200,000 – between half and two-thirds of German South-West Africa’s entire indigenous population – thereby establishing that the scale of the atrocity was far greater than Dernburg had claimed. This was not quite the revelation it purported to be: it was common knowledge, whatever the claims of British propagandists, that Germany had been economical with the truth and the staggering cost of the campaign – £23m (c. £1.3bn in today’s money) and the lives of 2,000 German troops – was definitive proof of the full connivance of the German government. The significance of the ‘secret documents’, which were selectively published in a 1916 South African Blue Book, was that they presented the British government with the perfect pretext for expressing outrage at a tragedy to which it had previously turned a blind eye.*
Britain needed no device to revisit the German suppression of the simultaneous Maji-Maji Rebellion in German East Africa, even though this had also failed to attract any official censure at the time, because the Reichstag had publicly sanctioned the actions of the Schutztruppe and there was no way of disguising what Schnee subsequently called ‘a relatively large sacrifice of native life’.7 In fact by the time the rebellion was finally scotched in 1907 as many as a quarter of a million Africans had died, the vast majority of them from starvation and disease caused by the Schutztruppe’s scorched earth tactics, and this further tragedy had finally forced Germany to admit that its colonial policy was flawed (and to instigate Dernburg’s reforms). The irony of Britain’s belated condemnation of German brutality was that her forces were now engaged in a struggle in East Africa with an enemy which had successfully blended the tactics favoured by the Maji-Maji rebels (a combination of pitched battles and guerrilla warfare) with the scorched earth tactics that had eventually defeated them, and which was commanded by a German general who had himself been a member of von Trotha’s staff in German South-West Africa – von Lettow-Vorbeck.
The second target of British propaganda was Germany’s administrative, as opposed to punitive, practices. In the decade before the war Dernburg’s reforms were considered to have drawn a line under the unsavoury goings-on during the rebellions in Germany’s African colonies, and the administration of her colonies had earned a good deal of respect for its efficiency; but when Germany’s future as a colonial power began to be called into question Dernburg’s reforms were swiftly forgotten. By 1916 the prevailing view in Whitehall, and among those sections of the British public with an interest in Africa, was that ‘the African world was a book that the Germans had never opened’8 and that, as latecomers to the continent, ‘whatever talents the Germans as a nation possessed, the control of subject races was not one of them’.9 Brute force, not efficiency, was now said to be the cornerstone of German administration: one treatise on the subject concluded that ‘in the German colonies, as in Germany herself, the militaristic system prevailed’,10 while another declared that even after Dernburg’s reforms there was ‘far more of the mailed fist in German civil administration than . . . may at first sight appear’.11
Accusations that Germany still condoned domestic slavery in East Africa resurfaced, Carl Peters’s objectionable views and deeds were widely publicised (greatly assisting his rehabilitation in the eyes of the German public),* and evidence was gathered from Africans in occupied territory regarding their views on the ‘People of 15’ (fifteen lashes being the standard punishment for even the most minor infractions against German administration). Documentary evidence that Schnee had considered whether to encourage pig-breeding as a means of stemming the rising popularity of Islam was circulated not only to the administrators of occupied German East Africa but also to mosques throughout the country, and British officials were given strict instructions only to follow ‘German ordinances and regulations . . . when they were not repugnant to British law’.12 A senior official was even commissioned by the Colonial Office to write a history of German East Africa which sought to establish once and for all Germany’s unfitness to rule in Africa.13
The German response to British accusations of degeneracy and brutality was forthright. The atrocities committed against the Herero and Maji-Maji rebels were portrayed as being ancient history, and already atoned for; and Britain’s colonial methods were decried as feeble. Ada Schnee encapsulated the German view when she wrote that the ‘weak point’ of British administration ‘is that it gives in to the natives too much. Because of this they become insolent and lazy which is not permitted under German doctrine’.14 Theodor Gunzert, the former Administrator of Mwanza, echoed her sentiments, asserting that Africans ‘needed the enlightened, ruthlessly effective and harsh Absolutism of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe’;15 and his colleagues took pride in perceiving themselves to be regarded by their subjects as wakal
i lakini wenye haki– ‘hard, but fair’.16 The definitive proof of the fairness of German rule was said to be the unstinting loyalty of the civilian population during the war, and although the truth of the matter was that Schnee and von Lettow-Vorbeck resorted to methods even more repressive than those of the British military authorities to strip German East Africa of all available foodstuffs and labour, and seldom paid for either, and that as many as 300,000 African civilians died as a result of their scorched earth policy, this was destined to become the central myth of all German accounts of the war.
The most forceful rebuttal of British propaganda was directed at accusations that Germany was guilty of war crimes in East Africa, the third arrow in the British quiver. The conduct of askari did not cause much of a stir, and only a handful of British writings endeavoured to draw distinctions between the German Schutztruppe and African troops fighting for the British (not least because by 1917 many former German askari had enlisted in the King’s African Rifles);*nor, with one or two notable exceptions such as Heinrich Naumann, did the conduct in battle of their European officers; and details of the plight of African civilians in German and British territory were either yet to emerge or deemed best ignored. But the atrocities alleged to have been committed against European POWs in German East Africa who were freed during the advances in 1916 and who published accounts of their experiences in a number of books, newspapers and journals soon afterwards, were deemed scandalous.
These accounts, and those of German POWs shipped to India, South Africa, Egypt and even Malta, show that although the conditions in POW camps were hard and irksome, they were rarely life-threatening. Hardship, however, was not the real issue. It was the ‘prestige’ of the European in Africa that was perceived as having been undermined by incarceration: Allied prisoners were unanimous in their condemnation of being forced to undertake menial tasks, such as cleaning latrines, in front of African guards. Germany responded to allegations of deliberately ‘humiliating’ prisoners in this way by claiming that the consequences of the Allies’ deployment of ‘coloured tribes’ on the Western Front were equally ‘humiliating’, and a vituperative Reichstag Command Paper on the subject declared that in ‘wars between civilised nations’ it was illegal to use African troops against Europeans if they were not ‘kept under a discipline which excludes the violation of the customs of warfare among civilised people’. The very public airing of racial, or racist, views concerning the wartime threat to European ‘prestige’ contrasted markedly with what had occurred during the Anglo-South African War – when both sides sought to downplay, or even deny, their use of ‘native’ combatants – and the propaganda battle outlasted the fighting: in 1919, when French troops from West Africa were stationed in the occupied Rhineland, the public outcry in Germany reached fever pitch when the soldiers were discovered to be pursuing such ‘barbarous practices’17 as consorting with German girls.
