Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  The surrender, at van Deventer’s behest, was sensitively handled by Edwards. It needed to be. Article XVII of the Armistice agreement had only stipulated that the German forces in East Africa should be ‘evacuated’, but the War Office had insisted that evacuation could only be effected if ‘unconditional surrender and disarmament’ took place. This was secured, by van Deventer’s own admission, ‘by a judicious mix of firmness and bluff ’. Von Lettow-Vorbeck sensed that there was trickery afoot but, unable to secure confirmation of his suspicions from Berlin, he accepted the War Office’s conditions under official protest. Van Deventer was quite clear in his own mind that ‘we had no real right to demand [a surrender] at all’.27 One consequence of surrender that caused considerable bitterness was that both the German combatants and the askari became POWs; equally contentious was the War Office’s refusal to lend von Lettow-Vorbeck the two million Marks he owed his askari in back pay (a debt that Germany honoured eight years later). However dubious the means by which the surrender had been secured, there was a limit to how conciliatory Britain was prepared to be; and as one observer pointed out, ‘there were many other Africans to whom the Germans owed money, but whom they were either unwilling or unable to pay’. Indeed there was no attempt – and never would be – to determine ‘what the natives [had] lost’* as a result of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘total disregard of the barest needs of the native population’ and his ‘wholesale seizure of every vestige of food stuff left to them’28 in both German and Portuguese East Africa. Indian traders were owed an estimated twenty million rupees as well, and no debt to impressed – as opposed to ‘regular’ – carriers was even recognised by German officers.

  Although many British officers felt very strongly about such matters, perhaps surprisingly so, von Lettow-Vorbeck remarked that ‘examples of discourtesy . . . were absolutely exceptional’.29 Furthermore, van Deventer insisted that during their voyage home the Germans should be ‘granted the honours of war’ and treated as ordinary citizens rather than POWs; and as they were transported up Lake Tanganyika to Kigoma on the George, and thence by railway to Tabora, British officers along the route were warned to be sensitive to the fact that the journey was likely to ‘cause feelings to run high’.30 At Tabora tears were shed by German and askari alike as they were finally separated and the askari continued, during a brief internment before being allowed home, to demonstrate haughty contempt for their British counterparts whom they had so often bested. On occasions they were not even averse to disarming and thrashing their camp guards.

  In Dar-es-Salaam, the Germans were received by General Sheppard, van Deventer’s Chief of Staff, and in January 1919 von Lettow-Vorbeck and his retinue of German officers and NCOs sailed for Europe on the SS Transvaal (formerly the Feldmarschall ). They were fortunate. Shipping was in desperately short supply and their comrades in POW camps in Egypt and India would, like many Allied troops, have to wait more than a year to be repatriated. As he reached Europe von Lettow-Vorbeck reflected that ‘we East Africans know only too well that our achievements cannot be compared with the military deeds and devotion of those in the homeland . . . [but] we had come back home unsullied, and that Teutonic sense of loyalty peculiar to us Germans had kept its head high even under the conditions of war in the tropics’.31 After returning to Berlin he and his men paraded beneath the Brandenburg Gate on 2 March 1919, receiving a heroes’ welcome from a populace which had for the most part refused to accept the reality of defeat in the field. But the Germany that von Lettow-Vorbeck knew, and whose nationalism and militarism he embodied, had ceased to exist.

  Within a few months of his triumphant return von Lettow-Vorbeck, ‘the Hindenburg of Africa’, was shot at by a ‘revolutionary’ after delivering a lecture in the Pomeranian city of Stargard about the victory at Tanga but, undaunted, he soon took to the field again. He was, despite his four years of extreme privation in the African bush, still motivated by the same fanatical single-mindedness, bordering on Eitelkeit (‘conceit’), when he led a Freiwilligkorps onto the streets of Hamburg where – with Kraut, Wintgens and Köhl on his staff – he was charged with suppressing the Spartacist uprising. Then, in March 1920, at the age of fifty, he became a leading figure in the Kapp Putsch, the nationalist revolt against the Social Democrats which sought to install a military dictatorship in anarchic Germany. The coup attempt failed and von Lettow-Vorbeck, fortunate to escape imprisonment, formally retired in May. It was the end of an extraordinary military career, but he and Schnee soon began another campaign which they would never abandon: the fight to secure the return of the German colonies. Both men lived into the 1960s, having survived into their nineties.

  Among his former opponents there were many who would always feel nothing but respect for von Lettow-Vorbeck. In 1929 he was even invited as guest of honour to a campaign ‘reunion banquet’ in London. But there were some who accused him of having a ‘brutal heart’,32 of ‘wanton ruthlessness’.33 In their eyes, the whole campaign was caused by German militarism gone mad and the Allies’ dogged insistence on countering it at every turn. It could have been otherwise, as one senior colonial administrator in East Africa perceptively pointed out: ‘Had we not invaded German East Africa’, wrote Charles Dundas, ‘it was quite possible that von Lettow-Vorbeck would have been compelled to surrender in order to save his own people, particularly the German women and children, from extreme privation. Instead we relieved him of that burden and left him unencumbered to pursue his tactics of attrition. One wonders at times whether it would not have been more profitable to content ourselves with holding our own borders, leaving the Germans to stew in their own juice’, he mused, before concluding that ‘in a sense it all seemed so futile . . .’.34

  EPILOGUE

  ‘There Came a Darkness’

  The death toll among the 126,972 British troops who had served in the East Africa campaign was officially recorded as 11,189 – a mortality rate of nine per cent – and total casualties, including the wounded and missing, were a little over 22,000. The loss of life among armed combatants was, however, only the tip of the iceberg. By the end of the 1917 mass levy of military carriers, without whom the campaign could never have been fought at all, a majority of adult males in the five British territories bordering German East Africa had been coerced into manning the supply lines. In some areas, such as British East Africa’s Teita district, three-quarters of able-bodied men served away from home; in others, in German East Africa, men found themselves impressed first by the Germans and then by the British. The consequence of mobilising manpower on this scale was ‘a maelstrom of gigantic proportions’,1 and in August 1917 the Acting Governor of British East Africa had to inform van Deventer that the country’s manpower resources were exhausted. By the end of the war more than one million carriers had been recruited by the British in their colonies and in German East Africa, of whom no fewer than 95,000 had died. One third of a small labour contingent recruited in the Seychelles never returned from the war; one in five men in British East Africa’s Carrier Corps died; and at least 41,000 Africans conscripted by the British in occupied German East Africa perished – the highest number from any of the recruiting ‘pools’ in East Africa.

  When the death toll among British troops was added to that of the carriers the official ‘butcher’s bill’ in the East Africa campaign exceeded 100,000 souls. The true figure was undoubtedly much higher: as many a British official admitted, ‘the full tale of the mortality among [the] native carriers will never be told’.2 Even 100,000 deaths is a sobering enough figure. It is almost double the number of Australian or Canadian or Indian troops who gave their lives in the Great War; indeed it is equivalent to the combined casualties – the dead and wounded – sustained by Indian troops. It is as if the entire African workforce employed at the time in the mines of South Africa had been wiped out. Yet the East Africa campaign remains, by and large, a forgotten theatre of war.

  The scale of the tragedy was not immediately apparent, either in Europe or in Africa,
not least because the compilation of statistics was delayed by ‘the many problems of demobilisation’.3 Even in the summer of 1919 the Chief of the Colonial Division of the American delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference remarked that the number of ‘native victims . . . may be too long to give to the world and Africa’.4 He was correct. There were many European combatants who paid tribute to the King’s African Rifles, which had earned a reputation for being ‘fit to fight against or alongside any troops in the world’,5 and about whose askari one colonel wrote ‘they do not know what fear means; they have won the war for us in East Africa’;6 and there were many, like General Northey, who awarded the carriers ‘the palm of merit’. But when the mortality rate among the latter became common knowledge in Whitehall it was deemed to be a ‘bloody tale’ that was best ignored, or even suppressed. As one Colonial Office official put it, in particularly unsavoury terms, the conduct of the campaign ‘only stopped short of a scandal because the people who suffered most were the carriers – and after all, who cares about native carriers?’7 This was not entirely fair to the many British soldiers, missionaries and administrators who expressed great concern about the horrors they had witnessed in East Africa in diaries and official reports. But for the most part their opinions did not find their way onto the agenda of politicians and civil servants back home who were preoccupied with ‘bigger issues’ elsewhere (or with excoriating Germany’s colonial credentials).

  Many of the deaths, among carriers and troops, could be attributed to another ‘scandal’ about which little was heard after the war. By the end of 1917 a number of ‘whistle-blowers’ had alerted the War Office to the lamentable state of the medical establishment in East Africa, and their allegations were too serious to be ignored. In the year ending October 1917 twelve times more soldiers had died of disease than in combat, and there were fewer than 13,000 hospital beds available for carriers – of which half were so far from the front lines as to render them unreachable for those struck down by malaria, dysentery or pneumonia in German East Africa. This, combined with sanitary arrangements which ‘courted failure from the first’ and inadequate rations, was the principal cause of a rise in the carrier mortality rate to almost thirty per cent in July 1917; and even in Nairobi plague was endemic. When Dr Pike compiled his exhaustive report on the state of the campaign’s medical facilities he pulled no punches, concluding that there was ‘much to regret in the medical history of this campaign’. The officer in charge of the infectious diseases hospital at Bombo, 4/KAR’s home depot in Uganda, was court-martialled; the officer in charge of No. 3 British Hospital in Nairobi was censured for never having visited Kijabe Sanatorium, which was also his responsibility; and the four senior medical officers in East Africa were summoned to face charges ‘on the score of discipline or efficiency as the case may be’. But Pike had to qualify his report to avoid it being ‘buried’, and the price paid for achieving any improvement in the situation was his statement that the blame for the death toll among the carriers, while ‘a most regrettable occurrence’, should not ‘rest with the medical authorities’.8 The implication was clear: carriers were expendable whereas troops were not. But even when the Court of Enquiry finally convened to consider the charges against the senior medical officers, the accused had all returned to India and were officially exonerated a year later by the Army Council.

  The suffering borne by the indigenous populations of East Africa was not confined to those who were recruited for carrier duties. The principal consequence of a drain on manpower unparalleled since the 1870s, when Arab slavers had annually exported 25,000 Africans to the Middle East, was the severe impairment of the capacity for survival of those left behind; and when the rains failed in British East Africa in late 1917 and early 1918 famine reduced those who barely managed to eke out an existence in years of good harvests to a state of total destitution. By mid summer, it was reported that ‘the people subsisted in many parts on wild roots and grasses’ and there were rumours ‘that some of the people had resorted to cannibalism’ (rumours which ‘were never substantiated’ but which the administration had ‘good reason to fear . . . were true’).9 One European farmer, Llewelyn Powys, described the situation around Nanyuki in the following words:

  famine stalked through the land with Pestilence galling his kibe. Week after week the country lay prostrate under the blank stare of a soulless sun. Month after month the waters of the lake sank lower and lower . . . It was as though the earth itself was undergoing some appalling process of putrefaction. The air was tainted, the flaked dusty mould stank. Everywhere one came across the carcasses of animals dead from exhaustion, carcasses with long muddy tongues protruding . . . the vultures grew plump as Michaelmas geese . . . the sun rose and sank in a blinding heaven, and under its hideous presence all sensitive life trembled and shrank.10

  Famine and its attendant diseases were not the only calamities to befall the indigenous populations of eastern and southern Africa. In the British colonies the war also brought tax rises and the enactment of increasingly repressive land and labour laws; while in South Africa the white population campaigned relentlessly for greater racial segregation, paving the way for a plethora of discriminatory legislation in the 1920s. At the end of 1918 the South African National Native Council wrote to King George V emphasising the loyalty of Africans during the war and requesting that ‘London intervene to lessen their oppression and see that voting rights were extended to the African population’,11 but the plea was ignored; and the Kabaka of Uganda and his chiefs beseeched the colonial government to put an end to kasanvu labour, which required all young men to work for set periods on government projects, but it took four more years to secure its abolition. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa it seemed, as one enlightened Norwegian resident of British East Africa put it, that ‘“all” that was wanted from Africans was that they should work for foreigners for a minimum wage without consideration for their betterment in anyway’;12 and that African interests, though ‘proclaimed in public as the basis of Allied policy’ were, in the words of one disenchanted British administrator, ‘largely disregarded in private’.13 When an officer with 5/SAI noted in late 1917 that ‘people in South Africa write and tell me they are sick of hearing about the German East Africa campaign,’ his appropriate riposte was to say that he was ‘sure that these poor natives in East Africa are pretty sick of it too’.14

  The worst calamity of all was saved for last. For the surviving troops and carriers on both sides, and for the civilian populations prostrated by four years of fighting in East Africa, October 1918 – ‘Black October’ – brought an even greater disaster than total war. The records of the military and civilian authorities say remarkably little about the advent of the ‘Spanish’ influenza epidemic, or the ‘disease of the wind’ as it was referred to in Abyssinia.*It was almost as if its effects were beyond their comprehension, and to begin with it was not easy to separate deaths caused by this new scourge from those caused by a host of other ailments besetting combatant and non-combatant alike. Even von Lettow-Vorbeck’s surviving doctors, who after four years in the field were well versed in treating almost every affliction known to man, were unable to determine the moment when the ‘bronchial virus’ which spread like wildfire through the German ranks in September 1918 was replaced by something altogether more horrifying. But within weeks of the Armistice Captain Walter Spangenburg, eleven other Germans, and 279 German askari and porters – one in eight of those who had surrendered at Abercorn – had died from the flu, and deaths in the British ranks had soared to four times their level in October. Only then did it become clear that East Africa was in the grip of an epidemic which ‘Western’ medicine was completely unable to combat, and that peace had brought no respite from the suffering.

  Among the civilian population of sub-Saharan Africa this new curse, so virulent that a man could quite simply drop dead while walking home to his shamba, was simply beyond imagination. It arrived in Mombasa and South Africa in September, in southern Nyasaland
at the beginning of October, and in Portuguese East Africa in the third week in October; and the new ‘clinical front’15 rapidly showed itself to be even more fluid than the ‘war front’ in Portuguese East Africa. It spread along the railways and lake steamer routes (conduits intended for economic development which in the past four years had only brought death and destruction to Africa); it spread along the vast lines of communication supporting the troops; it spread with soldiers and porters returning to their homes as the war reached its final stages; and it spread along labour migration roots, particularly into the mines of southern Africa.

  By the time von Lettow-Vorbeck and his German officers reached Dares-Salaam the situation was dire. ‘In Sea View camp,’ wrote a surviving Frontiersman,

  there were very few left standing; the bugles [were] all employed in blowing the last post while the sun was yet high in the heavens. A party of twenty details arrived from Nairobi; in twenty-four hours only one was left. The sick and the dead lay thickly in the hospital beds and on stretchers laid along the passages. New burial grounds were started; native and Indian fundi made coffins by lamplight and wondered if they themselves would occupy them . . . rumour averred that this was THE END: that a God weary of war had determined to wipe humanity off the world by means of a plague more fatal than man’s destructiveness . . . Out in the bush even the baboons were dying in their thousands.16