by Edward Paice
He might have added ‘out to sea’ as well: one in six of the 155 sappers of the 14th Company QVO Sappers died during their voyage back to Bombay in November.
In South Africa one returning soldier described how a ‘fear and horror of the dreaded disease hung over the entire country’. Then, in next to no time, ‘the disease was suddenly transformed to an epidemic’; then ‘it took on the proportions of a national emergency’; and eventually ‘it turned out to be a disaster, little less than a national catastrophe’.17 Among the South African gunners of the South African Mounted Rifles, a unit which had served in Nyasaland since early 1916, eight-four men died in October alone;18 while in the Transvaal Labour Bureau former combatant Adam Payne described how ‘in many cases the reports [of casualties on the mines] did not come in because all the officials of the mine hospital were themselves down with the epidemic’. ‘The native patients’, he continued, ‘were so numerous that they overflowed from the beds to the floor, and from the floor of the hospitals to the compound rooms . . . often those attending to the sick themselves collapsed suddenly [and] the ambulances were trotting the streets day and night.’19 From a staff of thirteen in his Germiston office, only Payne was not struck down. In a matter of a few weeks influenza claimed 250,000–350,000 lives in South Africa; while in some of the mines of Southern Rhodesia the death rate was as high as sixteen per cent, and even in southern Africa’s isolated rural areas it was between three and ten per cent.20
In British East Africa, the situation was no different. Revd Horace Philp started work as a medical officer on 2 November 1918 at Fort Hall, in Kikuyu province; within eight weeks there were an estimated 17,000 deaths in his district of Nyeri, while the Native Council in Ulu district, centred on Machakos, reported 8,000 deaths among a population of 120,000. By the time the epidemic abated it had killed 70,000 people, one tenth of the population of a province which had already lost a fifth of the 45,000 men sent for carrier duty during the war. For British East Africa as a whole, the official estimate of the death toll was 160,000; but it is unlikely that fewer than 200,000 men, women and children died – a substantially greater loss of life than that caused by the war itself (and almost a tenth of the total population of the protectorate).
The governments of the British colonies in sub-Saharan Africa were powerless in the face of the epidemic, but they did at least instigate emergency relief measures to counter the famine that followed. In occupied German East Africa, however, a country whose most productive areas had been fought over and ravaged by both sides, the skeleton British administration was hard-pressed to arrange sufficient food for the military establishment, let alone civilians; and even had food been available there was no transport. The consequences were appalling, particularly in the outlying areas of a country considerably larger than Germany itself. In ‘Kondeland’, for example, in the south-west, at least ten per cent of the population died in the epidemic and subsequent famine; and in some districts the death toll was as high as twenty per cent.
African responses to the epidemic varied. Many tribes among whom diseases of one sort or another were endemic, and for whom survival had always been precarious, regarded it with customary resignation: it was simply shauri ya mungu – ‘the will of God’.* Others attributed it to witchcraft. And some of those who suffered the greatest loss of life by dint of their proximity to the war or their close involvement with the colonial economy naturally blamed the ‘White Man’s Palaver’. One phrase, however, was common to many oral histories: ‘there came a darkness’.21 By the time the epidemic was over 1.5–2 million people are estimated to have died in sub-Saharan Africa – a higher death toll than that of French troops in the war. It was the final, diabolical confirmation that the Great War in East Africa was above all a war against nature, and a humanitarian disaster without parallel until the post-Independence era.
The willingness of many British combatants and colonial officials to acknowledge publicly the horrors that war had brought to the people of East and Central Africa may not have been shared by many in Whitehall; but German participants in the campaign experienced no ‘war guilt’ whatsoever – and the fate of Africans under German rule was even worse than that of those under British rule. It was symptomatic of the German attitude to the civilian populations of Ruanda, Urundi and German East Africa that no attempt was made even to keep records of how many civilians were conscripted for carrier duties, let alone the casualties among them: the campaign’s official historian simply noted that ‘of the loss of levies, carriers and boys [we could] make no overall count due to the absence of detailed sickness records’.22 The total was certainly not less than 350,000 men, women and children;23 and it is inconceivable that the death rate among them was lower than one in seven. Furthermore, in stark contrast to common practice in the British colonies, these carriers were seldom paid anything for their service; and when famine, caused by the wholesale ‘theft of food, cattle, and men’24 by the military authorities, descended on many parts of the country the people were simply left to starve. The people of Ugogo district, for example, between Kilimatinde and Dodoma, were forced to provide some 35,000 carriers for the Schutztruppe in 1916 as well as large quantities of grain and cattle; and as a direct result of this, and changes in the pattern of rainfall, a famine the following year killed fully one fifth of the population.25 At least 300,000 civilians are thought to have perished in Ruanda, Urundi and German East Africa as a direct result of the German authorities’ conduct of the war (excluding those conscripted for carrier service) – an even higher number of deaths than during the Maji-Maji Rebellion a decade earlier;26 and by the time British administrators and troops occupied the former German colonies they were already, in effect, little more than slave states.
This was not how German officials and soldiers regarded the state of affairs in their East African colonies. Von Lettow-Vorbeck and Schnee subsequently expressed great pride in the fact that as many as two million Africans had ‘served the military in some capacity or another’27 by providing supplies or services, and for them this constituted definitive proof of the loyalty (rather than suffering) of ‘Germany’s Africans’. There was not the slightest sign of recognition, either in their accounts or those of any German combatant, that the tragic effects of the war had been compounded by the extreme severity of their regime; and in less than two decades a Nazi publication, Deutschland braucht Kolonien (‘Germany needs colonies’), would claim that just 1,000 carriers had died supporting the Schutztruppe. The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Africans had simply been erased from German history, although the myth of their ‘loyalty’ had not.
There was also a striking absence of any post-war reassessment in Germany of stereotypical views of Africans in the aftermath of the war. The same was certainly true of South Africa as well. But Bishop Willis of Uganda, on the other hand, voiced questions which many a British missionary, colonial official and soldier had shown themselves willing to address during the campaign. In a speech in 1919 he declared that Africans had ‘met Europeans, all of different classes, some deeply prejudiced against colour in any form, some entirely free from race prejudice; some who believed in keeping the African in his place, some who equally believed in treating every man with respect. And for the first time Europeans in many cases met Africans in direct and personal contact, marching together, fighting and suffering together . . . and many a European reviewed and revised his idea of the African from this contact’.28 The lesson to be learnt, he asserted, was that ‘African and European in Africa need one another’; and he warned that any attempt ‘to put the clock back, and arrest the upward progress of these millions of [African] men and women must inevitably bring with it its own terrible nemesis’.29 The extent to which his words were heeded by cash-strapped British governments during the next decade is a moot point. What is significant is that there was a tacit admission by the Allied colonial powers, even allegedly ‘dissolute’ Portugal and ‘tyrannical’ Belgium, that something needed to be done to put
their colonial ‘houses’ in order – whereas in post-war Germany the colonial lobby recognised nothing untoward in the way that Germany had ruled in Africa, or fought in Africa, and only saw what it wanted to see: an unflinching and unquestioning loyalty on the part of millions of contented colonial subjects. Koloniale Schuld, ‘colonial guilt’, was as conspicuously absent as war guilt.
While the populations of sub-Saharan Africa struggled to cope with the aftermath of the influenza pandemic the fate of Germany’s colonies was decided at the Versailles Peace Conference. The process was described by Lord Milner as a ‘huge scramble’ to redraw the colonial map of Africa; and by Major Grogan, the former Liaison Officer with the Belgian forces in East Africa who was his adviser on boundary questions, as ‘an astounding [education] into how the great international affairs of state are adjusted’.30 At one point, when Lloyd George was considering whether to cede Jubaland, 25,000 square miles of north-eastern British East Africa, to Italy, Milner asked Grogan ‘where is it, and has it any significance?’. ‘Thus,’ remarked Grogan, ‘are empires made and unmade.’31
One particularly influential Belgian report submitted at the conference ‘rejected German claims that they had not undertaken military preparations in their colonies and were not responsible for the spread of the war to Africa’ and also ‘discounted the argument that the performance of Germany’s African troops deserved some compensation’. The undoubted success of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s opposition to the Allied forces was attributed solely ‘to his ability to withdraw and the use of terror to ensure local support’; and the report concluded that Germany had ‘proved incapable of understanding and administering colonial populations’.32 George Beer, Chief of the Colonial Section of the American delegation, was equally damning: the German colonies were not, in his opinion, ‘as in the British commonwealth, regarded as parts of one large political aggregate, each of which must be administered partly in its own interest . . . [and] were never regarded as ends in themselves, but merely as means to spread Kultur, to reinforce prestige and power, and to add to the wealth of Germany’.33 As a result of these and other equally vituperative submissions Germany was summarily dispossessed of her colonies, and Britain and South Africa emerged from Versailles as the clear ‘winners’ in eastern and southern Africa: South Africa was handed German South-West Africa, and German East Africa became British Tanganyika. Ruanda and Urundi, to the considerable annoyance of Smuts and Milner, were handed to Belgium (an occurrence which would have been unimaginable ten years earlier, after the revelations concerning King Leopold’s murderous regime in the Congo); and Portugal was thrown a scrap in the form of the Kionga Triangle.
Among British imperialists, and South African adherents to the imperial cause, there was a palpable sense of triumph at the outcome of the final phase of the Scramble for Africa. An all-red ‘Cape to Cairo’ route, sought for a generation by imperialist diehards convinced of its commercial and strategic importance, had become a reality; and from 1919 ‘Rhodes’s Dream’ even began to appear in travellers’ guide-books. In theory it had become possible to traverse the African continent end to end in just fifty-three days (via 4,456 miles of railway, 2,004 miles on board steamers, and 363 miles of road) without ever setting foot on territory not controlled by the British Empire. The war had been, as von Lettow-Vorbeck had always maintained it would be, ‘decided on the fields of battle in Europe’,34 but this was not at all the outcome that he – or his political masters in Berlin – had envisaged.
Although Africa was as important to the colonial powers at Versailles as at any time since the late 1890s, Africans themselves were given no greater voice than ‘ordinary’ Europeans. Missionaries were deputed to collate and express African views; but they, like the politicians, had their own expansionist agenda and many shaped their submissions accordingly. Furthermore, as one British colonial official pointed out, Africans were ‘not so simple as to tell the victor that they preferred to be ruled by the vanquished [and] if the truth be known, the native might have said “a plague on both your houses”.’35 Despite the obvious shortcomings of the process Musinga, the paramount chief in Ruanda, obligingly denounced his former allies by declaring that ‘the Germans did not pay attention to my affairs . . . they left me as a wild animal’;36 and a host of witnesses were found to castigate German ‘frightfulness’. Only one major concession to ‘African interests’ emerged from Versailles: with ‘selfish imperialism’ of the pre-war variety on trial, and a prevailing sense that Africans ‘could no longer be bandied about like so many sheep’,37 Germany’s former colonies – at the insistence of America – were not simply handed over to the victors lock, stock and barrel. As ‘mandates’, described by one historian as ‘Imperialism’s new clothes’,38 they were supposed to be administered as a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’ under the auspices of the League of Nations; but for most Africans there would prove to be little distinction between colonies and mandates. In the post-war era the cash was simply not available, even had the political will existed, to turn high-flown ideals and aspirations into reality.
It would take another world war, in which African askari would serve with equal distinction, for the politicisation of the indigenous population of East Africa to begin in earnest. But in 1935 fifty chiefs assembled in Machakos to inform Dr Arthurs, a missionary, of their views on the call-up of the King’s African Rifles reserves in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. ‘The position is not the same as in 1914–18’, Arthurs was told, ‘nor would we assist in any cause which would involve spearing our fellow Africans. You called us to help in the war of Fourteen–Eighteen, and we willingly went, but if you called us now we would ask the reasons and have to be convinced of the justice of the cause before we would go again.’39 Their suspicions were justified. African colonies were still viewed as valuable bargaining counters in Whitehall, and when the Abyssinian invasion was accompanied by the raising of the swastika by Germans who had been allowed to return to East Africa, British politicians began to explore the possibility of appeasing Hitler by handing back the country that they had seized at such vast expense.
Africa was once again a pawn in the clash between Germany and her European neighbours, so much so that in 1938 Tanganyika was even suggested as a possible outlet for Germany’s Jewish population. Hitler’s reply was forthright: while he was certainly interested in the return of Germany’s colonies, ‘he could not be expected to ask the German people to turn over to the Jews . . . territories drenched in “the blood of German heroes” where von Lettow-Vorbeck had fought’.40 The following year he was still articulating colonial demands, although more preoccupied with the Drang nach Osten, and just for good measure conferred upon a somewhat ambivalent sixty-nine-year-old von Lettow-Vorbeck the honorary rank of General der Infanterie. The wheel had seemingly turned full circle.
‘The Lonely Graves’
(To Those Who Fell in East Africa, 1914–1918)
by Malcolm Humphery
Full many suns have gone their ways,
Since you were laid beneath the plains,
To memory belong those days,
And lasting stillness with you reigns.
The tramp of feet, the boom of gun,
The bullet’s hiss, and wounded’s groan –
Then, when the fighting has been done,
You were left there, dead and alone.
Nought but the wind now bends the grass,
Cicadas o’er you shrill their song,
And through the forest, as they pass,
The lions echo loud and long.
The silent years go drifting by
As clouds, and yet you do not mind,
Lonely, yet not alone, you lie:
You live in hearts of those behind.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX ONE
German East Africa Schutztruppe:
Dispositions July 1914
Commander: Oberstleutnant P. von Lettow-Vorbeck
Staff Officers: Major A. Kepler
, Hptm. G. Kraut, Hptm. T. Tafel
Adjutant: Oberlt K. Göring
Ordnance Officer: Lt E. Müller
Feldkompanie Garrison Officers
1/FK Aruscha Hptm. Willmann, Lt Boell, Lt Körbling
2/FK Iringa Hptm. Styx, Oberlt Falkenstein, Oberlt Aumann (at Ubena)
3/FK Lindi Hptm. Doering, Lt Freiherr von Grote, Lt Krüger
4/FK Kilimatinde Hptm. Rothert, Lt Kaufmann, Lt Freiherr von Lyncker, Lt Goetz, Oberlt von Linde-Suden (at Ssingida)
5/FK Neu-Langenburg/
Massoko Hptm. von Langenn-Steinkeller, Oberlt von Veltheim,
Lt Kieckhöfer
6/FK Udjidji Hptm. Freiherr von Hammerstein-Gesmold, Lt Poppe, Oberlt Gerlich (at Kasulu)
7/FK Bukoba Hptm. Bock von Wülfingen, Lt Bergmann, Lt Bender, Oberlt Freiherr von Haxthausen (at Biaramulo)
8/FK Tabora Hptm. Fischer, Lt Bauer, Lt Naumann
9/FK Usumbura Hptm. Otto, Oberlt Spalding, Lt Meyer
10/FK Dar-es-Salaam Oberlt von Chappuis, Oberlt Henneberger, Lt Gutknecht, Lt Spangenburg
11/FK Kissenji Hptm. Stemmermann, Oberlt Köhl, Oberlt von Busse, Lt Erdmann, Lt Freiherr von Stosch
12/FK Mahenge Hptm. von Grawert, Lt Walde, Lt Schroeder
13/FK Kondoa-Irangi Hptm. Hans Schulz, Lt von Oppen, Lt Langen
14/FK Muansa Hptm. Braunschweig, Lt von Kleist, Lt Recke, Oberlt Giehrl (at Ikoma)
Principal recruiting depot (Dar-es-Salaam) – Hptm. P. Baumstark, Lt K. Wolff
Four new companies were formed in 1914 from the police and former askari :
15/FK (Moshi)
16/FK (Tanga)
17/FK (Bagamoyo)
18/FK (Dar-es-Salaam)
The following senior officers were transferred from government to military service after the outbreak of war
