The World's War

by David Olusoga

  Against this background, the outbreak of a war among the European colonial powers created a distinct conundrum. It threatened to tear apart the bonds of white racial community and potentially risked undermining all the other maxims of colonial rule in Africa. A shared view emphasized the prestige of the white race – the threat to which was angrily voiced in a wartime essay entitled England: Traitor to the White Race, written by Bernhard Dernburg, the former German Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, and published in the United States:

  Just as the belligerents in Europe are divided by nationality, so people are divided by race in the colonies; and, just as closer ties bind nationalities and nations, so there is also a community of races… in the colonial domain, every member of the white race is answerable to every other for the maintenance of his purity, culture, and prestige of this greater community… But as, in the colonies, it is a question of dealing with great masses of undeveloped beings, far superior to the whites in number and not united among themselves, this task of the colonizer can be accomplished only if he succeeds in maintaining the prestige of the white race morally and culturally. If the white man is looked upon as mentally superior, on a higher plane economically, superior in weapons and power, the natives will decide that to render obedience to him is not only necessary, but wise. That is what is called the prestige of the white race. It is based on the native’s belief that the will of the white man is good, unshakable, unconquerable.2

  Dernburg obviously had, in a war context, a propaganda axe to grind. Nevertheless, white setters – British, Boers, French, German, Belgian, Portuguese – all believed that if white men now fought one another in front of the Africans, the result would be to tarnish the white man’s prestige and lead Africans to question the wisdom of paying ‘obedience to him’. And therein lay a sense of dread. During the nineteenth century, all the powers had recruited black mercenary armies from among their local populations, with the sole purpose of repressing other black Africans. The prospect of now sending these men into a war in which they would inevitably fight and kill white enemy soldiers, and possibly occupy white farms and towns too, appalled many colonists. Not only would white prestige be damaged, but the spilling of white blood by black hands – for long cast as the greatest of all crimes in colonial Africa – would be condoned. The sanctity of white life had been a point reinforced through racially biased judicial systems, the widespread use of capital punishment, and through exemplary punishments and military retribution. If African men were now permitted to fight against whites, how would they ever again accept the notion that white life was uniquely valuable and precious?

  Other fears entered the mix, too, based on the racial theories of the day. It was said that a war in Africa would awake within black soldiers their repressed, atavistic warrior instincts – the same savage forces that white colonization and the ‘civilizing mission’ had supposedly suppressed. There was the question of what role black veterans of an African war would claim for themselves in the post-war empires. German colonialists in South West Africa and the British and South Africans in southern Africa had spent much of the previous half century striving to take modern rifles out of the hands of the more worldly and militarily competent peoples of the continent. The prospect of thousands of African veterans, trained to use modern weapons, experienced in combat and having fought against white men, was widely considered to be anathema to the future security of white settlers.

  Finally there was the bigger picture. Settlers in Africa and colonial ministers in Europe alike feared that the economic advances being made in their African colonies could be plunged into reverse by war. Across the continent, new farms had been established, and a great spate of railway construction was under way; all this seemed in jeopardy. Some argued that Africa’s development stood at a critical moment, and that despite all these advances the process of colonial control was far from complete. There were, after all, huge swathes of the interior over which the writ of the colonial powers existed only on the map. The great carve-up of Africa as agreed at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 was less a single decisive event but rather part of a process – one that was far from complete, and which was potentially reversible.

  All of these arguments were aired in the years leading up to 1914; and most of them found audiences. But within days of the outbreak of the conflict, the idea that the colonial empires of Africa might escape being dragged into the conflict evaporated.

  TOGO, 2014. Surrounded by fields of crops and the mud and straw huts of the local Togolese farmers stand the ruins of a nerve-centre of European colonialism. Half-consumed by the vegetation lie huge rusted pieces of machinery. They are the heavy steel mounts on which enormous antennae once stood, along with giant water tanks which once cooled electric engines, and the remains of circular electric generators, brown with rust, some of them up-ended. All this detritus lies scattered – evidently by a huge explosion. Nearby are the concrete foundations of what once was a command centre, filled with weeds, overgrown with vines. The outlines of other buildings, perhaps outhouses or barracks, can still be traced in the red African soil. These physical manifestations are all that remains of a once vital hub for Germany’s colonial communication: its radio station in Kamina – the Funkstation Kamina.

  There was a reason why the first British land offensive of the war came in German Togoland, and a reason that the ultimate target of that offensive was the radio transmitter at Kamina. On 5 August 1914, within hours of the declaration of war, the British General Post Office ship the CS Alert carried out the very first British action of the conflict – the severing of five underwater telegraph cables that linked Germany to the United States.*2 What this meant was that for the duration of the conflict, the German transatlantic telegrams were routed through neutral Sweden – but that effectively meant via London, since Sweden used the British Empire’s vast cable network. That left the German communications susceptible to being intercepted, monitored and decrypted – as indeed they were, by the team of cryptologists in the British Admiralty’s ‘Room 40’, Britain’s First World War equivalent of Bletchley Park. However, foreseeing the vulnerability of its cable communications, Germany had, long before the war, commissioned the construction of a series of high-power radio transmitters capable of relaying Morse-code communications from across its colonial empire and beyond back to stations within Germany. By August 1914 that network was nearing completion and already spanned most of the globe.

  In order to neutralize this threat, the instructions dispatched to Britain’s colonial forces in Africa and Asia at the outbreak of hostilities included injunctions not only to capture German harbours, coaling stations and shipping, but also to attack and disable Germany’s radio stations. On 8 and 9 August 1914, two Royal Navy warships bombarded the German transmitter in Dar es Salaam, capital of German East Africa. Five days later, and two days after Alhaji Grunshi had fired his historic shot against the German force in Togoland, the SS Armadale Castle, an armed merchant cruiser, appeared off the coast outside the town of Swakopmund, the main port of German South West Africa. After a short bombardment she slipped off into the mist of the Skeleton Coast, having destroyed another link in the enemy’s chain of radio stations. Likewise, the station in Lüderitz Bay, in the south of that colony, was seized by South Africans. One by one, the transmitters were being silenced. The Funkstation Kamina, however, was the most important of them all, and the most valuable strategic asset in German Africa. It acted as a relay station, channelling communications between the Kaiser’s wider empire and Berlin, and passed messages to and from German shipping in the southern Atlantic. In the event, as the British-led forces closed in, the station was dynamited on the night of 24 August 1914 by its German defenders, before it could fall into enemy hands. By the end of September 1914, and without having to fight for it, British forces had taken the coastal transmitter at Doula, too, in German Cameroon.

  Beyond the specific targets of radio stations, Alhaji Grunshi’s first shot represented th
e opening salvo in a series of wars that – despite all the fears and pre-war lobbying of settlers and colonial ministers – spread rapidly across the continent, and which would ultimately result in the systematic dismantling of Germany’s colonial empire in Africa and beyond. The war in Togoland – along with the operations to capture Germany’s scattered territories in the Pacific, and the seizure by British, Indian and Japanese forces of the German enclave at Tsingtao in China – represented the only phase of the war in which the fighting really was ‘all over by Christmas’. With the destruction of the Funkstation, German Togoland quietly ceased to exist.

  The capture of German South West Africa – modern Namibia – began just as decisively, but stretched on into 1915. There, the German Schutztruppe (‘Protection Troop’) garrison was confronted by invading South African forces under the command of Louis Botha, the Boer commander who had previously fought against the British in the Second Anglo-Boer War. The South Africans – a whites-only combat force – entered German territory in September 1914, landing in the southern harbour town of Lüderitz and crossing over the Orange River and into the southern deserts, in a far less successful land offensive than the French and British achieved in Togoland. The progress of the invasion was halted in September 1914 by an uprising by some Boers against the British in South Africa itself. It was only after that rebellion had been quashed, in February 1915, that the campaign in the Namib Desert recommenced. The hiatus had no impact, however, on the ultimate result. By early May 1915 the South Africans had taken the capital, Windhoek; by July the bulk of the German forces had been pushed into the scrub deserts in the north-east of the colony, and there they were forced into an ignominious surrender near the settlement of Otavi.

  Despite making great claims to this being a ‘white man’s war’, the Germans in South West Africa mobilized three units of African troops on the outbreak of war.3 They also pressed the mixed-race Baster people – descendants of settlers and indigenous peoples – to fight on their side. The Basters, who had been witness to the wholesale extermination and brutal repression of two of the colony’s other ethnic groups in the previous decade, chose to rebel instead. They were saved from annihilation only by the advance of the South Africans. Yet the moment the fighting was over, considerations of race and white prestige quickly became pre-eminent. The South Africans permitted German settlers who had fought against them as reservists in the Schutztruppe to return to their farms; only the regular Schutztruppe were interned as PoWs. Louis Botha’s peace terms were intended to ensure that nothing was done to impair what he called the ‘standing of the white race’ in the minds of the African peoples of South West Africa – a colony that Botha and the government in Pretoria were determined to wrest from German control at the end of the war and incorporate into an enlarged South Africa.

  The campaign to capture and occupy German Cameroon (Kamerun) took longer to reach its conclusion. On 6 August 1914 French forces invaded from French Equatorial Africa to the east, while a force made up of 4,000 Nigerian troops under 350 white British officers marched in from the north. The French and British were supported by units from the Belgian Congo. All the invading armies wore European uniforms, but the vast majority of the fighting men were black Africans. The white Belgian officers found themselves in the unnerving position of leading a campaign from their nation’s African empire, while their homeland itself was being overrun by a German army a million strong. The defending German forces in Cameroon numbered around 4,000, three-quarters of them Askari – native African troops. After abandoning the coastal ports without a fight, the defenders of German Cameroon retreated into the interior. The war in Cameroon dragged on miserably until spring 1916, despite the wide-scale and widespread hostility of a local population, resentful of thirty years of German aggression and punitive raids, and despite large-scale defections by the Askari. Eventually, the remaining Askari, Germans and their families escaped over the border into Spanish Muni (today’s Equatorial Guinea), effectively surrendering the colony.

  If events in the last-remaining German colony, German East Africa, had followed a similar trajectory, the final chapter in Germany’s colonial venture in Africa would have been neatly concluded long before 1918. The fact that it was not is down to one man, the commander of the colony’s Schutztruppe.

  LATE 1913. A steamer journeys to East Africa. Aboard is an old-style Prussian officer – the career soldier and son of a general, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. He has already acquired a reputation as one of the German Army’s colonial ‘specialists’. For a start, he was part of the German-led international force sent to teach the nationalist ‘Boxer’ rebels a lesson in China in 1900. He has already fought against the Nama people, during Germany’s war in South West Africa from 1904, where he was badly wounded, losing an eye. By most accounts, he is cultured, capable – and charming. The aim of his journey now is to take up command of the Schutztruppe in German East Africa. While on board, he makes the acquaintance of the young Karen Blixen, who will later write a memoir of her Kenyan life, Out of Africa, under the pen-name Isak Dinesen. She is struck by the force of his personality, and the two became travel companions. In her view, Lettow-Vorbeck belongs ‘to the olden days, and I have never met another German who has given me so strong an impression of what Imperial Germany was and stood for’.4

  The aspect of Lieutenant Colonel Lettow-Vorbeck’s personality that Karen Blixen did not encounter, and upon which she left no remarks, was his obsessiveness. The Schutztruppe commander, forty-four years old in 1914, was a man driven by a fanatical belief in duty, a trait that made him prone to an extreme form of tunnel vision. From the moment war broke out, all non-military considerations seemed to evaporate from his mind. This might have been less of an issue had the civilian Governor of German East Africa, Heinrich Schnee, been a stronger figure; but from very early on in the war, Lettow-Vorbeck strongly asserted his belief that in the current circumstances he was the paramount authority in the colony, rather than Schnee. The conflict between the two men lasted until November 1918, but early victory and growing fame was to place Lettow-Vorbeck in the dominant position for most of that time. This victory of soldier over civilian in a battle of wills was to prove disastrous for millions of Africa’s people.

  The forty-two-year-old Schnee remained, at least in theory, the highest authority in German East Africa. The author of a number of books, and with a background in law and a career in the German colonies in the Pacific behind him, he had clear views on the peoples of Africa and Germany’s colonial mission. He was, by the low standards of German colonialism in Africa, a liberal, and he was resented by the more thrusting and ambitious of the settlers and the Schutztruppe.

  The colony over which Schnee now ruled was in many ways an oddity. The bulk of the African population lived in what is today Rwanda and Burundi, while along the coast was a zone populated by Swahili speakers. A great deal of racial mixing had taken place over the centuries between ethnic Arab populations and local African peoples, of whom there were over a hundred ethnic groups with their own languages, cultures and traditions. The offshore islands of Zanzibar and Pemba were under British ‘protection’, and the colony was surrounded on all sides by those of potential enemies. To the north was British East Africa, to the west the Belgian Congo, and to the south lay British Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) and Portuguese Mozambique. There had been two extremely violent rebellions in the colony since 1885. The Maji-Maji rebellion of 1905–06 had been particularly bloody and was suppressed with appalling violence. The scorched-earth policies followed by the Schutztruppe resulted in a famine that had led to the deaths of perhaps as many as a quarter of a million Africans. Unsurprisingly, there was a deep-seated resentment of German rule among the colony’s African population, almost 8 million strong.

  Yet Schnee in 1914 was convinced that the colony, despite its bloody past, stood on the verge of the next phase of its development, one in which such repressive measures would not be req
uired. Unlike many colonies, German East Africa operated at a profit. The white European population had swelled to over 5,000, and many of them lived in the healthier northern highlands, where they farmed and produced sisal, coffee, rubber and other goods for the German market. The colony had two railways: the Central Railway – 780 miles long and linking Dar es Salaam with Lake Tanganyika – had only been completed in July 1914. It was due to open formally on 12 August, and celebrations to mark this pivotal moment in the colony’s economic development were being prepared when the war broke out. Along the rail corridors, European farms and tiny towns and settlements had begun to develop, the local people having been displaced or absorbed into the European economy as landless labourers. There had been great advancement in the provision of schools for Africans, and the slave trade that still existed on the Swahili coast was being effectively repressed. Governor Schnee was determined that any war in Europe would not be allowed to jeopardize German East Africa’s economic progress or place the white settlers of the colony at unnecessary risk.

  There had initially been some hope, during July and August 1914, that the colony might escape the war altogether, on the basis of what amounted to a legal technicality. As the great powers’ alliance system pulled Europe into two armed blocks, Schnee and his opposite number in British East Africa, Governor Sir Harry Conway Belfield, both hoped that Articles Ten and Eleven of the General Act agreed in 1885 might be invoked. These stipulated that if war were to break out between nations with colonies in the Congo Basin – which included much of German East Africa, as well as German Cameroon – the region could be declared neutral and kept out of the fighting. In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of war in Europe, neither Schnee nor Belfield sought conflict nor authorized any offensive actions that might provoke the other. The lawyerly Schnee even attempted to pursue legal avenues, through intermediaries, which might have led to the application of the neutrality clauses; but they came to nothing. And Belfield, even in January 1915, was declaring that ‘the colony has no interest in the present war except so far as its unfortunate position places it in such close proximity to German East Africa’. Despite the caution of the two governors, the white settler populations of both colonies rushed to enlist or to don their reservist uniforms and take up arms. Nairobi, capital of British East Africa, in particular filled with white hunters and hot-headed settlers who had brought their own arms. They demanded to be incorporated into the army, given uniforms and a mission, forming themselves into militia units and planning for their part in the war against the Hun in Africa. Belfield hoped calmer heads would prevail, and that his counterpart in the German colony would have more luck dowsing the flames of nationalism.