by M G Vassanji
Few people I met knew or cared that a protracted campaign of the First World War—which changed so much of the world—had been fought in this region, that their town in Africa reposing at the foot of Kilimanjaro had a fascinating, dramatic modern history that was connected to the larger events of the world; that that European war had also dramatically changed the course of their African nation.
When war was declared by the great powers of Europe on August 4, 1914, the two colonies, British East Africa (Kenya) and Deutsch-Ostafrika (Tanganyika), became willy-nilly a part of it. Far away from Europe in every conceivable way, the East African campaign would seem pointless, frivolous, and bizarre, a waste of resources and lives that could have no possible impact on the outcome of the actual war, which in the real theatre in Europe would end up consuming millions of lives. But the British Empire stretched across the globe, protected by its navy, and therefore every corner of it was potentially vulnerable and strategic. The war in East Africa was fought using colonial proxies, Indians against Africans, and Africans against each other. There was a thriving Indian population in both the countries, but the Indian soldiers who fought on the British side were not local, they were shipped in from the Subcontinent.
Both colonies were recently acquired and settled. The dividing boundary had been drawn barely twenty years before. Kenya in 1914 had a mere 5,000 Europeans, of which 1,200 lived in Nairobi; the others, mostly farming families, were gathered in the lush highlands and the Rift Valley. There were 25,000 Indians. The Uganda Railway, completed in 1905, ran from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria—Mombasa to Nairobi and Kampala—following ancient caravan routes close to the border. Nairobi, founded as a way station and railway depot, had become the capital of Kenya, with a population of 20,000. In neighbouring Tanganyika there was a comparably small number of whites, concentrated in Dar es Salaam and Tanga on the coast, the highlands of the Kilimanjaro region in the north, and the Iringa region in the southern highlands. The Usambara Railway ran from Tanga up to Moshi, and like its Kenyan counterpart ran parallel and close to the border. Farther south, the much longer Central Line ran from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma on the other great lake, now called Lake Tanganyika. It was in this raw region, grabbed from its owners, and still unformed as colonies, that a two-year war took place.
Only days after the declaration of war, enthusiastic British settlers in Kenya, eager to fight for the motherland, had formed two ragtag volunteer corps, the East African Mounted Rifles and the East Africa Regiment. South of the border in Tanganyika, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a professional soldier who would go on to become a legend even to the British, began to gather settlers and recruit African askaris in preparation for engagement. Like sparks presaging a forest fire, small units of armed men began darting across the border. These raids were indecisive, exploratory, and adventurous in nature, and more harassment than anything else. There were some notable engagements, however. On August 15 a German force of three hundred captured the strategic town of Taveta, twenty-five miles from Moshi, just inside the border in Kenya. This was a thorn in the British side, since from here the Germans could mount hit-and-run operations on the vital Uganda Railway. Farther east, on the coast, von Lettow-Vorbeck had his eyes on Mombasa. In late September, German askaris marched north along the coast and crossed the border but were beaten back.
Soon after, the British attempted two ambitious attacks on the German colony. In the first, in the Kilimanjaro area on November 3, 1914, an Anglo-Indian force of 1,500 men crossed the border and were soundly beaten by a German force half the size. In the second engagement, known forever as the infamous Battle of Tanga, a unit assembled as the Indian Expeditionary Force B, consisting of some 8,000 troops, arrived in a large convoy of ships to capture the port town of Tanga. They were humiliated by a much smaller but well-trained German-African force.
Finally in November 1915, worried by reports of these and other setbacks from the British colony, the Committee of Imperial Defence in London recommended that the conquest of German East Africa take place as soon as possible. This turned out to mean immediately, and the man picked to lead the invasion was Lieutenant-General Jan Smuts of South Africa, who arrived in Mombasa in February 1916. Smuts, a diminutive man, was of Afrikaaner background, therefore arguably an African. In the Boer War (1899–1902) he had commanded guerrilla raids against the British. He had tussled with Gandhi. He was as tough as von Lettow-Vorbeck.
Suddenly in early 1916 the quiet and arid border region between Kenya and Tanganyika, sparsely dotted with small villages, was overrun by thousands of soldiers speaking a dozen languages and from as many cultures: settlers wearing wide-rimmed sun hats, the British, South Africans, and Rhodesians in baggy khakis and helmets, Indians in a variety of turbans, smart African askaris in puttees and caps with a neck-flap. Armoured cars raced urgently on grass trails and new roads, vast tent villages sprang up, wildlife stayed away, and horses and pack animals raised the dust. Even today, this spectacle from the past makes you wonder. What would the natives in their rudimentary settlements—a few mud huts around a yard of packed red earth—someone at Mbuyuni, for instance, or Maktau—have made of this upheaval of their universe, this alien invasion that could as well have come from Mars? There are no accounts from their side, of course.
Smuts meant business. His plan was to attack the Kilimanjaro area from the west, throwing a full division at Namanga (where a present border post exists), and from the east along the Voi–Taveta axis, the two divisions later to join up. The British forces outnumbered Lettow-Vorbeck’s Feldkompanies by 18,400 to 6,000. A railway line had been extended from Voi to Maktau, more than halfway to the border, to transport the British troops. By March 5, British forces, including several mounted, infantry, and field artillery units, had amassed at Mbuyuni, some twenty miles east of Taveta, and Serengeti, a village farther up. On the evening of March 7 the South Africans marched down in two columns, and the next day had displaced German positions on the Chala Crater overlooking Taveta. On March 10, the 2nd South African Horse unit expelled the Germans out of Taveta, which they had occupied the previous year. Meanwhile, Salaita Hill, just outside Taveta, where the Germans had twice rebuffed the British, had been occupied unopposed by other units on March 9.
The Germans retreated towards Moshi, making British advance as difficult as possible. Early on March 14 the South Africans under Major van Deventer reached Moshi. At about the same time the 1st Division, arriving from the west, established contact. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops retreated east, along the railway. Smuts pursued. But, as the official history of the East Africa Operations states, “Although the Germans had fallen back, they had not been effectively brought to battle, much less suffered tactical defeat.” Engage-and-retreat was in fact the tactic adopted by von Lettow-Vorbeck against the superior enemy forces, in a protracted guerrilla war across the country, north to south. There is some irony in the fact that the pursuing Smuts had himself used similar tactics against the British in the Boer War not long ago in South Africa.
Von Lettow-Vorbeck was never defeated and became a military hero and a man of legend.
The English poet and novelist Francis Brett Young was thirty-one when he accompanied Smuts’s invasion as a member of the medical corps and gives a wonderfully impressionistic account of that experience in his book Marching on Tanga. In novelistic fashion he begins,
When the troop train ran into the siding at Taveta the dawn was breaking. All through the night we had been moving by fits and starts over the new military line from Voi, moving through a dark and desolate land which, eighteen months before, had been penetrated by very few men indeed. In that night journey we could see little of the country. Not that we slept—our progress was too freakish, and the Indian railway trucks in which we were packed were too crowded for that—but because the night seemed to lie upon it with a peculiar heaviness.
The title of the book is somewhat misleading: the troops did not go to Tanga but, always in pursuit of the retreating Germans, march
ed eastwards along the railway for some distance, and then turned south. Falling sick near Handeni, Brett Young appears to have been sent back to England after a period of recuperation near Nairobi, where he completed his book in 1916. The manuscript was censored, which is perhaps why it is at times vague and short on graphic detail. But it has passages of beauty, and the whole East African experience seems to have come upon him like a dream. He ends,
But, though we do not always know it, the submerged memory of the dream lingers. And, in the same way, it seemed to me that though the forest tangles of the Pangani close above the tracks we made, and the blown sand fill our trenches and drift above the graves of those whom we left sleeping there, that ancient, brooding country can never be the same again, nor wholly desert, now that so many men have lived intensely for a little while in its recesses. Shall we not revisit the Pangani, I and many others, the country to which we have given a soul?
Since the “British” soldiers (including the South Africans and Rhodesians) were all accounted for, one assumes that it was the dead Indians and Africans who were buried on the road, the former to be remembered anonymously in that memorial in Moshi, the latter by the Askari Monument in the centre of Dar es Salaam. Brett Young went on to have a prolific career, publishing numerous books, some of which were best-sellers. His favourite novel, however, according to the Francis Brett Young Society, was Jim Redlake, now out of print, which uses some of the censored portions of Marching on Tanga.
To me the great war does not evoke Flanders or Vimy Ridge or Gallipoli, all vividly and multiply brought to life in novels and films, or the red poppies of November, in the same way it does the windblown thorny semidesert from Voi to Moshi under the mighty Kilimanjaro, the Usambara Railway, and the road to Tanga. And too, there is the overriding irony of it: the graves at Moshi, the anonymous monuments to the Africans and the Indians.
A week before my journey to Moshi from Nairobi, I had gone to visit Taveta from the Kenya side to look at the site of Smuts’s great push eighty years earlier. On the way, however, there was a bit of family history to lay to rest.
Even before Kenya was colonized and its great railway was built, Indians had settled along that interior route to Uganda, running their little dukas (shops) that brought supplies to the local Africans. My great-grandfather, Nanji Lalji, was one of them, having arrived from the village of Girgadhada in the Kathiawar region of Gujarat to begin a business in the town of Kibwezi, not far from Voi. Here he was the local mukhi, or headman, of the Khojas and presided over the khano. This bit of family history I had learned only recently after a meeting with one of his daughters-in-law, my father’s aunt, a shrunken old woman in a mattress shop in downtown Nairobi. Kibwezi turned out to be a typical nondescript town under the sun, with nothing of interest save the ruin of the old khano where my great-grandfather had presided. The Indians had all gone away. Several years later, I saw my ancestor’s village in India. Here too the Khojas had gone away, except for one family, and the khano was shut down, after the Gujarat violence of 2002. It was a strangely moving experience, to come to the place of my origins, but by this time I could also manage a sense of detachment.
The Uganda Railway was built in the early 1900s using indentured Punjabi and local African labour. Given various names, including the Lunatic Express and the Iron Snake, it was an engineering marvel of its time, traversing some six hundred miles, ascending to more than 6,000 feet before plunging down into the Rift Valley and rising up again to meet Lake Victoria. The construction was gruelling, and many workers died from malaria, dysentery, and sleeping sickness; and for a few terror-filled months some Punjabis fell victim to lions in the grassland who had become so emboldened by access to easy meat that they would creep inside a tent of sleeping men and drag one off. This grisly episode of the railways—the plight of the “coolies”—is captured vividly in the book The Man-eaters of Tsavo by Colonel Patterson, the man who hunted down the predators.
The Nairobi–Mombasa highway, going east, stays close to the railway. Arriving at Voi around noon, we turned into the Taveta road. It was rough and dusty, punishing for the car, and there was not another vehicle in sight, so that if the car broke down, as our driver worried, we would be stuck in the middle of nowhere under a burning sun. All around us the dry thorny shrub of the Taru Desert, a dull brown and green landscape relieved by the occasional baobab tree. Roads led into villages now obscure, which in that brief moment of the war had assumed such importance. There was no sign of the military railway from Voi, only a herd of cows and a few lanky Masai youth in red shukas with their herding sticks. Finally we entered a grassland, and soon thereafter the land was abundant and green with large shady trees and we were in Taveta. Straight ahead of us loomed Kilimanjaro, both peaks visible.
An eerie feeling. Could this be real? Is this where, under the eyes of this African god, the great war was fought?
Taveta was a sprawling village surrounded by hills and mountains. We found a decent hotel, from the terrace of which we could look upon a vista: the Pare Mountains before us on the left, Kilimanjaro directly in front, Chala Crater to the right. Behind us a stone church on a small hill, and behind that, Salaita Hill, whose occupation by a small party of Germans in 1915 had been the cause of so much British frustration. The hotel manager, a man in his forties wearing a Kaunda suit—a collared short-sleeved shirt of linen worn over matching pants—was a former schoolmaster and a history buff to whom I took instantly. He was delighted at my interest. Nobody knows about the war here, he rued; all that history, now lost. The church-on-a-hill behind us was relatively new, from the 1930s, but there was a cemetery, not very far, on the site of an old church destroyed in the war. There was a 1904 grave there, of a white woman.
He gave me a car with driver to go and have a look. The cemetery was a short distance away from the modern town, but I couldn’t find the old grave. The place was lovely, however, shaded with mango trees and utterly quiet and peaceful. The graves seemed to have been reused, and even the gravestones. On our way back, a surprise awaited. Across the road from the church rose a site that made my heart race: old brick ruins crowning the top of a rise. We stopped so I could walk around. What remained of the original structure—a rectangular bunker—were the ruins of the outer walls, and in one corner an almost intact room with crenelated walls, a square opening in each of them, used presumably to fire down on the enemy. There was no roof, and the room was now used as a kitchen. The rest of the building had been patched up crudely with cement and brick and housed the church offices. Stones were scattered on the sides of the hill, debris that presumably had rolled away from the old structure. As we drove on, alerted, we noted occasional heaps of rubble that could very possibly—very hopefully—be signals from times past.
You have to go and see Lake Chala, the manager insisted, and the next morning we did just that.
The lake is inside a crater and invisible from the road, so that you have to walk up a hill to see it. And when you do so you come upon a sight of such pristine beauty it leaves you helpless. The sky blue, the leaves green, the dirt road an insignificant thin line. The lake below, crystal-clear blue, mysterious, deep; tiny ripples on the surface played by the wind like light fingers on a harp. You have no word to say; you walk away from the others. You think, This could be the site of Creation itself. And you want to hoard away this moment, so that years later you can say, I was at Lake Chala. When the tourists had not arrived and only a privileged few knew about it.
You can, if you try, climb down to the water. We meet two Masai youths who have done just that. We go halfway down, but the climb is steep, and without a stick (the Masai each have one) it does not seem wise to proceed farther. But at the top of the crater is a stone fortification, a wall, some nine feet high and twenty wide. This is where the South Africans had dislodged the Germans.
It takes some feat—amidst this spell-binding natural beauty that surrounds us—to imagine here tens of thousands of troops, animals, guns, motor vehicles. Du
st, petrol fumes, animal odour in the air. They came, fought, and left, leaving only these stone clues behind, like men and beasts from another planet.
Lake Chala is fed by a stream from Kilimanjaro running underground. It runs, we are told, all the way to Lake Jipe, emerging once at the Njoro Springs. From the terrace of our hotel later we could see a green belt apparently following that path.
Now here I was in Moshi a week later perusing the names of the war dead: J. Watson of the Machine Gun Corps, and Private S.H.V. Palmer of the 12th Regiment of the South African Infantry, and D. Scott King of the 4th South African Horse, and W. Dawson of the Calcutta Volunteers Battery, and many other young men of Smuts’s British army who died far away from home and were left buried here in Moshi.
5.
Tanga, Decline in the Sun
LATE THAT AFTERNOON IN MOSHI I took a bus bound for Tanga. When earlier in the day I bought my ticket, the company agent had confidently brandished a seating chart, and with the wisdom of a seasoned traveller I had put my name on an ideal place; to my chagrin the actual seat arrangement bore no resemblance to the one on the chart. Nothing to be done, a shrug of the shoulders by all concerned. That agent was nowhere to be found, and that too was par for the course. The bus terminal resounded with a football commentary: a Yanga–Simba derby was concluding, and a large crowd had gathered outside a stall to follow the match on radio. Yanga were the Young Africans and Simba were the former Sunderland, both Dar teams.