The Nature of the Great War in Africa
Generalmajor Paul von Lettow Vorbeck (first rider from left) during the triumphal parade in Berlin which celebrated his return to Germany in 1919. He wears the cross of the Pour Ie Merite at his throat. The two mounted figures in the foreground are Governor Schnee and Kapltän Looff of the Königisberg - both strong characters with whom Von Lettow clashed throughout the campaign. He was undoubtedly the main architect of the German resistance, but It was nevertheless a remarkable team effort.
Lieutenant-General Smuts (second from right) at the Pangani River, 1916. He and his staff wear standard British officers' uniforms, mostly in khaki drill, with goggles round their necks - companion photographs show that they were travelllng by open staff car. The signallers operating the heliograph wear shirts and breeches, though the seated figure behind the telescope appears to wear an Indian pagri.
On 12 August 1914, in Togoland, Regimental Sergeant-Major Alhaji Grunshi of the West African Frontier Force became the first soldier in British service to fire a round in the Great War. On 25 November 1918, two weeks after the signature of the armistice in Europe, at Abercorn in Northern Rhodesia Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck surrendered, the last German commander of the war to do so. As much from its outset as beyond its formal conclusion, therefore, the First World War was far more than just a European conflict. In August 1914 British, French, Belgian, and German belligerence embraced the entire continent of Africa with the exception of Liberia, Ethiopia, and the relatively smaller colonies of Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Not even these would remain exempt from the war, at least in its indirect forms.
Black and North African soldiers, served in large numbers in the various theatres of the First World War. Those who served in the French colonial armies saw duty not only in Togo and Cameroon but also at Gallipoli, in the Balkans and on the Western Front. In all, some 845,000 “natives” served under the tricouleur during the 1914–18 war, including 181,000 Tirailleurs Sénégalais. West Africans serving under the Union Jack fought in Cameroon, while some 50,000 East Africans, including 35,000 troops of the King’s African Rifles, fought the Germans in East Africa. Another one million Africans saw service as carriers for the British in East Africa, where they suffered extraordinarily high casualties from gunfire, disease and overwork. Deaths may have reached ten per cent of the total, or 100,000 men. African soldiers also fought in East Africa in World War I in the German, Belgian and Portuguese forces.
Both during the war and after it, British and French propaganda accused the Germans of militarizing Africa: they had, said Lloyd George on 24 January 1919, ‘raised native troops and encouraged these troops to behave in a manner that would even disgrace the Bolsheviks’. Such rhetoric was fed by the ferocity with which the Germans suppressed the wave of resistance that struck their colonies with simultaneous force between 1904 and 1906. Genocide and famine were both deployed against the Herero in South-West Africa and the Maji-Maji in East Africa. Thereafter, however, German colonial administration became more liberal. Military responsibilities were circumscribed, commercial development promoted, and settlement doubled. As a result, the German colonial forces, the Schütztruppen, could draw in more whites: from 1913 conscripts were allowed to complete their reserve service overseas rather than remain liable for recall to Germany. But the settlers themselves became increasingly reluctant to meet the costs of an inflated military establishment, and order on a daily basis was handed over to an expanded police force. Admittedly their armament was similar to that of the Schütztruppen, and they could be, and were, incorporated with them. Nonetheless, the point remains that it was not so much Germany as the Entente which was responsible for arming the African.
The idea that the immense manpower pool of the African colonies might be harnessed for military purposes was given its most coherent and ambitious pre-war expression in France, by Charles Mangin in his book La Force Noire, published in 1910. Mangin predicted that French West Africa could raise 40,000 men, or 4 per cent of the total population of 10.65 million, and that enlistment in some areas could rise to 8 or 10 per cent. At the time such projections looked far-fetched, but by the end of the war France had enlisted 200,000 soldiers in West Africa.7 When Britain declared war, the Africans involved, directly or indirectly, in hostilities totalled 50 million. The actual burden of service was unevenly distributed. In West Africa Britain recruited about 25,000 soldiers—a relatively large figure, but small by comparison with French efforts in the adjacent areas. Southern Rhodesia, influenced by the South African opposition to using blacks as soldiers in a white man’s war, enlisted no Africans until 1916. But by then 40 per cent of the white adult male population was on active service, and sufficient fresh drafts for the Rhodesia Regiment could not be procured. The Rhodesia Native Regiment, formed in 1916, had embodied only 2,360 men by 1918, less than 1 per cent of the total African male population, and 75 per cent of them originated from outside the colony.
The majority of those Africans enlisted during the war were not soldiers, or not primarily so. They were carriers. The major problem of conducting operations in Africa, as it had been in all the small wars of European conquest in the nineteenth century, lay ‘not in defeating, but in reaching the enemy’. Lettow-Vorbeck likened the march and supply of a single company in East Africa to the movement of a division in Europe. Railway construction had only just begun to open up the hinterland; roads were few, and motorized vehicles fewer. Draught or pack animals, although usable in the highlands and savannah of some parts of Central Africa and in South Africa, fell prey to the tsetse fly in many tropical areas. For the campaigns in the Cameroons and East Africa, therefore, a human chain linked troops to their bases, and without it they could not move, feed, or fight.
The difficulties of supply, rather than the experiences of battle, did most to disseminate the impact of the Great War throughout the African continent. The numbers who experienced combat were few. The war in Africa was an affair not of ‘big battalions’ but of individual companies. A unit any larger than 100 to 120 men could not be readily supplied. Moreover, a company with its attendant porters mustered about 300 men and on the tracks of the equatorial rain forests of central Africa constituted a column 1,500 to 2,000 yards long; a formation any bigger was too large for effective, tactical control. The force-to-space ratio was, therefore, totally different from that of the western front. Small-scale actions in Africa settled the balance of power in territories as big as a whole theatre of operations in Europe.
One of the most striking differences was the almost total absence of artillery. Individually, heavy guns proved of value in the open grasslands of the northern Cameroons or northern Tanganyika. But collectively, guns had little opportunity. Even where draught animals were more readily available, in South-West Africa, the Germans were not able to turn a relative strength to advantage. Oxen moved slowly, and not at all in the midday heat. Mules were used for the transport of pack guns, but the lack of clear paths through the bush meant that they could take twice as long to cover the same distance as did the foot-soldier. Thus, the guns tended to arrive too late. In theatres where the tsetse fy ruled out animal draught, 300 porters could be required for a single Weld gun, without considering its likely shell consumption. In the jungle, even a small calibre mountain gun Wring at a high trajectory needed a clearing of 100 yards, as well as good telephone communications with forward observers, for indirect fire. Because none of the European powers had planned to fight each other, the guns possessed by each colony tended to be of varying calibres, obsolescent, and short of ammunition. In the Cameroons the Germans had fourteen guns of different types and 3,000 rounds. When used, their moral impact, particularly on black troops unaccustomed to artillery fire however light, outstripped their destructive effect. Fighting in Africa was therefore predominantly an infantry affair, the machine-gun being the heaviest and most significant weapon regularly deployed.
Although fought between European powers for objectives that were also European, the African campaigns of the First World War bore more relationship to the nineteenth-century campaigns of colonial conquest than they did to the Great War itself. In relation to the outcome of the war they were, as is too often remarked, sideshows. But neither observation should be allowed to trivialize their importance. The first demonstrates the danger of characterizing the war in terms appropriate to only one theatre, even one not fitted to the entire geographical span of the war. The second judges Africa in terms of that one theatre, instead of recognizing that relatively the impact of the war on the Dark Continent was as great as that on Europe that few black families were unaffected, and that at the end the transfer of territory completed the partition of Africa commenced four decades earlier.
Posts
