German East Africa

“ The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those ports where the flag of their country would wave over them. ”

“ Concerning German East Africa the prosperity of 1913 continued up to the outbreak of war, and it appeared that the completion of the trunk line from the coast to Kigoma, on Lake Tanganyika, several months in advance of the scheduled time, stimulated the energies of the administration and the settlers. The effect of this completion on the traffic of the Uganda Railway had not developed and will not be injurious if German Africa passes into British hands as the result of the war. ”

“ As a consequence the Dual Control had been abolished in January 1883, since when Great Britain, with an army quartered in the country, had assumed a predominant position in Egyptian affairs (see EGYPT.) In East Africa, north of the Portuguese possessions, where the sultan of Zanzibar was the most considerable native potentate, Germany was secretly preparing the foundations of her present colony of German East Africa. But no overt act had warned Europe of what was impending. The story of the foundation of German East Africa is one of the romances of the continent. ”

“ At first we thought the German in East Africa to be a better fellow than his brother in Europe, more merciful to his wounded prisoner, more chivalrous in his manner of fighting. But the more we learn of him the more we come to the conclusion that he is the same old Hun as he is in Belgium—infinitely crafty, incredibly beastly in his dealings with his natives and with our prisoners. ”

“ Germany has long had a greedy eye on Zanzibar, for the nation that holds it controls, both strategically and commercially, Germany's East African possessions and their capital of Dar-es-Salam. That England would be willing to turn Zanzibar over to Germany in return for the cession of a strip of territory through German East Africa which would permit the completion of her long-dreamed-of, and at present indefinitely interrupted, Cape-to-Cairo trunk line, there is every reason to believe. ”

“ On the faith of private treaties, and of an agreement with Portugal, Germany has recently staked off a region in East Central Africa stretching from the boundaries of the Congo Free State to the Indian Ocean, and embracing an area considerably larger than the German Empire. To a portion only of this region—the boundaries of which, contrasted with that arbitrarily claimed in addition, will be apparent from a comparison of the maps—have the Germans procured a title; and the steps by which this has been attained afford an admirable illustration of modern methods of land-transfer in Africa. ”

“ These strategic efforts to the west and southwest of German East Africa, and the continuous upward advance of the stations and flotillas of King Leopold towards the east, limit the operations of the slave-traders to that narrowing and untravelled area lying between Stanley Falls and Lake Tanganika, and will have the effect of determining the Arabs to seek outlets eastward through British East Africa, which, in its present state, is most backward in fulfilling the objects of united Europe. ”

“ Africa alone, or one conviction to every 637 natives; while in the adjoining protectorate of Uganda, among the same type of natives but under a British administration, the ratio of convictions was only one in 2,047. There is not a town in German East Africa where you cannot see boys of from eight to fourteen years, shackled together by chains running from iron collar to iron collar and guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, doing the work of men under a deadly sun. ”

“ German Africa, which will find allies at once in Abyssinia and in Mohammedan freedom movements, will make the employment of black troops against our European frontiers impossible. German Africa alone will give us a balance of power in the East and in Africa. It will remove the Egyptian pressure on Asia Minor. German Africa will make us a world power by enabling us to exert decisive influence upon the world political decisions of our enemies and of other powers, and to exercise pressure on all shaping of policy in Africa, Asia Minor, and southern Europe. ”

“ If our victory is great enough, we can hope to unite under our hand the whole of Central Africa with our old colony South-west Africa; Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Dahomey, well-populated Nigeria with the port of Lagos, Kamerun, the rich islands of San Thomé and Principe with their splendid ports, the Katanga ore district, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Mozambique, and Delagoa Bay, Madagascar, German East Africa, Zanzibar, and Uganda ”

“ It is a matter for congratulation, but not on the statesmanship displayed by British ministers, that the fruit of the German essay at the establishment of a "new Empire" in Southern Africa was no more than the annexation of South West Africa, for it is by no means unthinkable that there was a possibility that in addition to the south-west the Germans might have drawn a wide belt right across the continent from west to east, taking in Bechuanaland, the Transvaal, Tongaland, and that portion of Zululand giving the Transvaal an outlet to the east coast at St Lucia Bay. ”

“ The Union of South Africa, as you have seen, has taken over German South-West Africa; Great Britain has assumed the control of all German East Africa with the exception of Ruanda and Urundu, which have become part of the Belgian Congo. Togoland is divided between France and Britain, while the greater part of The Cameroons is merged into the Lower French West African possessions of which the French Congo is the principal one. Britain gets the Cameroon Mountains.
The one-time Dark Continent remains dark only for Germany. [Pg 102]
VICTORIA FALLS — Photograph Copyright British South Africa Co. ”

“ STREET IN THE NATIVE QUARTER, DAR ES SALAM
Anyone who does not travel merely for the sake of present impressions, but is accustomed to see the past behind the phenomena of the moment, and, like myself, leaves the area of European culture with the express object of using his results to help in solving the great problem of man’s intellectual evolution 5in all its details, will find in the voyage to German East Africa a better opportunity for survey and retrospect than in many other great routes of modern travel. ”

“ Who would be sent to healthy, cheery Nairobi? Who to the vile desert at Voi? Who to interesting, far-distant Uganda? Who to the ghastly mangrove-swamps down the coast by the border of German East? Who to places where there was real active service, fighting, wounds, distinction and honourable death? Who to dreary holes where they would “sit down” and sit tight, rotting with fever and dysentery, eating out their hearts, without seeing a single German till the end of the war. ”

“ It is twenty years since Germany began to build up a colonial empire in Africa, and the net result is that, after spending some hundred million dollars, she has acquired over a hundred million square miles of territory, with a sparsely scattered German population of between five and six thousand souls. A third of the adult white population is represented by officials and soldiers. Militarism is rampant everywhere, with the result that the white settler shuns German colonies as he would the plague. ”

“ These rich lands afforded to their new masters useful supplies of raw materials, which were capable of almost indefinite expansion. They included, in East and South-West Africa, areas well suited for white settlement; but German emigrants, despite every encouragement, refused to settle in them. An elaborately scientific system of administration, such as might be expected from the German bureaucracy, was devised for the colonies; officials and soldiers have from the beginning formed a larger proportion of their white population than in any other European possessions. ”

“ Paul Rohrbach’s dictum, “It is applicable to a nation in the same way as to the individual that the right of existence is primarily justified in the degree that such existence is useful for progress and general development,” comes forcibly to mind. These [218] natives of Southwest Africa had been weighed in the German balance and had been found wanting.
Germany lost more than a million square miles of territory in Africa as a direct consequence of General Botha’s bold action. These are divided in four great regions, Southwest Africa, Kamerun, Togo and East Africa. ”

“ But what consequences ensue for the whole of East Africa! In wars and raids repeated again and again over hundreds of miles, the new rulers of the land have made a wilderness of the old thickly-populated and well-tilled land. Under the name of the Mazitu, they were the terror of the country between Nyasa and Tanganyika by the end of the sixties. Later on, in the early days of German colonial rule, they became, under that of Mafiti, a far worse terror to the whole vast region between Nyasa and the Indian Ocean. ”

“ The German is not a sportsman as we understand the term, though the modern young German who apes English ways, comes out to East Africa occasionally to make collections for his ancestral Schloss. That the Crown Prince should have reserved large areas for game preserves speaks for this modern tendency in young Germany. The average German is not keen on exercise in the tropics, he will be carried by sweating natives in a chair or hammock where Englishmen on similar errands will walk and shoot upon the way. ”

“ A tribe which has contributed largely to the German military forces is the Wanyamwezi. Of excellent physique, they long resisted German domination, but now they are entirely subdued. Hardy, brave and willing, they are the best fighters and porters, probably, in the whole of East Africa. Immigrant Wanyamwezi, enlisted in British East Africa into our King's African Rifles, do not hesitate to fight against their blood brothers. There is no stint to the faithful service they have given to the Germans. ”

“ As the Germans have magnificent territory east of Zanzibar, it was but fair that England should have some portion for the protection she has accorded to Zanzibar since 1841. The Germans appeared to 1887.
March 9.
Cape of
Good Hope. have recognized this, as you may see by the late Anglo-German Agreement. France had already obtained an immense area in West Africa. All the world had agreed to constitute the domain of King Leopold, on which he had spent a million sterling, as the Independent State of the Congo. ”

“ Germany could use natives in war.
German colonial aims are really not colonial, but are entirely dominated by far-reaching conceptions of world politics. Not colonies, but military power and strategic positions for exercising world power in future, are her real aims. Her ultimate objective in Africa is the establishment of a great Central African Empire, comprising not only her colonies before the war, but also all the English, French, Belgian, and Portuguese possessions south of the Sahara and Lake Chad and north of the Zambezi River in South Africa. ”

“ In the matter of official recruitment of labour, the Germans are by far the most vigorous of any of the West African Powers. In this official recruitment the individual labourer concerned has very little say indeed; that he should desire to enjoy his freedom is apparently no concern of anyone, all he knows is that he has to work for the white man for a given period, and in German South West Africa the “contract” must be made “as long as possible.” ”

“ Four territories are, so to speak, in the melting pot of political speculation—British Gambia, French Congo, Belgian Congo, and the Portuguese colonies of East and West Africa. None of the Powers in control of these territories desire to add another foot of tropical Africa to the burden they carry already. Great Britain has a full share of responsibilities in the African continent. France, Belgium and Portugal, even if they desired to enlarge their tropical dependencies, have not yet established a case for expansion. ”

“ France has been the competitor, to some extent the successful competitor, of Germany in West Africa, where she partially envelops the Cameroons and Togoland. But the German Government has never ventured to state the French colonial methods as a casus belli. That the German people have viewed with jealousy the growth of French power in Africa is a notorious fact. Quite recently, on the eve of the present war, we were formally given to understand that Germany, in any war with France, might annex French colonies [11] ”

“ The individual German may come and do a little trading on his own account, but it is France as a nation that is going to prosper out of Africa. This is the one paramount aspect of the real North Africa of to-day as it has been for some generations past, a fact which the Foreign Offices of many powers have overlooked. ”

“ Solf, the German Secretary for Colonies, has lately proposed a simple solution of Africa's industrial future. "In redividing Africa those nations which have proved most humane toward the natives must be favored. Germany has always considered that to colonize meant doing mission work. That is why in the present War the natives of our colonies stick to us. ”