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"German East Africa"
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Violent intermediaries : African soldiers, conquest, and everyday colonialism in German East Africa
The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history.
Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents. Violent Intermediaries situates them in their everyday household, community, military, and constabulary roles, as men who helped make colonialism in German East Africa.
By linking microhistories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, Michelle Moyd shows how as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, the askari built the colonial state while simultaneously carving out paths to respectability, becoming men of influence within their local contexts.
Through its focus on the making of empire from the ground up, Violent Intermediaries offers a fresh perspective on African colonial troops as state-making agents and critiques the mythologies surrounding the askari by focusing on the nature of colonial violence.
eBook
Labour scarcity and colonial labour strategies (and the Africans’ response) in German East Africa, 1885–1914
The worldwide history of labour has recently garnered heightened interest, examining previously overlooked areas of employment and the key figures in labour. However, some facets of labour in colonial German East Africa remain obscure. This paper discusses labour demand, Africans’ responses, and the changing mobilization strategies in German East Africa, 1885–1914. With evidence from existing literature and a collection of primary historical sources, this paper argues that German labour mobilization strategies were informed by their unrealistic theories of readily available African labour in large numbers to serve in colonial enterprises. On the contrary, there was a persistent labour problem due to Africans’ reluctance to work for them. Unexpected African responses to labour questions influenced the changing nature of colonial labour organization strategies. Hence, the plans range from economic and political strategy to coercive means. The paper concludes that, despite the strategies to ensure labour availability, the labour question continued to be the field where the most significant interests of the colonizers and the colonized confronted one another throughout German rule in Tanganyika.
Journal Article
Making Mount Kilimanjaro German: Nation building and heroic masculinity in the colonial geographies of Hans Meyer
In 1885, as Germany claimed dominion over what was to become German East Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro became the highest German mountain; in 1889, the German geographer Hans Meyer was the first European to reach its summit. The \"conquest\" of Kilimanjaro was more than just one man's heroic adventure; it was an event that brought together Geography, the building of the German nation and European imperialism. This paper seeks to explore Hans Meyer's production of geographical knowledge about Kilimanjaro and the way in which the geographical gaze of one man gave rise to an object at which others could gaze and about which they could read. Building on scholarship on exploration, field work in Colonial Geography, and the production of the geographical self, the paper follows Meyer to the field in colonial German East Africa, and back to academia, publishing houses and public talks in Germany. In so doing, the paper encounters not only the production of knowledge about Physical Geography, the messiness of fieldwork and a wide range of technologies of observation and recording, but also the production of the white, male and German geographer as a trustworthy witness.
Journal Article
Colonial Geography
Colonial Geography charts changes in conceptions of the relationship between people and landscapes in mainland Tanzania during the German colonial period. In German minds, colonial development would depend on the relationship between East Africans and the landscape. Colonial Geography argues that the most important element in German imperialism was not its violence but its attempts to apply racial thinking to the mastery and control of space.
Utilizing approaches drawn from critical geography, the book argues that the development of a representational space of empire had serious consequences for German colonialism and the population of East Africa. Colonial Geography shows how spatial thinking shaped ideas about race and empire in the period of New Imperialism.
eBook
The Territorial Expansion of the Colonial State: Evidence from German East Africa 1890–1909
What explains states’ sub-national territorial reach? While large parts of the state-building literature have focused on national capabilities, little is known about the determinants of the unevenness of state presence at the sub-national level. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at early attempts at state building: it investigates the processes of state penetration in the former colony of German East Africa. Contrary to previous studies – which largely emphasized antecedent or structural factors – the current study argues that geographical patterns of state penetration have been driven by the state’s strategic imperative to solidify control over territory and establish political stability. The article tests these propositions using an original, geo-referenced grid-cell dataset for the years 1890 to 1909 based on extensive historical records in German colonial yearbooks and maps.
Journal Article
Hinterland: The political history of a geographic category from the scramble for Africa to Afro-Asian solidarity
This article traces the history of one geographical concept, hinterland, through changing political contexts from the 1880s through the 1970s. Hinterland proved a valuable tool for states attempting to challenge the global territorial order in both the Scramble for Africa and the postwar world of nation-states. In the context of German territorial demands in East Africa, colonial propagandists used hinterland to knit together the first longue-durée histories of the Indian Ocean to cast Zanzibar as a failed colonial power and win control of the coast. In the 1940s, Indian nationalists revived hinterland as a concept for writing about the Indian Ocean, utilizing the concept to link areas far from the ocean to an informal Indian empire that could be rebuilt to its premodern glory through naval expansion. In both contexts, hinterland provided a geographical framework to challenge British dominance on the Indian Ocean. The shifting meaning and usage of the term indicates continuities in territoriality between the Scramble for Africa and postwar internationalism.
Journal Article
Bio-Engineering across Empires
This article examines the convoluted global story of Fritz Bronsart von Schellendorff, a zebra breeder in German East Africa. Around 1900, he promised to tame zebras and to crossbreed them with horses to create a new draught animal: the zebroid. Being an avid trickster, Bronsart continuously managed to attract new sponsors for over a decade, most prominently Emperor Wilhelm II. By tracing the global story of zebra breeding and domestication through multiple archives, this article explores the potential of a microhistorical approach to global history. The case study investigates how Bronsart and his rivals navigated a complex, sometimes paradoxical, web of global and local connections. It argues that only a multilayered analysis of entanglements can provide an accurate picture of global processes. Furthermore, it assesses how these processes influenced historical actors, and, in turn, were fashioned by the actors themselves.
Journal Article
Religion, politics and an apocryphal admonition
This article analyses a Muslim missive, which was circulated in German East Africa in 1908. Erroneously dubbed the “Mecca letter”, it called believers to repentance and sparked a religious revival, which alarmed the German administration. Their primarily political interpretation of the letter was retained in subsequent scholarship, which has overlooked two important textual resources for a better understanding of the missive: the presence of similar letters elsewhere and the fourteen copies still available in the Tanzanian National Archive. Presenting the first text-critical edition of the letter, together with a historical introduction of the extant specimens and a textual comparison to similar missives elsewhere, the article argues that the East African “Mecca letter” of 1908 was nothing more than a local circulation of a global chain letter. As such, its rapid transmission was not connected to a single political agency, but was likely prompted by a large variety of motivations.
Journal Article
Radical potentials, conservative realities: African veterans of the German colonial army in post-World War I Tanganyika
During World War I, African colonial soldiers (askari) of the Schutztruppe für Deutsch Ostafrika fought a difficult campaign in German East Africa. In November 1918, they surrendered to the British alongside their commander, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Within a few months, their German officers had left East Africa to return to Germany. Most of the ex-askari found it difficult to make new lives for themselves in Tanganyika, as the former Germany colony came to be known in 1920. In British Mandate Tanganyika, the ex-askari had limited options for making a living commensurate with the status they had occupied before the war. Their paths through British colonial rule from 1918 to 1961, when Tanganyika became independent, took different forms. This article charts some of these paths in order to place the African veterans of the Schutztruppe alongside the experiences of other Black veterans of the First World War, whose responses to postwar indignities led them to radicalize. That African Schutztruppe veterans did not become radicals raises intriguing questions about the factors that shaped military veterans’ politics after the First World War, and through the next five decades of the twentieth century.
Newspaper Article