Maji Maji Rebellion

The Maji Maji Rebellion was an armed uprising against German colonial rule in German East Africa, today mainland Tanzania, that lasted from July 1905 to August 1907. Sparked largely by forced cotton growing, it drew in many peoples of the south, united at first by belief in a protective "water medicine". German forces crushed it with a scorched-earth campaign, and estimates of the dead, most of whom died in the famine that followed, range from 75,000 to 300,000.

After the Scramble for Africa, the German Empire held East Africa through a network of interior forts, relying on force to keep control. From 1898 it levied a head tax and made heavy use of forced labour. In 1902 Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen ordered villages to grow cotton for export, setting quotas even where the crop was poorly suited to the land, and placed local headmen in charge, turning them against their own communities. New forest and game laws added to the hardship, as wild pigs multiplied and ravaged food crops. With men taken away to work, villages struggled to feed themselves, and in 1905 drought threatened the region.

The uprising found its unifying idea in the teaching of a spirit medium, Kinjikitile Ngwale, who said he was possessed by a spirit and called on the people of the region to drive out the Germans. He gave his followers a medicine of water, maji in Swahili, mixed with castor oil and millet seeds, which was said to turn German bullets into water. Armed mainly with spears and arrows, the fighters set out wearing millet stalks on their heads.

On 31 July 1905 Matumbi people attacked Samanga, destroying a cotton crop and a trading post. Kinjikitile was arrested and hanged. The revolt spread quickly as the Ngindo, Yao and other peoples joined, attacking German posts across the south; in August a party of five missionaries, including the Catholic bishop of Dar es Salaam, was killed. At Mahenge thousands of fighters attacked the German fort but were driven back by machine-gun fire. The Ngoni joined later with some 5,000 men, but were routed on 21 October.

Götzen called for reinforcements, which arrived from Germany and even New Guinea, and in October 1905 he took the offensive. Three columns swept the south, burning villages, crops and food stores. One German officer wrote to Götzen that only hunger and want could force a final submission. The south-west was subdued by April 1906, but in the south-east the war became a guerrilla struggle until the last resistance ended in August 1907. Recorded losses on the German side were 15 Germans, 73 African soldiers and 316 auxiliaries. The famine that followed, remembered as the Great Hunger, killed far more than the fighting, and scholars such as A. Dirk Moses have described the German tactics as genocidal.

The war devastated southern Tanzania, and observers half a century later still described the region as not fully recovered. Germany introduced administrative reforms under a new governor, Albrecht von Rechenberg. Tanzanian nationalists later presented the rising as a first united stand against foreign rule, though many historians see it rather as a series of revolts with varied causes, and the role of religion remains debated. The same years saw the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, and the name of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya may echo Maji Maji.

Our 1900 and 1914 maps show German East Africa at the time of the rebellion.