German East Africa

The largest and most populous of Germany's overseas possessions, German East Africa took in mainland Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, together nearly 995,000 square kilometres with over seven million inhabitants on the eve of the First World War. Founded on treaties gathered by the adventurer Carl Peters in 1884–1885, it was held by force against repeated African resistance, culminating in the Maji Maji war of 1905–1907, and was lost in the First World War. In 1919–1920 it was divided between Britain, Belgium and Portugal.

Peters persuaded a number of local rulers on the mainland opposite Zanzibar to sign treaties, and on 27 February 1885 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck signed an imperial charter for his company. When the Sultanate of Zanzibar objected that the mainland was his, German warships arrived off his palace in August 1885 and forced him to give way, leaving him only a coastal strip. Company rule sparked a coastal uprising in 1888, the Abushiri revolt, which was suppressed in 1889 with British help, after which the German state took over directly. The Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of 1890 fixed the border with British territory to the north.

Expansion inland was carried out by armed columns of African soldiers under German officers, notably the Wissmann force, which committed widespread atrocities. Peters himself earned the Swahili nickname "Mkono wa damu", the man with blood-stained hands. In the southern highlands the Hehe, under their chief Mkwawa, resisted from 1891 and, though weakened when rival peoples sided with the Germans, kept up a guerrilla war for years; Mkwawa took his own life in 1898 rather than be captured. Flogging and forced labour were routine features of German rule, and slavery, though restricted, was never formally abolished.

In 1898 the Germans imposed head taxes, and from 1902 Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen ordered villages to grow cotton for export under compulsory quotas, often on unsuitable land and to the neglect of food crops. In July 1905 the Matumbi people uprooted cotton at Samanga, beginning the Maji Maji war. The spirit medium Kinjikitile Ngwale had given followers maji, a water medicine said to turn bullets to water, and the movement spread among Ngindo, Yao, Ngoni, Bena and many other peoples across the south. Kinjikitile was arrested and hanged for treason. Outnumbered but far better armed, German forces answered with a deliberate scorched-earth policy, burning villages and crops. Estimates of the dead, overwhelmingly from the famine that followed, range from about 75,000 to 300,000. Several scholars have described the German tactics as genocidal. Tanzanian nationalists later remembered Maji Maji as the first united stand against foreign rule, though historians also stress the diversity of its local causes.

After a colonial scandal, Berlin appointed Bernhard Dernburg in 1907 to reform the administration, and Governor Albrecht von Rechenberg (1906–1912) placed more weight on African smallholder farming. Railways from Tanga to Moshi and from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika, the latter completed in 1914, opened the interior. Sisal became the main plantation crop, alongside coffee, rubber and cotton, but some 70,000 Africans laboured on plantations where conditions were often poor and forced recruitment common. In 1913 there were only 882 German farmers and planters in the colony.

In the First World War, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck led a German force of mostly African soldiers, or askari, and porters on a long guerrilla campaign, defeating a far larger British landing at Tanga in November 1914. Pressed by much larger British imperial and Belgian forces, he withdrew into Mozambique and finally laid down arms in Northern Rhodesia in November 1918. Britain alone mobilised over 400,000 African porters for the campaign. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the colony was divided: Britain took Tanganyika, Belgium Ruanda-Urundi and Portugal the small Kionga Triangle, with the handover taking effect on 10 January 1920.

Our 1914 map labels the colony German East Africa (Tanganyika). It borders the East Africa Protectorate to the north, the Belgian Congo to the west and Portuguese Mozambique to the south. Its mainland forms most of today's Tanzania.