Radical potentials, conservative realities: African veterans of the German colonial army in post-World War I Tanganyika

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring 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.