“Savage War” as “People’s War”: Nineteenth-Century African Wars, European Perceptions, and the Future of Warfare

Abstract

This article first looks at how British, French, and German officers assessed the specifics of nineteenth-century colonial warfare and how they distinguished it from wars in Europe. Part 2 explores, on the basis of war reports from the nineteenth century and secondary literature, the significance of specifically African war traditions from precolonial times and how these came into play when, in the second half of the century, within a few decades the European colonial powers divided the continent among themselves with enormous brutality in their “scramble for Africa.” In their mental baggage Europeans brought ideas about war as having to “take a different form in Africa,” to quote a Prussian observer of the Franco-Moroccan War. What did this imply for their own style of warfare? Part 3 intervenes in the politically charged debate about how the European experience of nineteenth-century colonial warfare shaped war, and genocide, in twentieth-century Europe. The wars in nineteenth-century Africa, both precolonial and colonial, were not “contained” (gehegt) wars, to use Carl Schmitt’s term. Following 1815, in most of Europe the containment of warfare—that is, the separation of combatants and the civilian population—worked for a hundred years. After that, no more. Why? Does the experience of colonial warfare offer an explanation? This article tests an explanation that hinges on an unconventional comparison of what Europeans called “savage war” in Africa and “people’s war” (Volkskrieg) in Europe.