German East Africa Research Articles

Kala Shairi: German East Africa in Swahili Poems (review)

Kala Shairi: German East Africa in Swahili Poems (review)

Geschosse zu Wassertropfen Sozio-religiöse Aspekte des Maji-Maji-Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika (1905-1907)

Geschosse zu Wassertropfen Sozio-religiose Aspekte des Maji-Maji-Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika (1905-1907). By Jigal Beez. [Bullets to Drops of Water: Aspects of the Maji Maji War in German East Africa, 1905-1907]. Vorkoloniale und fruhkoloniale Geschichte Afrikas Vol. 1. Koln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag, 2003. Pp. 210; 2 maps, 3 illustrations, 3 poems. euro19.80 paper. In Geschosse zu Wassertrophen (Bullets to Drops of Water) author Jigal Beez studies the Maji Maji war (1905-1907) against the German colonizers in Tanzania, arguing that this was foremost a socioreligious struggle. For this book the author reworked a 1998 M.A. thesis in ethnology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and notes how its publication at the beginning of the twenty-first century takes on special relevance with the increase in religiously motivated terrorism (p. 11). Becz summarizes the study as an attempt to explain Maji Maji by analyzing the categories of thought of the people in southern Tanzania (p. 12). In this regard, the author first investigates various theories regarding socioreligious movements. As a historian, this reviewer is hard-pressed to judge the applicability of these theories, but the ground seems to be well covered. From theory, the book moves into the history of Maji Maji. Beez examines changes within the precolonial societies in southern Tanzania, the establishment of German economic and political power, and then the outbreak of Maji Maji. Beez describes the main points of the conflict and summarizes the postwar German repression and the effects upon the African societies. Overall, Beez presents a concise, readable history covering the many aspects of the conflict. The next chapter then progresses into the most interesting part of the work, a historical analysis of the social and religious elements of the Maji Maji movement. Beez explains how the movement evolved and the maji spread and then even how, after the first setbacks against the Germans, these people who believed in the possibility of medicinal protection were willing to try new but similar types of protection (pp. 142-43). Parallel to this, the analysis follows the path of Kinjikitile as the prophet of the water's power to a later period, after German suppression and widespread hunger, when Kinjikitile is seen by some as a deceiver (p. 143). Finally, the fifth chapter meshes the two historical chapters with the theory and argues Maji Maji can be seen as a socioreligious struggle with nativistic, revivalistic, and millennial aspects. Throughout the argument, Beez remains very careful at refuting the contention that Maji Maji borrowed concepts from Christianity or Islam; the indigenous religious were capable of providing ideas for the struggle. …

Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874–1915

Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874–1915

Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania

Introduction: peasant & worker agency in Tanzanian history - Industrialisation & the labor question in German East Africa, 1885-1914 - Slavery & the genesis of colonial labor relations - Labor migration & the erosion of the plantation imperative - Environmental collapse, household disruption & rebellion in Rufiji district - An antidote to the plantation labor shortage? The peasant cotton campaign in southeastern Tanzania - Migrant labor & the shaping of plantation work culture - 'Wamekwenda Vilimani!': transformations in rural society - Epilogue

"Practising hygiene and fighting the natives' diseases". Public and child health in German East Africa and Tanganyika territory, 1900-1960.

For reasons of population policy and missionary strategies, childcare was a relatively early issue of colonial medical policy and services in East Africa. The main challenge for the adaptation of biomedicine to the local situation proved to be not so much schemes for treatment or prevention, but rather the question of staffing. Education and employment of females, as well as social acceptance and keeping up professional standards of biomedically trained personnel, posed major obstacles to the implementation of governmental health policies. In addition to these obstacles, European prejudices about African disinterest in child health contributed to the feeling that limited progress had been made after 50 years of biomedical efforts to improve African child health.

Mikono ya damu: "Hands of Blood": African Mercenaries and the Politics of Conflict in German East Africa, 1888-1904 (review)

Contents: Tanzania - German East Africa / Deutsch Ostafrika - Colonial military - Schutztruppe - African military - Imperialism.

German Women for Empire, 1884-1945

Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884-1945. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.336 pp. $19.95 paperback. acquired colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the 1880s, and was stripped of them following the First World War. Fantasies of regaining the lost overseas colonies and of conquering new ones in the East occupied colonialists in during the Weimar and Nazi periods. Yet compared with historians of Britain and France, historians of have paid relatively little attention to the topic of colonialism and its legacies. Lora Wildenthal's history of German colonialism both documents the lives of individual women colonialists and explains the importance of gender and race in shaping the German colonial enterprise. The first monograph to address these topics in depth, Wildenthal's important book will serve as a foundation for future studies of German colonialism and women's roles in it. Moving chronologically, the book traces the continuities in German thought from the late nineteenth century through the Third Reich. In sum, colonialist women's organizations and official goals showed almost continuous intensification of racism and nationalism between 1885 and 1933 (201). Chapter one examines colonial nursing; following missionary work, nursing offered German women a new, increasingly secular role in the colonies. Wildenthal presents the nurses themselves-unmarried or widowed women who traveled to the colonies-and their advocates back home, aristocratic clubwomen who patronized the German Women's Association for Nursing in the Colonies. German nurses sought an autonomous female sphere free from clerical male governance, but they did not consider to be something they shared with African women. Wildenthal writes, While German men might opt to see all women as fundamentally alike, women saw themselves first as Germans, then as female. They could not express, nor apparently imagine, a raceless femininity (52). The second chapter focuses on the prolific writings of Frieda von Bulow, who for a time ran a colonial plantation in German East Africa and was the lover of the notorious German Carl Peters. Wildenthal pulls from von Bulow's writings three key themes: German nationalism, women's freedom, and men's violence. For radical nationalists of the late nineteenth century, colonial Africa was the settingwhere, ironically, a purer Germany could emerge. Far from the decadent, industrialized, materialist metropole, the colonies demanded courage and hard work. Wildenthal discovers in the writings an idealized detached from the actual German state and social order (58). Bulow, who never married, found in the colonies a freedom that did not exist for women at home. But she was ambivalent about this freedom; for women it was heavier to bear than beloved chains (69). Finally, Bulow addressed men's violence, a topic current in late 19th-century feminist circles. …

Celebrating power in everyday life: The administration of law and the public sphere in colonial Tanzania, 1890-1914

The paper examines the way in which power was routinely exercised in colonial German East Africa in everyday life. In order to achieve domination rather than ruling just by brute force, the German administration set up district councils called Schauri , in which members of the local African elite were invited to act as advisers to the District Officer. The highly formalized meetings of the council were held in public at least once a week. The district officer had the final say in all matters. The council members deliberated the most mundane aspects of colonial rule. Yet the meetings also dealt with more substantive issues, such as administration of law in the district, local political affairs or the latest public decree from the Governor in Dar es Salaam. The paper argues that the Schauri meetings constituted the most important field of political interaction and engagement between the German rulers and their African subjects. These meetings were thus an indispensable part of what one might call the 'colonial public sphere'.

The colony as laboratory: German sleeping sickness campaigns in German East Africa and in Togo, 1900-1914.

This paper is on dangerous human experimentations with drugs against trypanosimiasis carried out in the former German colonies of German East Africa and Togo. Victory over trypanosomiasis could not be achieved in Berlin because animals were thought to be unsuitable for therapeutic laboratory research in the field of trypanosomiasis. The colonies themselves were necessarily chosen as laboratories and the patients with sleeping sickness became the objects of therapeutical and pharmacological research. The paper first outlines Robert Koch's trypanosomiasis research in the large sleeping sickness laboratory of German East Africa and then focuses on the escalating human experiments on trypanosomiasis in the German Musterkolonie Togo, which must be interpreted as a reaction to the starting signal given by Robert Koch in East Africa.

The Battle of Tanga, 2-5 November 1914

The battle of Tanga, lasting from 2 to 5 November 1914, between the British and Germans was the opening clash in a relatively little-known campaign that was to last over four years. It was conceived as part of a wider plan to ensure British maritime superiority in the Indian Ocean as well as depriving the Germans of their system of overseas wireless transmission stations. However, through a lack of considered analysis and departmental ambitions, it evolved into an ill-thought-out attempt to seize the whole of German East Africa with two brigades of the Indian army. The landings at Tanga were compromised by the need to renounce a local truce, followed by the dilatory disembarkation of the fighting troops. A rapid attempt to take the town was bloodily repulsed by the German defenders and a second, more deliberate attack was similarly defeated. Fearing a greater catastrophe, the British force withdrew to British East Africa and assumed a defensive posture. The affair highlighted a number of weaknesses and defects in British training and operational readiness for modern war.

Mozambique, German East Africa and the Great War

In Africa Germany had always held a covetous eye for the northern portion of the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, and World War I provided the long-sought opportunity for it to take what it wished. Prior to the war German intimidation of Portugal yielded border concessions in southern Angola, the annexation of the mouth of the Rovuma River in Mozambique, and the establishment of a German enclave there at Quionga. As the war unfolded, German colonial aims in East Africa shifted to the defence and that of becoming a distraction of Allied resources in an attempt to provided relief to the European front. The German strategy changed from a diplomatic to a military one that was successfully translated to the operational and tactical levels and in this forgotten theatre caused Portuguese and British resources to be expended at inordinately high levels for limited gains in chasing down an elusive foe.

The Baumwollfrage: Cotton Colonialism in German East Africa

In March 1907, as newly-appointed Colonial Minister Bernhard Dernburg prepared to visit German East Africa to assess the colony's potential for economic development following the recent Maji Maji rebellion, requests poured in from businessmen seeking to accompany the minister. Prominent among the select few allowed on the trip were representatives of the German textile industry interested in founding cotton plantations in the colony. Among those participants was Gustav Hertle, director of the Leipzig Cotton Spinnery, the largest cotton spinner in Germany, who had long expressed interest in colonial cotton production. Following the trip the Leipzig Spinnery went on to acquire land in German East Africa, where it founded one of the biggest cotton plantations in the colony. Other textile industrialists who accompanied Dernburg also established cotton plantations in East Africa.

Notes on Portulaca L. (Portulacaceae) in Tropical East Africa

This paper arises from the preparation of the account of Portulacaceae for the Flora of Tropical East Africa. Many species from East Africa are based on the Tanzanian collections of the German botanist A. Peter and described by him in his Flora von Deutsch Ost-Afrika (1938). Von Poellnitz (1940), also working on Peter's material, described some additional species. However, these species names have hardly been used since, and the interpretation of some of them has caused problems, discussed below. Luckily much of Peter's material is still extant and available for consultation in the Berlin herbarium. Since the 1940s Portulaca collections from East Africa often either remained undetermined to species, or names of widely distributed species have been misapplied, particularly P foliosa Ker Gawl. and P kermesina N. E. Br. Part of the problem stems from the fact that variation within Portulaca is very little understood. Self pollination is the norm and leads to a multiplicity of local forms. The coastal lowlands and Tana River area of Kenya are particularly rich in Portulaca variants, whose significance is difficult to assess from the sparse herbarium material available. Two particularly distinctive forms are described here as new species. Additionally, a locally common yellow-flowered species from southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, which has been routinely misidentified as P foliosa, was found to be undescribed.

The ‘Freeing’ of slaves in German East Africa: The statistical record, 1890–1914

(1998). The ‘Freeing’ of slaves in German East Africa: The statistical record, 1890–1914. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 19, Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa, pp. 109-132.

’When Men Are Weak‘: The Imperial Feminism of Frieda von Bülow

Frieda von Bülow was a colonialist woman author and activist who also engaged the bourgeois women's movement of pre‐First World War Germany. She is of interest to scholars of German colonialism, racial thought, feminism, and women's literature. This article interprets her life experiences, including travel to German East Africa (mainland Tanzania) and her affair with Carl Peters, together with her feminist non‐fiction and anti‐feminist fiction, to argue that she developed an imperial feminism in which German women's emancipation was predicated on the subordination of racialised ‘others’.

FAMINE AND WILD PIGS: GENDER STRUGGLES AND THE OUTBREAK OF THE MAJIMAJI WAR IN UZARAMO (TANZANIA)

Late in 1907 a missionary from Kisserawe in German East Africa complained of a spate of ngoma ritual dances among the Zaramo people. In particular he singled out an ngoma conducted by women to ameliorate a drought that was threatening that year's maize crop. As the women danced around a well, dressed as men and brandishing muskets, they appealed for rain from ‘their god’. Several aspects of this ngoma make it remarkable. It occurred following the Majimaji uprising in German East Africa, which the Germans put down with such violence as to make war as a tactic of resistance unpopular if not untenable. The ngoma was attended by Christian and non-Christian African women alike, suggesting a purpose whose expediency cut across competing belief systems. Finally, although cross-dressing was an aspect of certain Zaramo rituals, the symbolic appropriation of men's social roles by dress and wielding of weapons made this ngoma anomalous and suggests that the participants were consciously and purposefully reshaping gender roles at this time. The timing and symbolism of the ngoma make it clear that it was a reaction to the threat of famine, which had become a recurrent aspect of Zaramo life by 1907 and a symptom of ongoing rural social change ushered in by colonial rule. The larger question is whether changing perceptions of gender roles intersected with the Majimaji war (1905–7), and whether Majimaji had an underlying meaning for rural Tanzanian societies that has escaped the attention of historians. If so, it suggests that the prevailing conception of Majimaji needs to be questioned and re-examined.

Forest Conservancy in the Alps of Dauphiné, 1287–1870

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticlesForest Conservancy in the Alps of Dauphiné, 1287–1870John F. FreemanJohn F. Freeman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 38, Number 4October 1994 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3983603 Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in Forest & Conservation History (1990-1995), which is continued by Environmental History (1996-present). © 1994 Forest History Society, Inc. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Thaddeus Sunseri Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874–1915, Environmental History 8, no.33 (Sep 2021): 430–451.https://doi.org/10.2307/3986203

‘The natives must first become good workmen’ : formal educational provision in German South West and East Africa compared

Although German researchers have written fairly extensively on the missionary provision of formal education in former German South West Africa, very few works in English have addressed this subject in detail. Moreover, there has been no comparative study of formal education in Germany's African colonies. This article attempts to redress these gaps by highlighting the differences in the educational provision for German South West Africa's indigenous and white settler populations. It compares the limited role played by the colonial government in the education of Africans’ and ‘coloureds’ in German South West Africa to its active role in German East Africa. Furthermore, it examines the types of employment available to whites, Africans and ‘coloureds’ in South West Africa and contrasts these with the formal education provision and job availabilities for Africans in German East Africa. In so doing, it examines why such discrepancies existed. One important reason to emerge is the role played by South West Afric...

NOMANSLAND: The British Colonial Office and the League of Nations Mandate for German East Africa, 1916–1920

One of the many problems facing the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was the future of the conquered German and Turkish territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Widespread anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and the United States opposed direct annexation of the possessions, but wartime agreements and the security interests of the Allies prevented returning the conquered areas to their former rulers. In particular, many British leaders wanted to ensure that Germany could never again attempt world domination and were convinced that the restoration to Germany of its overseas possessions would pose a “grave political and military menace” to Britain's vital maritime connections with South Africa and India. After a long, often acrimonious debate, the Conference agreed on a compromise that placed the former German colonies and Ottoman provinces under the supervision of the League of Nations. This solution gave the Allies control of their acquisitions as “mandates” within a framework of international accountability. Great Britain received the most mandates, including Germany's largest colony of German East Africa. For the British leaders who had always advocated transforming German East Africa into a British colony, the new system seemed to make little practical difference. For the colonial officials in London and at the highest levels of colonial administration within the conquered possession, however, the mandates system presented serious problems and was not simply a disguise for annexation.

Slave Ransoming in German East Africa, 1885-1922

L'A. etudie les esclaves hommes et femmes (recemment acptures et ceux de la premiere genration) de l'ile de Mafia (Afrique orientale) sous la loi allemande de 1895 a 1992. Il insiste sur les femmes et les facteurs qui influencent leur attitude envers l'hegemonie de leur maitre et sur l'autonomie devenue possible grâce a la « rancon ». Les esclaves n'agissaient pas seulement en tant que dependants des maitres et n'etaient pas facilement manipulables par les ingenieurs allemands. Cette liberation progressive etait pour les esclaves un signe d'aspiration a controler leur vie.