The First World War (1914-1918)
Senior 6 · History
The First World War (1914-1918)
Lesson 3 of 5
25 min
The last German force to surrender in the First World War did so not in Europe but at Abercorn, in Northern Rhodesia (today Mbala in Zambia), on 25 November 1918, two weeks after the armistice. It had been fighting in East Africa for more than four years. Africa was not a side-show to be added at the end of an essay: in 1914 Germany held four colonies there, and every one became a battlefield. Rwanda, then part of German East Africa, was fought over in 1914–16, occupied by Belgian troops, and struck by famine. Use the map to follow the campaign in which Rwanda was caught up.
Definition
Askari: an African soldier serving in a colonial army in East Africa, German or British.
Schutztruppe ("protection force"): the German colonial army, made up mostly of African askari under German officers.
Force Publique: the army of the Belgian Congo, Congolese soldiers under Belgian officers.
Carrier (or porter): a labourer who carried an army's food, ammunition and equipment on his head where there were no roads, railways or pack animals. Most were recruited by force.
Requisition: an army's seizure of food, cattle, labour or goods from the local population for its own use.
Indirect rule: governing a colony through existing African rulers, who kept their titles but served the colonial power.
| Colony (today) | Attacked by | Course | Ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Togoland (Togo, eastern Ghana) | British and French forces from the Gold Coast and Dahomey | A short campaign to capture the German radio station at Kamina | August 1914, within three weeks |
| Kamerun (Cameroon) | British, French and Belgian forces, with Nigerian and Senegalese troops | A long campaign in forest and highlands | Early 1916; most of the garrison escaped into neutral Spanish Guinea |
| German South West Africa (Namibia) | South African forces under Louis Botha | Rapid advances across the desert after a pro-German rebellion in South Africa was crushed | July 1915 |
| German East Africa (mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi) | British, Indian, South African and East African troops; the Belgian Force Publique; Portuguese forces | A war of movement and retreat across East Africa, led on the German side by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck | 25 November 1918, at Abercorn |
Lettow-Vorbeck's aim was not to save the colony, which he knew he could not do, but to tie down as many Allied soldiers as possible, far from the Western Front. In November 1914 his askari defeated a British and Indian landing at Tanga. In 1916 the Allies attacked from three sides: South African general Jan Smuts from the north-east, a British "Lake Force" from Lake Victoria, and the Belgian Force Publique from the west, through Rwanda and Urundi, reaching Tabora on 19 September 1916. Lettow-Vorbeck retreated south, fought a costly battle at Mahiwa in October 1917, crossed into Portuguese Mozambique, and came back through German East Africa into Northern Rhodesia, where news of the armistice reached him.
German writers later called him "undefeated in the field". It is true that he was never forced to surrender in battle, and that more than 100,000 Allied troops were sent against him at different times. But by the end of 1917 Germany had lost the colony, and the price of his campaign was paid mainly by Africans who had no say in it: the askari of both sides, and above all the carriers and the villagers whose food and labour the armies took.
Important
Source analysis: how many carriers? Lettow-Vorbeck published his memoirs in 1920. Writing about the supply lines of his army, he admitted:
"I have at my disposal no figures showing the total number of carriers employed for the service of the troops, and it is very difficult to arrive at it at all definitely. […] but I am sure I do not exaggerate in saying that, on the whole, hundreds of thousands of carriers worked for the troops; and all of them had to be fed and medically looked after."
Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa, English translation published by Hurst and Blackett (London, 1920), chapter 2.
The commander who could count his German officers and askari killed in each skirmish could not say, even roughly, how many carriers served him. That silence is itself evidence of how little their lives were valued. Historians have had to estimate. Hew Strachan put the deaths among African carriers in British service alone at about 90,000; Edward Paice, in Tip and Run (2007), at about 95,000, most of them from disease, exhaustion and hunger. No reliable count exists for the carriers of the German and Belgian armies, or for the civilians who died when their food was taken; estimates for all war-related deaths in the region run into the hundreds of thousands. Note also the self-justifying final clause: Lettow-Vorbeck claims his carriers were "fed and medically looked after", which the death rates do not support.
Rwanda had been placed in the German sphere by agreements among Europeans, and German officers began to visit the royal court in the 1890s. From 1907 a German Resident, Richard Kandt, governed from a small post at Kigali, which he founded. Germany ruled indirectly, through the Mwami (king) Yuhi V Musinga, who reigned from 1896 to 1931. German officers helped the court bring northern areas that had resisted royal authority under its control, while Catholic and Protestant missions spread from 1900. German rule was thin on the ground: a handful of officials and soldiers, depending on the Mwami's chiefs.
Rwanda bordered the Belgian Congo along Lake Kivu, so it became a front line at once. On 24 September 1914 the German Resident, Captain Max Wintgens, seized the Belgian post on Idjwi island in Lake Kivu, and in the following months his askari, with Rwandan auxiliaries, fought Belgian forces north of Gisenyi. The royal court supplied fighters, food and carriers to the German side. In April 1916 the Force Publique's northern brigade, under Colonel Philippe Molitor, crossed the border north of Lake Kivu. The outnumbered Germans withdrew, Musinga refused further resistance, and Belgian troops entered Kigali on 6 May 1916. From then on Rwanda was under Belgian military occupation; Lesson 1 of the next unit follows how that occupation became a League of Nations mandate.
Famine followed the armies. Both the German and the Belgian forces took food, cattle and above all men to carry their loads, and the demands fell on farming families at the moment when fields needed to be planted and harvested. The famine Rwandans call Rumanura struck western Rwanda, near the lines where the two armies had faced each other, and then spread across much of the kingdom, made worse by irregular rains. The historian Georgia Brunner (2024) argues that the Belgian authorities used later famine relief as a reason to demand more forced labour, so that the war's pattern of extraction outlasted the war itself. No reliable death toll exists.
| Area | Effects |
|---|---|
| Political | Germany lost all its African colonies. They were shared out as League of Nations mandates: Ruanda-Urundi to Belgium; Tanganyika to Britain; Togoland and Kamerun divided between Britain and France; South West Africa to South Africa. |
| Human | Deaths of soldiers, carriers and civilians, mostly from disease and hunger; famines such as Rumanura; the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, which spread along wartime routes into Africa. |
| Economic | Forced labour, requisitions and new taxes; colonies were made to produce food and raw materials for the war effort. |
| Political awareness | Africans had seen Europeans fight and defeat each other; returning soldiers brought new ideas, and in 1919 a Pan-African Congress met in Paris during the peace conference. |
| Memory | In 2021 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission reported that an estimated 116,000 to 350,000 people who died in British service, mostly East African carriers and soldiers, were never commemorated by name, or at all. |
Warning
Avoid two distortions. (1) Treating Africans as background. Askari fought on both sides, and their choices, skills and losses shaped the campaign; Rwanda's court made its own decisions about whom to support. (2) Romanticising Lettow-Vorbeck as an "undefeated" hero. His campaign was skilful, but its cost fell on African carriers and farmers, and it changed nothing in the outcome of the war.
Tip
Use Rwanda as evidence. In an essay on "the effects of the First World War on Africa", one well-chosen local case is worth more than a long general list. The occupation of Kigali (6 May 1916), the demands for carriers and the Rumanura famine (1916–18) give you dated, specific evidence for the political, economic and human effects in a single paragraph.
Important
Discuss. War memorials in Europe list soldiers by name; most of the carriers who died in East Africa have no grave and no name on any memorial. Why do you think this happened? What would fair remembrance of Africa's part in the First World War look like today, in Rwanda and elsewhere?
"Empire & Commonwealth: East Africa" (National Army Museum, London). A short film on the soldiers and labourers from across the British Empire who fought in East Africa. Watch for who did the fighting and carrying, and compare its view with the source analysis above. It gives the British side only; the Belgian advance through Rwanda is covered in this lesson.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the sketch map, the tables, the definitions and the exercises.
