African Response to Colonial Rule
Senior 4 · History (Languages)
African Response to Colonial Rule
Lesson 2 of 4
25 min
In July 1891 the German commissioner Emil von Zelewski marched inland with a battalion of 320 askari, their officers and porters, to subdue the Hehe of the southern highlands. On 17 August, at Lugalo, about 3,000 warriors of the Hehe ruler Mkwawa, commanded in the field by his brother Mpangile, ambushed the column. Armed with spears and only a few guns, they quickly overpowered it and killed Zelewski. The severe defeat was a great setback to German military prestige.
Rwanda belonged to the same colony, German East Africa. The governor who later crushed the greatest rising there, the Maji Maji war of 1905 to 1907, was Gustav Adolf von Götzen, the man who had crossed Rwanda in 1894. This lesson analyses the forms of African resistance through these two struggles, and compares them with resistance elsewhere in Africa.
Definition
Resistance: opposition to colonial conquest or rule. Active (armed) resistance: fighting, by war, uprising or raids. Primary resistance: fighting the original conquest, usually led by existing rulers. Secondary resistance: rising against colonial rule once it was established, often across ethnic lines.
Guerrilla warfare: fighting by small mobile groups using surprise, ambushes and knowledge of the land, avoiding pitched battles. Scorched-earth policy: destroying crops, food stores and villages so that an enemy, or the people supporting it, cannot survive. Spirit medium: a person believed to speak for a spirit or ancestor.
Mkwawa ruled the Hehe from his fortified capital at Kalenga, near today's Iringa. After Lugalo, the Germans returned in force. On 28 October 1894, under the new commissioner Friedrich von Schele, they stormed Kalenga. Mkwawa escaped and fought on as a guerrilla leader for almost four years. On 19 July 1898, surrounded, he shot himself rather than be captured. The Germans took his skull to Germany; Lesson 4 follows its story.
Analysis. The Hehe were a strong, centralised military state, and Mkwawa used the land well: an ambush first, guerrilla war later. This is primary resistance by an established ruler defending his kingdom. It failed in the end against a colonial power that could send more men, artillery and supplies, but it took the Germans seven years.
Causes. Germany imposed head taxes from 1898 and relied heavily on forced labour for roads and other work. In 1902 Governor von Götzen ordered villages to grow cotton for export, each with a quota, although cotton needed more water than most of the land could give. Forced labour on the cotton fields was hated, and in 1905 a drought threatened the region.
Leadership and belief. The spirit medium Kinjikitile Ngwale, at Ngarambe, gave people "war medicine": water (maji in Kiswahili) mixed with castor oil and millet seeds, which he said would turn German bullets into water. The belief gave people from many different communities the courage and unity to rise together.
Course. The rising is dated from 20 July 1905, when a cotton field worked with forced labour was symbolically destroyed; on 31 July Matumbi fighters marched on Samanga, destroying the cotton crop and a trading post. In August the rebels attacked German posts across the south: Ifakara fell on 16 August, and several thousand fighters advanced on the fortified post at Mahenge, which was defended with two machine guns. The Ngoni joined with a force of 5,000. After a German attack on their camp on 21 October, Ngoni fighters threw away their medicine, crying "The maji is a lie!" Kinjikitile himself died on 4 August 1905.
Suppression and cost. Götzen called for reinforcements and used a scorched-earth policy. The war and the famine that followed, the "Great Hunger", killed between 75,000 and 300,000 people, overwhelmingly from hunger.
Analysis. Maji Maji was secondary resistance: a rising against established colonial rule, caused by its economic demands, that united many peoples through a shared religious idea. Its size and unity were new; its tragedy was that belief could not stop machine guns, and the colonial power made the civilian population pay.
African Biographics: "The African Rebellion That Terrified The German Empire", about 16 minutes, on the Maji Maji war. Watch for the causes the video gives, the attack on Mahenge, and how the Germans ended the rising; compare its figures with those in this lesson.
| Resistance | Where and when | Cause | Methods | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nandi, led by the Orkoiyot Koitalel Arap Samoei | Kenya, 1890 to 1906 | British occupation and the building of the Uganda Railway | Guerrilla attacks; sabotage of the railway and telegraph wires | Koitalel was killed on 19 October 1905 at a meeting called as a truce |
| Hut Tax War, led in the north by Bai Bureh | Sierra Leone, 1898 | A hut tax of five or ten shillings a year from 1 January 1898 | Attacks on officials and merchants | Scorched earth; Bai Bureh surrendered on 11 November 1898 and was exiled to the Gold Coast |
| Herero and Nama | German South West Africa (Namibia), 1904 to 1908 | German rule and the loss of land | War and guerrilla war | Crushed with mass killing; Unit 6 studies it as a genocide |
| Bambatha | Natal (South Africa), 1906 | A new poll tax of one pound on top of the hut tax | Uprising | 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu men killed, against 36 colonial soldiers |
| John Chilembwe | Nyasaland (Malawi), January 1915 | Settler abuses and the colonial order | Rising led by an American-educated Baptist minister | About 40 rebels executed and 300 imprisoned; Chilembwe shot dead on 3 February 1915 |
Warning
Do not dismiss the maji belief as "superstition" and stop there. Historians debate its role: a German inquiry split between those who blamed "sorcerers" and those who blamed the burdens of German rule. The medicine failed against bullets, but it gave many separate communities a shared cause. Explain what it did, not just whether it was true.
Tip
For any resistance, use the CLMO grid: Causes, Leaders, Methods, Outcome. Fill one row for the Hehe and one for Maji Maji, and you have a comparison essay plan.
Important
Discuss. The Hehe resisted for seven years under one ruler; Maji Maji united many peoples for two years under spirit mediums. Which was the more serious threat to German rule, and why?
Practice
Key points
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the map, the comparison table, CLMO and the exercises. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Quick check
Which best explains why Maji Maji counts as secondary resistance?
