German East Africa

In 1886 colonial rivalry between Britain and Germany flared up again and a fresh Anglo-German Partition Agreement clearly defined German and British spheres of influence. A straight line traced between Kenya and Tanganyika along the actual boundaries divided the territories. North of the line, Kenya and Uganda went to England. The Southern part together with Ruanda-Urundi to the west went to Germany: this gave birth to German East Africa. Germany seized the occasion to reduce the mainland possessions of Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar to a 16 km wide coastal strip, keeping free access to all ports.

TANGANYIKA as a geographical and political entity did not take shape before the period of High Imperialism; it's name only came into use after German East Africa was transferred to Britain as a mandate by the League of Nations in 1920. What is referred to here therefore is the history of the region that was to become Tanganyika.

German CARL Peters had secured treaties with tribal leaders on East Africa's coast, providing the German government with legitimation to negotiate with Britain over spheres of interest in East Africa. In the treaty of 1886, Germany renounced it's claims on the WITU AREA (on Kenya's coast, north of Mombasa) and on Uganda, and Britain recognized Germany's claim to what was to become German East Africa. In another treaty of 1890, Germany traded the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba for the much smaller island of Heligoland, off Germany's coast in the North Sea. The Germans bought off the Sultan of Zanzibar's rights to the Tanganyikan coast for $ 800,000.

The German East Africa COMPANY (founded 1887, succeeded by the German government in 1891) established BAGAMOYO as their colony's capital, soon moving it to DARESSALAAM. The colony was called DEUTSCH-OSTAFRIKA (German East Africa). The colony's borders had been established in treaties with Britain (Kenya, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia), Belgium (Belgian Congo) and Portugal (Mocambique); interests of the indigenous people were disregarded. From the coast, the Germans penetrated the country and established their rule. The currency was 1 Rupia = 64 Pesa.

1885-1888 Carl Peters, administrator

1888-1891 Hermann von Wissmann, Reichskommissar

1891-1893 Julius von Soden

1893-1895 Friedrich Radbod von Schele

1895-1896 Hermann von Wissmann

1896-1901 Eduard von Liebert

1901-1906 Gustav Adolf Graf von Goetzen

1906-1912 Georg Albrecht von Rechenberg

1912-1918 Albert Heinrich Schnee

The area [Tanganyika] was at first administered by the German East Africa Company, whose harsh direct rule, land alienation, and forced labour policies caused so much native opposition that the Imperial Government was forced to assume control in 1891.

German East Africa's currency was the rupee. Fifteen rupees were equal in value to twenty German marks or to one English pound.

Supported schemes to establish Afrikaner refugees from the South African Boer War and poor Germans from Russia on the foothills of Mount Meru.

Gotzen refused to allow European settlers to buy their farms until the land had been cultivated. He is best remembered for his brutal supression of the Maji-Maji Rebellion. While fighting the rebels, Gotzen implemented a scorched-earth policy in southern GEA which caused the destruction of a region the size of Germany. During this campaign more than 100,000 men, women and children died as a result of famine and disease.

In German East Africa (1912) the following Government return was made of natives in European employment :-

Railway construction and repair 16,055

Railway services 4,007

Harbour works, Tanga 100

Government service 5,000

Employed by European merchants & c. 2,500

Employed in caravans for Europeans 5,000

At mission stations 3,000

In European domestic service 9,000

Mining 2,966

Plantations 91,892

Total 139,520

In addition, some 25,000 were in the employ of Arabs and Indians. Wages ranged from 3 to 12 rupees per month in addition to food. Natives employed on the Central Railway received from 8 to 10 rupees and a food allowance of 15 hellers (2 1/2 d.) a day. Labour was reported scarce in the plantation districts.

In 1884 and 1885, Carl Peters and agents of the German East Africa Company made treaties with the Tanganyika main-land chiefs, and. in 1887 officials arrived to establish a colonial rule which lasted until 1914. The primary task of these administrators was to maintain law and order and develop communications which would open up the country to trade and commerce.

Missionaries proceeded the administrators and as education was an inevitable concomitant of evangelization, a system of rudimentary schools was quickly established. In 1900, there were 600 mission schools with 50,000 pupils accounting for 95% of the total school enrolment at the time, and by 1914 these figures had risen to 1000 schools with 150,000 pupils.

The Germans had no initial plans to establish an education system, but the need arose for them to train a junior and local civil service to staff their administrative machine. The purpose of their schools was thus defined in an official circular of 1903 as:

a. to enable the native to be used in government administration;

b. to inculcate a liking for order, cleanliness, diligence and dutifulness and a sound knowledge of German customs and patriotism

In single-minded fulfilment of these aims, they had established by 1914, 60 three-year village primary schools, 9 two-year central schools and one high school in Tanga providing clerical, industrial and teacher training for up to 500 pupils. The system was secular and strictly vocational but effective, and brought much favourable comment from British administrators who tried to rebuild the civil service in the 1920s.

Imagine a country three times the size of Germany, mostly covered by dense bush, with no roads and only two railways, and either sweltering under a tropical sun or swept by torrential rain which makes the friable soil impassable to wheeled traffic; a country with occasional wide and swampy areas interspeesed with arid areas where water is often more precious than gold; in which man rots with malaria and suffers torments from insect pests; in which animals die wholesale from the ravages of the tse-tse fly; where crocodiles and lions seize unwary porters, giraffe destray telegraph lines, elephants damage tracks, hippopotami attack boats, rhinoceroses charge troops on the march, and bees put whole battalions to flight. Such was German East Africa in 1914-18

In the vast, agonising mosaic of the Holocaust, Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed was simply one more piece, one of millions of the Nazis' victims lost to obscurity without a funeral or a grave.

Now bin Adam is to make history in Germany by becoming the first black person to be given a memorial in his adopted country as an individual victim of the genocide of the Third Reich. A Stolperstein - a bronze 'stumbling block' - will be erected on the ground outside the house in Berlin where he lived.

The memorial will be placed so that pedestrians have to step around it, and its aim is to stop future generations from thinking of the Holocaust in terms of anonymous, faceless numbers. Until now the markers have been almost exclusively established at Jewish homes, but bin Adam's Stolperstein will serve as a reminder of other minorities, the black people, the disabled, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, political dissenters and Jehovah's Witnesses, who were also murdered under Hitler's regime.

The Stolperstein is a project conceived by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig. He plans to create a total of 12,000 markers outside houses, giving the name of the person or persons who lived there and the date on which they were taken to a concentration camp. Munich is the only city to have so far refused to have the markers, saying that they would encourage anti-Semitism.

bin Adam, who was born in Tanzania, joined the then colonial German East Africa services when he was 10 years old and served with the army. He emigrated to Berlin in 1929, where he immediately got into trouble with the authorities by walking into the Foreign Ministry and demanding his outstanding service pay.

Although his request was refused, he decided to stay, working as a waiter in hotels and taking small parts in films. He had roles in more than 20 movies with stars such as Zarah Leander, Hans Albers and Willy Birgel, even after the war broke out. He also taught Swahili at the Oriental Workshop.

He married a German woman, Maria Schwander, and they had three children - Adam, Annemarie and Bodo - but his family struggled to make ends meet because of his excesses, which included numerous affairs that resulted in several illegitimate children. He was still in dispute with the authorities over money for his time in the armed forces when he was arrested in 1941, charged with the crime of 'miscegenation' - racial intermarriage - and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died in November 1944.

The plaque, which will stand outside his former home on Brunnenstrasse in Berlin's Mitte district, comes with the release of a book about him, Truthful Till Death, by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst. The book focuses attention on the persecution of black people under the Third Reich, which included forced sterilisation and, ultimately, extermination.

By the start of the 20th century, Germany had extensive colonies in Africa and it is often claimed that German doctors carried out genetic experiments on East Africans. After the First World War, France occupied the German Rhineland, deploying colonial African soldiers as the occupying force. The result was hundreds of children born to German women by African soldiers who then became a target for Hitler. In Mein Kampf, he referred to them as 'Rhineland Bastards'.

By 1937, every identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had been forcibly sterilised, often without anaesthetic. By the outbreak of war most black people had fled. The few who remained were exterminated.

The Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 gave Britain a mandate to administer all of former German East Africa under the supervision of the League of Nations, with the exception of Ruanda and Urundi, which were placed under Belgian administration. The country was renamed Tanganyika Territory, and was governed by the Colonial Office with General Sir H.A Byatt as first Administrator General.

In 1922 Slavery was finally abolished.

The Supreme Council at the Versailles peace talks allocates all of GEA to the UK under mandate. Belgium, which still occupies Ruanda-Urundi, protests the decision.

Carl Peters (1941)

Directed by Herbert Selpin. A docu-drama of the life of Karl Peters, the German Commissioner in East Africa during World War I. It tells of the founding of Deutsch Ostafrika, which covered parts of present-day Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. In German without titles. 110 min. 999:2740

It is not the task of this essay to take stock of a colonial past where Germans and Tanzanians shared for 25 years a common history. However this period may be judged, it seems that Tanzania's borders are the most positive heritage the Germans have left to the citizens of this country.

Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gessellschaft - German East Africa Company