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  One Mumbo prediction held that all Europeans would disappear from their country. When German troops crossed the border from German East Africa and attacked the British garrison at Kisii in 1914, the Africans took this as a confirmation of Mumbo’s forecast. They rose up and plundered administrative and missionary centers throughout the region—although this particular response came primarily from the Gusii tribe, rather than the Luo. The British were harsh in their suppression of the rebellion, killing more than 150 Africans.

  Many of the Mumbo leaders were deported to a detention camp on an island off Kismayo in the Indian Ocean, now part of southern Somalia. However, the threat of expulsion did not deter Mumbo’s most devout followers, and despite frequent arrests and deportations by the British authorities, they continued their insurrection throughout the interwar years.

  The border with the German protectorate was only seventy-five miles from Nairobi, and the outbreak of war brought panic to the white settlers. Many planters left their farms and fled to the city, carrying any weapon they could lay their hands on: elephant guns, shotguns, sporting rifles. Twelve hundred settlers were accepted for service in the East African Mounted Rifles (EAMR), and the rest were asked to return to their farms. Uniforms were not immediately available, so recruits handed over their shirts and volunteer women sewed the letters EAMR on their shoulders.42 The makeshift army began commandeering horses from farmers. The colony declared martial law, ordering all “enemy aliens” rounded up and incarcerated.

  British East Africa was going to war.

  6

  FIVE WIVES AND

  TWO WORLD WARS

  PAND NYALUO DHOGE ARIYO

  An old knife has two edges

  AS THE clouds of war began to roll in over the fields of Flanders in the summer of 1914, there was a widely accepted understanding in East Africa between colonial Britain and Germany that war on the continent was pointless. By 1914 Britain controlled a quarter of the African continent, and the German colonies were five times larger than the Fatherland. Despite the skepticism voiced by both Bismarck and Gladstone in the 1880s about the wisdom of colonizing Africa, by the beginning of the twentieth century both nations were beginning to profit from their overseas ventures. The two colonial nations also faced similar problems in trying to administer large African populations, and open hostility was not in either party’s interest. It was a comfortable alliance, and Dr. W. S. Solf, the German secretary of state for the colonies, willingly accepted that his nation’s ambitions in Africa would best be served by being “England’s junior partner.”1

  Prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, most of the operations by the King’s African Rifles (KAR) were little more than “large scale cattle raids” against the native population.2 The military forces in the two colonies in East Africa were finely balanced in numbers: in the summer of 1914, Britain had 2,383 officers and askaris (African soldiers) in the KAR, and Germany had 2,756 troops. One resident of Nairobi wrote that British East Africa “was not prepared. Why should it have been, with a German colony cheek-by-jowl across the border? … German East Africa was much too near to be dangerous.”3 However, this peaceful coexistence was not to last, and the first shots discharged in anger during the First World War were fired not in Europe but in Africa.

  On August 5, 1914, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, British troops from the Uganda protectorate attacked a German river outpost near Lake Victoria. Ten days later, troops in German East Africa attempted to take the small coastal port of Taveta, a dozen miles inside British East Africa, where a German volunteer soldier called Bröker became the first combatant to die on foreign soil. In south Nyanza in western Kenya, near panic ensued the next month when a detachment of German troops led by Captain Wilhelm Bock von Wülfingen took the undefended British post at Kisii. KAR troops reclaimed the town after fierce fighting and several deaths, but the British now worried that the strategic railhead and port at Kisumu were vulnerable to attack.

  By the autumn of 1914, then, German and British forces in East Africa were actively at war, and the conflict continued until after the armistice in Europe. For the first time, ordinary Africans were dragged into a war between European nations, mainly as porters. For weeks and months on end, they were required to march eighteen miles or more a day through the jungle, enduring intense heat and often torrential rain. They survived on meager rations and minimal medical support.

  Of the 165,000 African porters who were employed in the KAR Carrier Corps in British East Africa during the war, more than 50,000 died—a much higher casualty rate than on the Western Front. This extraordinary figure represented one in eight of the adult male population in Kenya and Uganda. The war devastated large areas, laid waste to farming land, and brought hunger, disease, and death to ordinary African civilians; thousands more perished in the global influenza pandemic that followed the war. The Afro-American writer and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his seminal 1915 essay, “The African Roots of War,” that “a great cloud swept over sea and settled on Africa … twenty centuries after Christ, black Africa, prostrate, raped and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe.”4

  By 1914 all local insurrections in British East Africa had been suppressed, including the Mumbo rebellion in south Nyanza, and the British had established an effective and comprehensive administration across their territory. Having buckled under colonial rule, the Africans now demonstrated remarkable stoicism in coping with the outbreak of a European war on their continent. Despite the occasional brutality shown by the colonials toward the local people, plenty of Africans admired and respected the organization and stability that British rule brought to the region. In fact, some of the tribes that had been most resistant to British rule in the 1890s contributed many combatants to the KAR—perhaps because the KAR offered an opportunity for young Africans to maintain their warrior status in a society increasingly dominated and controlled by the British. One young African summed up the situation by claiming that the army “was a suitable job for a warrior … It showed that we were men.”5 This was particularly the case with the Nandi, who had fought long and hard against the construction of the Uganda Railway at the turn of the century. Ten years later, they contributed a greater percentage of their male population to the KAR than any other tribe in Kenya.6

  In Nyanza, the Luo had mixed responses to the conflict. Initially, finding volunteers in south Nyanza was relatively easy; the disruption caused by the Mumbo cult had led to high unemployment among the Africans in the region. However, the British soon ran out of willing recruits as young African men started volunteering to work on white farms in order to avoid the Carrier Corps, and their colonial masters had to resort to more persuasive means. In a modern equivalent of the press gang used by the British Royal Navy during the eighteenth century, the authorities rounded up young men when they were at sporting events or other public gatherings or out herding their livestock. To meet their strict quotas, local chiefs sometimes seized unwilling recruits from their homes at night. According to John Ndalo, nobody in the Kendu Bay area wanted to fight, and they were all forcibly conscripted:

  They were using the local chiefs to identify the homes with the young men who were capable of fighting. So the chiefs would come into the locality and say, at such and such a home, we want one young man, or two or three. In the First World War, there were no volunteers—they used to pick young men and take them by force.

  However, even these drastic measures did not fulfill the quotas and the colonial government was obliged to introduce legislation to allow the conscription of Africans. In the first twelve months of the war, 4,572 Africans from central Nyanza alone were pressed into service with the KAR, and their numbers continued to increase as the war progressed.

  Thousands of young Luo men joined the army, eventually dominating the battalions of the KAR.7 Of all the major tribes in Kenya, only the seminomadic Maasai avoided active service, although they did provide valuable military intelligence alo
ng the border with German East Africa (as did the Maasai living on the other side of the border for the Germans). Hans Poeschel, the editor of the colonial newspaper Deutsch-Ostafrika Zeitung, wrote that they must have been reluctant to take up arms on behalf of the British because the Maasai “had grown to know the English … as still greater cattle-thieves than they themselves.”8

  For several years running up to the outbreak of war, Onyango Obama had been living away from his family with the white missionaries in and around Kisumu; he was part of the first generation of young Luo boys to benefit from an education in a mission school. Onyango was clever and ambitious, and by 1914 he could read and write both English and Swahili. Sarah Obama claims that he also learned about administration from the British and was familiar with paper records and land titles.9 Inevitably, Onyango’s grasp of administration, as well as his ability to speak Dholuo, Swahili, and English, made him an ideal recruit for the KAR Carrier Corps, because the British desperately needed translators to pass down commands from the white officers to the African porters, scouts, cooks, guards, and wagon drivers. According to Sarah Obama, Onyango’s first job in the KAR was overseeing the African teams who were building roads as part of the war effort.

  The Carrier Corps was essential for warfare in East Africa. The region had very few roads suitable for mechanized vehicles, and the prevalence of the tsetse fly prevented the use of draft animals, leaving human porters as the only viable means of moving military equipment around the region. John Ainsworth, one of the ablest British administrators in British East Africa, was impressed with the Luo porters during the war:

  A very large portion of the responsibility for producing porters fell on the Nyanza Province. It can be said with truth that they helped to win the war. The Kavirondo porter became a very well-known feature in “German East” during the war. He was usually referred to as omera (a Luo word meaning “brother”).10

  Sir Philip Mitchell, who fought in Togoland, Cameroon, and East Africa and later became governor of Kenya in 1944, claims that it took three porters to support a single armed soldier on the front line in East Africa.11 He also regretted the terrible loss of life sustained by the Africans in the KAR Carrier Corps: “The heaviest sufferers were the porters, among whom loss of life was greatest and lamentable; faithful men, who did what they had to do with little complaint and great endurance; but who ought never to have been asked to do it, and who suffered much which should have been prevented.”

  John Ndalo too remembers that the conditions were tough and the casualties high: “During that time, there was no organized form of transport, so the soldiers were walking and many died on the road. So we lost quite a lot of Luo young men. They were working as porters as well as fighting.”

  In addition to supplying recruits to the Carrier Corps, the inhabitants of Nyanza were required to contribute to the war effort in other ways. In the last year of the war the people of central Nyanza provided more than two thousand head of cattle as well as three thousand goats. The dreaded hut tax was also further increased.

  To the Africans, the Europeans were fighting an incomprehensible war. The missionaries and colonial administrators had spent years condemning intertribal wars as sinful and uncivilized, but now the Africans were being recruited for what they saw as just another intertribal war—only on a much larger scale. They could not understand why they were marching for days into a strange and inhospitable country, only to fight an enemy from whom they took little or nothing; why not fight a quick campaign, seize their cattle and women, and then go home? Sir Philip Mitchell understood the Africans’ bewilderment:

  The White Men, hitherto seen by the native people in small numbers of superior, almost fabulous, people, all apparently of one tribe, with similar habits and common interests were suddenly found to belong to different tribes which were fighting each other and required African help to do it. Not only was it no longer a shocking and dangerous thing to offer violence to a Mzungu; on the contrary, if he was on the other side, it was a soldier’s duty to attack him, and kill him if possible or to take him prisoner, and even Chiefs and villages could earn rewards from the other side for what was in fact treason and rebellion against their lawful Government.12

  The German colonies fought their European neighbors in Africa with varying degrees of success. Togoland, Cameroon, and German South West Africa (Namibia) fell to Allied forces by the early months of 1915, with the exception of the German stronghold of Mora in Cameroon, which held out until February 1916. However, it was a very different story in German East Africa (consisting of today’s Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda), where the German commander led a brilliant campaign with the support of well-trained askaris. Colonel (later General) Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck understood the special demands of fighting a war on African soil, and he also spoke fluent Swahili—this alone helped to earn him the respect and admiration of his African troops. Unlike the British, he also recruited black officers. Von Lettow-Vorbeck understood that, strategically, East Africa would never be anything other than a sideshow during the First World War. His instructions from Berlin were to maintain the defense of the colony at all costs, but he knew he had no real hope of winning this campaign. Instead, he was determined to tie down as many British troops as possible, thereby denying them a place on the Western Front.13 Through a combination of preemptive strikes on towns such as Kisii and brazen attacks on the Uganda Railway, he not only captured badly needed weapons and supplies but also kept more than 150,000 Allied troops fighting in East Africa throughout the war.

  In March 1916 the British launched a formidable offensive against the Germans under the command of General Jan Christian Smuts, who had more than 45,000 troops at his immediate disposal—four times the number of Germans. Hopelessly outnumbered, the German commander nonetheless fought an effective rearguard action as he retreated south through German East Africa. During this campaign Onyango Obama was moved from his road-building duties in British East Africa and transferred to German East Africa to support the growing offensive. For almost a year the Germans and their loyal African askaris survived as best they could, alternately living off the land and enjoying supplies captured from the advancing Allied forces. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s army was so successful at acquiring provisions and equipment from the enemy that by the end of the war the German forces had more ammunition than they could carry. Nevertheless, the Germans knew they could not repulse the Allied forces, who pursued them relentlessly across German East Africa and into Portuguese-controlled Mozambique.

  By early November 1918 rumors were beginning to circulate among the German forces that the war was nearly over, but von Lettow-Vorbeck remained convinced that any end to the conflict would be favorable to Germany. Chased around East Africa by British forces for the past several years, he and his army had little idea of the real situation in Europe. He expressed disbelief when the British commissioner told him what was happening back home in the Fatherland:

  The Commissioner told me that the German fleet had revolted, and that a revolution had also broken out in Germany; further, if he was to accept a report which was official but had not yet been confirmed, the Kaiser had abdicated on November 10th. All this news seemed to me improbable, and I did not believe it until it was confirmed on my way home months later.14

  As the commander of German forces in East Africa, von Lettow-Vorbeck had no choice but to offer his surrender to Brigadier General W. F. S. Edwards. Under a storm-laden sky at Abercorn on the border between German East Africa and northern Rhodesia, hostilities ceased at 11:00 a.m. on November 25, 1918—exactly two weeks after the armistice was signed in Europe. Not only had the first shots of the war been fired in Africa, but so too were the last. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s army had the distinction of being the only German forces to have occupied British-controlled soil during the Great War.

  Among British imperialists there was an almost palpable excitement about the new opportunities in Africa. For the first time they had the chance to paint Africa “Empire Red”
from south to north, and Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a “Cape to Cairo” route became a reality. The British could now travel from the extreme south of the continent to the Mediterranean Sea without ever leaving the British Empire; the journey took fifty-three days, traveling 4,456 miles by railway, 2,004 miles on river and lake steamers, and just 363 miles by road.

  In 1919, not only did the Treaty of Versailles set out the terms of peace in Europe, but article 22 divided the German colonies between other European nations. This division of territory was just as important as that produced by the Berlin conference of 1885, and once again the Africans were given no voice in their future. Granted, some missionaries were tasked with canvassing African opinion and representing them at the conference in France, but like the politicians, the missionaries had their own vested interests and agenda. The one significant concession made to “African interests” at Versailles was the acknowledgment that, in the words of one historian, Africans “could no longer be bandied about like so many sheep.”15 At the insistence of the United States—which was now beginning to assume a much greater role in international politics—the ex-colonies of Germany were not to be simply handed over to the victorious Allies; instead, they were to become “mandates,” administered under the auspices of the newly founded League of Nations. These mandates declared:

  To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization … [and that] … the tutelage of such people should be entrusted to advanced nations who, by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position, can best undertake this responsibility and who are willing to accept it.16