Customer Reviews

Tip and Run

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mention World War I in Africa to most people, even most military historians, in the United States and about all that comes to mind is 'The African Queen.'

In reality, the struggle between the Germans trying to expand their colonies and the British trying to stop them was a long, messy, bloody mess. This was a time when the Europeans thought that an overseas empire was going to bring the home countries unimagined wealth, glory, and happiness.

In 1914, the Germans had three major African possessions: German South West Africa (now mostly Namibia), German East Africa (Tanzania) and Cameroon. It was their intent to conquer the territory inbetween the three colonies and create a huge colony. The British, of course, had other plans. The result was a series of battles fought by mostly local troops with just enough modern equipment such as rifles, machine guns and warships to increase the killing but not the results.

The trajedy of it all is that the events in Africa really didn't matter. The outcome was all dependent on what happened in Europe.

Supurbly researched and well written, this is a history of events little known in the United States.

I found this book exciting, fascinating and incredibly well written. I do not agree with the criticisms that the book gets too bogged down in facts and not enough examination of individual personalities. This book is a serious historical work and it maintains that maturity throughout. Paice is conscious that he is leading the field in this area of history and he retains the responsibility of that ground breaking studiousness. Those who are used to military history or African history by writers like Pakenham or Holland, will love it. Those who like a bit of gossip with their history will be dissapointed. This book will prove to be a classic and we can only see a better understanding of African History because of it. This will stand with Pakenham's 'The Boer War' and Rothberg's 'The Founder' as one of the seminal works in African Colonial History.

Despite the books seriousness it is not a difficult read and I would recomend it to anyone.

The First World War wrecked not only vast areas of Europe, Russia and the Middle East, but also huge tracts of Africa. Edward Paice's book studies this almost ignored disaster.

In Africa, the First World War was fought between Britain and Germany across German East Africa, an area five times the size of Germany, which became in 1919 British Tanganyika, later modern Tanzania.

On the British side, at least 100,000 people were killed, including 95,000 African carriers. Britain had recruited a million carriers from the five British-owned territories bordering German East Africa - the majority of the adult males. As one Colonial Office official noted, the campaign "only stopped short of a scandal because the people who suffered most were the carriers - and after all, who cares about native carriers?"

Germany recruited an estimated 350,000 carriers, who probably also suffered a one in ten death rate. At least 300,000 civilians died in Ruanda, Urundi and German East Africa.

As Paice notes, German East Africa's "most productive areas had been fought over and ravaged by both sides." Both sides stole grain and cattle as well as men. The war devastated the whole of East Africa, weakening the population so that they suffered a great famine in 1918, then the `Spanish flu', and then another famine.

The imperialist war between the British and German ruling classes laid waste some of Africa's most fertile land and killed probably half a million Africans, wrecking East Africa's prospects for decades to come.

Edward Paice, a historian turned banker who then reverted to history whose family has deep roots in Kenya's British settler community has written this book on what is easily one of the most fascinating chapters of the history of World War 1, but has languished in obscurity in the English-speaking world not least because of how spectacularly able Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the commander of the German forces in Tanganyika, was, and how incompetent many of the Allied forces were.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck waged a successful guerilla campaign until the armistices, and with his force led by 300 Germans, he was able to create so much mayhem that the allies were forced to deploy a vastly larger number of soldiers to protect their African colonies from his men, soldiers who thus were not available for service in Europe.

Paice masterfully describes the human toll that the African war exacted, hundreds of thousands dead, a scorched earth policy, all over a war that might never have erupted had the British not invaded Tanganyika, and forced the Germans there, who might otherwise have preferred to bother themselves with the safety of German civilians.

Less masterful is Paice's lack of adequate descriptions of some of the extremely interesting people involved in the war, the brilliant Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who spoke fluent Swahili with his Askari, Meinerzhagen, an English intelligence officer, Spencer-Simon, the highly eccentric sailor who brought ships to Lake Tanganyika against large odds... etc. Also not adequately explained is that von Lettow didn't only win when he won battles, but also with the deployment of every Allied soldier sent to Africa and thus unavailabe for service in Europe. A book with a bit wider scope would be so much more enthralling.

Paice convincingly and interestingly describes the Germans' brutal treatment of Africans, and yet somehow I can't but believe that his descriptions of ancillary details reflect the prejudices in his family. A bit more detail and thorough research would have made for a much better book.

And yet, well worth reading.