German East Africa (GEA; DOA) was a German colony in the African Great Lakes region, which included present-day Burundi, Rwanda, the Tanzania mainland, and the Kionga Triangle, a small region later incorporated into Mozambique. GEA's area was , which is nearly three times the area of present-day Germany and almost double the area of metropolitan Germany at the time.
The colony was organised when the German military was asked in the late 1880s to put down a revolt against the activities of the German East Africa Company. It ended with Imperial Germany's defeat in World War I. Ultimately the territory was divided amongst Britain, Belgium and Portugal, and was reorganised as a mandate of the League of Nations.
History
Like other colonial powers, the Germans expanded their empire in the Africa Great Lakes region, ostensibly to explore the region's rich resources and its people. Unlike other imperial powers, however, they never formally abolished either slavery or the slave trade and preferred instead to curtail the production of new "recruits", regulating the existing business of slavery.
The colony began when Carl Peters, an adventurer and the founder of the Society for German Colonization, signed treaties with several native chieftains on the mainland which is opposite Zanzibar. On 3 March 1885, the German government announced that it had granted an imperial charter, which was signed by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck on 27 February 1885. The charter was granted to Peters' company and was intended to establish a protectorate in the African Great Lakes region. Peters then recruited specialists who began exploring south to the Rufiji River and north to Witu, near Lamu on the coast.
The Sultan of Zanzibar protested and claimed that he was the ruler of both Zanzibar and the mainland. Chancellor Bismarck sent five warships which arrived on 7 August 1885, training their guns on the Sultan's palace. The Sultan was forced to accept the German claims on the mainland outside a -strip along the coast. In November 1886 Germany and Britain reached an agreement declaring they would respect the sovereignty of the Sultan of Zanzibar over his islands and the -strip along the coast. They otherwise agreed on their spheres of interest along what is now the Tanzanian–Kenyan border.No. 123 Agreement between the British and German Governments, respecting the Sultanate of Zanzibar and the opposite East African Mainland, and their Spheres of Influence – 1st November 1886 (in: Map of Africa by Treaty Vol II, pp. 617, 620) https://archive.org/details/mapafricabytrea00britgoog
"3. Both powers agree to establish a delimitation of their respectives spheres of influence on this part of the East African Continent.....
The territory to which the arrangement is applied is bounded on the south by the Rovuma River, and on the North by a line which, starting from the mouth of the Tana River, follows the course of that river or its affluents to the point of intersection with the equator and the 38th degree of east longitude ...."
"Line of Demarcation.
The line of demarcation starts from the mouth of the River Wanga or Umbe, runs direct to Lake Jipe, passes thence along the eastern and round the northern side of the lake and crosses the Lumi River;
Teveita and Chagga (Kilimanjaro District)
After which it passes midway between [sic] the territories of Taveita and Chagga, skirts the northern base of the Kilimanjaro range, and thence is drawn direct to the point on the eastern side of Lake Victoria Nyanza which is intersected by the 1st degree of south latitude" The British and Germans agreed to divide the mainland between themselves, and the Sultan had no option but to agree.
German rule was established quickly over Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam, and Kilwa. Oscar Baumann was sent to explore Masailand and Urundi. During his expedition he discovered the source of the Kagera river, the Alexandra Nile. The caravans of Tom von Prince, Wilhelm Langheld, Emin Pasha, and Charles Stokes were sent to dominate "the Street of Caravans". The Abushiri Revolt of 1888 was put down with British help the following year. In 1890, London and Berlin concluded the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty, which gave Heligoland to Germany and decided the border between GEA and the East Africa Protectorate controlled by Britain, although the exact boundaries remained unsurveyed until 1910.
The stretch of border between Kenya and Tanganyika, running from the sea to Lake Victoria, was surveyed by two British brothers: Charles Stewart Smith (British Consul at Mombasa) and his younger brother George Edward Smith (an officer and later a general with the Royal Engineers). Stewart Smith had been appointed British Commissioner in 1892 for the delimitation of the Anglo-German Boundary in Africa, and in the same year they both surveyed the line from the sea to Mount Kilimanjaro. Twelve years later George Edward Smith returned to complete the survey of the remaining from Kilimanjaro to Lake Victoria.The Last Time , Stewart Smith, J. (2019). The last time: memoirs of a colonial officer in Nigeria and the Southern Cameroons, free ebook version via Cambridge University Centre for African Studies p. 36
The German expansion was undertaken by military groups such as the notorious Wissmann Truppe, armed with modern weaponry. The Wissmann Truppe consisted of African soldiers led by German commanders. Under their command the Wissmann Truppe committed widespread atrocities. Between 1891 and 1894, the Hehe people which were led by Chief Mkwawa resisted German expansion. They were defeated because rival tribes supported the Germans. After years of guerrilla warfare, Mkwawa was cornered and committed suicide in 1898.
The colonial expansion led by Carl Peters came with considerable violence against the local populations. Carl Peters was infamous for his brutality, which had earned him the nickname "Mkono-wa-damu", or "Man with the blood-stained hands". He was known for leaving a path of destruction in his wake during his conquests, leaving entire villages slaughtered. Peters was also known for keeping a "harem" of local women, who would be completely at the mercy of Peters. In one instance, he had a woman flogged daily on suspicion of having sexual relations with another native. The native in question was hanged.
Other atrocities included rape, floggings and torture with iron rods.Davis, Christian S., Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, p. 1, 2012 Flogging was so excessive that the German colonies were known by other European powers as the "flogging colonies".
These widespread atrocities caused several uprisings in the German colonies. The Maji Maji Rebellion occurred in 1905 and was put down by Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen, who ordered measures to create a famine to crush the resistance. It may have cost as many 300,000 lives. Scandal followed with allegations of corruption and brutality. In 1907, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow appointed Bernhard Dernburg to reform the colonial administration.
German colonial administrators relied heavily on native chiefs to keep order and collect taxes. By 1 January 1914, not including local police, the military garrisons of the Schutztruppen (protective troops) in Dar es Salaam, Moshi, Iringa, and Mahenge numbered 110 German officers (including 42 medical officers), 126 non-commissioned officers, and 2,472 Askari (native enlisted men).
Economic development
Germans promoted commerce and economic growth. Over were put under sisal cultivation which was the largest cash crop. Two million coffee trees were planted, rubber trees grew on , and there were large cotton plantations.
In the early years of the colony, hunting and gathering remained the basis of the export economy, and ivory and wild rubber were major exports. The African-owned plantations along the coast, on the other hand, suffered from the gradual abolition of slavery. The number of European-owned plantations rose steadily, but many of them proved unprofitable. Global markets for commodities like coffee and rubber were very unstable, and the soil and climate were not always favourable to the grower. It was only in sisal that the large plantations finally found a reliable source of income.John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.124-138. Under the governorship of Albrecht von Rechenberg, from 1906 to 1912, the colonial administration began to place more emphasis on the economic potential of African small-holder agriculture, for which railway construction was an essential precondition.John Iliffe, Tanganyika under German Rule, 1905-1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p.69-81. In his detailed study of the economic development of the colony, Rainer Tetzlaff came to the conclusion that "German East Africa never achieved any real significance for the German Empire, neither as a colony for the settlement of emigrants, nor as a supplier of raw materials, nor as a market for exports."Rainer Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung und Ausbeutung: Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Deutsch-Ostafrikas, 1885-1914 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970), p.191.
One of the great impediments to the development of plantation agriculture was the labour problem. The plantations could not function without a large African workforce, but employment conditions were often poor, not to say life-threatening. Local German officials frequently colluded with European landowners in forcing Africans to work on the plantations, although the government in Berlin had banned any form of forced labour. The various labour ordinances promulgated in Dar es Salaam were largely ignored in the interior. The social and economic impacts of large-scale labour migration on "labour reservoirs" such as Unyamwezi and Usukuma were often devastating.John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.151-163.Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884-1914 (Helsinki: Tiedekirja; Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 1994), p.321-440.Thaddeus Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002).John W. East (ed. and trans.), The Labour Question in German East Africa (Tanzania): A Collection of Primary Historical Sources Translated from the German (2018).
Beginning in 1888 the Usambara Railway was built from Tanga to Moshi to bring these agricultural products to market. The Central Railroad covered and linked Dar es Salaam, Morogoro, Tabora, and Kigoma. The final link to the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika was completed in July 1914 and was cause for a huge and festive celebration in the capital with an agricultural fair and trade exhibition. Harbor facilities were built or improved with electrical cranes, with rail access and warehouses. Wharves were remodeled at Tanga, Bagamoyo, and Lindi. After 1891, the German colonial administration undertook efforts to overhaul the region's caravan routes, which had existed before European colonisation, into all-weather highways, although most of these projects proved to be unsuccessful and ended in failure.
In 1912, Dar es Salaam and Tanga received 356 freighters and passenger steamers and over 1,000 coastal ships and local trading-vessels. Dar es Salaam became the showcase city of all of tropical Africa. By 1914, Dar es Salaam and the surrounding province had a population of 166,000, among them 1,000 (0.6%) Germans. In all of the GEA, there were 3,579 Germans.