Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2011
This essay uses German East Africa as a historical example to illustrate some of the complex interrelationships between colonial labor and military practices. Analysis of African soldiers' roles in colonial labor regimes underscores the degree to which colonial militaries, labor, and punitive structures reinforced each other on a daily basis. Colonial states depended on their African soldiers, and the free and unfree laborers they recruited, conscripted, and supervised, for preservation of the German colonial state's political authority and economic viability. Moreover, these military labor practices tied soldiers' households to colonial state interests, laying the basis for new colonial cultures and campaign communities.
1. German East Africa comprised what is now mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi.
2. Askari is an Arabic and Kiswahili word for soldier, police, or guard. Colonial armies throughout eastern Africa used the term to refer to their rank-and-file African recruits.
3. German officers referred to the African soldiers recruited from Cairo, Egypt, in 1890 and elsewhere in northeastern Africa collectively as “Sudanese.” This ethnic moniker obscures their complex histories as military slaves and former soldiers in the Turco-Egyptian and Anglo-Egyptian army, as well as their wide-ranging geographic and cultural origins. For the sake of simplicity in this article, I retain this label, enclosed in quotation marks, to indicate the problematic nature of the term. The British colonial army in East Africa, the King's African Rifles (KAR), also recruited such soldiers, often using the term “Nubi” as a reference to this group. See Leopold, Mark, “Legacies of Slavery in North West Uganda: The Story of the ‘One-Elevens,’” in Médard, Henri and Doyle, Shane, eds., Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (Oxford, 2007), 124–144Google Scholar; and Parsons, Timothy, ‘Kibra is our Blood’: The Sudanese Military Legacy in Nairobi's Kibera Location, 1902–1968,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 30:1 (1997): 87–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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34. Prince, Gegen Araber und Wahehe, 114.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
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48. Hildebrandt, Eine deutsche Militärstation, 20.
49. Ibid., 119–20.
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58. Gillman papers, Mss.Afr. s. 1175, diary entry, 23.XI.05, Rhodes House.
59. Their proximity in these disciplinary and work contexts is suggested by the fact that military doctors recommended similar antimalarial prevention and treatment regimens for askaris and chain-gang prisoners. See Kolonial-Abteilung des Auswärtigen Amts, , ed., Medizinal-Berichte über die Deutschen Schutzgebiete 1903/04 (Berlin, 1905), 31Google Scholar.
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64. European colonizers throughout Africa used the word “boy” to refer to their domestic servants, regardless of the servant's actual age.
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73. Ibid., 68; Arnold, Steuer und Lohnarbeit, 192.
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80. Rockel, Carriers of Culture, 117–30.
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87. Ibid., 7, 8.
88. Ibid., 8.
89. Ibid. See also NL Correck, diary entry May 3, 1906, BayHSta; and NL Georg von Prittwitz und Gaffron, diary entry August 6, 1898, Box 248, Folder 6/248, Leibniz Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, Germany.
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95. Zirkel, “Military Power in German Colonial Policy,” 97.
96. The best general synopsis of the Maji Maji War is John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge), 168–202. For the most recent scholarly treatments of the war, see the essays in Giblin, James and Monson, Jamie, eds., Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War (Leiden, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A useful contemporary account of the military campaign is Paasche, Hans, Im Morgenlicht: Kriegs-, Jagd-, und Reise-Erlebnisse in Ostafrika (Berlin, 1907)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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99. I discuss this topic in greater depth in “‘We don't want to die for nothing’: Askari at War in German East Africa, 1914–1918” in Race, Empire, and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge, 2011).
100. Marine-Oberingenieur Bockmann report, RM 8/368, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg, Germany pp. 152–64.
101. Ibid., p. 160, 163.
102. Space does not permit discussion of the porters as part of this military labor system under German rule. But see Glassman, Jonathon, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995)Google Scholar; Hodges, Geoffrey, The Carrier Corps: Military Labor in the East African Campaign, 1914–1918 (Westport, CT, 1986)Google Scholar; Page, Melvin, The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War (Boulder, CO, 2000), 107–14Google Scholar, passim; Rockel, Carriers of Culture; and Sunseri, Vilimani for their analyses of porter cultures and work ethics from the nineteenth century through the First World War. According to Page, British colonial labor demands on Malawians during World War One were so extreme that Malawians came to refer to the entire war as “the war of thangata,” or the war of “work which was done without real benefit.” See Page, The Chiwaya War, 5.
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104. Sunseri, Vilimani, 115–18.
105. Military post Tschiwitoke to military post Ishangi, May 8, 1904, R 1003 FC/1162, BA-B.