African theatre of World War I
The African theatre of the First World War comprises campaigns in North Africa instigated by the German and Ottoman empires, local rebellions against European colonial rule and Allied campaigns against the German colonies of Kamerun, Togoland, German South West Africa, and German East Africa. The campaigns were fought by German Schutztruppe, local resistance movements and forces of the British Empire, France, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal.[e]
For the conflict also known as "Africa's First World War", see First Congo War.Background[edit]
Strategic context[edit]
German colonies in Africa had been acquired in the 1880s and were not well defended. They were enclosed by territories controlled by Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal.[4] Colonial military forces in Africa were relatively small, poorly equipped and had been created to maintain internal order, rather than conduct military operations against other colonial forces. The Berlin Conference of 1884 had provided for European colonies in Africa to be neutral if war broke out in Europe; in 1914 none of the European powers had plans to challenge their opponents for control of overseas colonies. When news of the outbreak of war reached European colonialists in Africa, it was met by little of the enthusiasm seen in the capital cities of the states which maintained colonies.[5] An editorial in the East African Standard on 22 August argued that Europeans in Africa should not fight each other but instead collaborate to maintain the repression of the indigenous population. War was against the interest of the white colonialists because they were small in number, many of the European conquests were recent, unstable and operated through existing local structures of power; the organisation of African economic potential for European profit had only recently begun.[5][f]
In Britain, an Offensive sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence was appointed on 5 August and established a principle that command of the seas was to be ensured and that objectives were considered only if they could be attained with local forces and if the objective assisted the priority of maintaining British sea communications, as British Army garrisons abroad were returned to Europe in an "Imperial Concentration". Attacks on German coaling stations and wireless stations were considered to be important to clear the seas of Imperial German Navy commerce raiders. The objectives were at Luderitz Bay, Windhoek, Duala and Dar-es-Salaam in Africa and a German wireless station in Togoland, next to the British colony of Gold Coast in the Gulf of Guinea, which were considered vulnerable to attack by local or allied forces and in the Far East, which led to the Siege of Tsingtao.[6]
Aftermath[edit]
Analysis[edit]
The war marked the end of the German colonial empire; during the war, the Entente powers posed as crusaders for liberalism and enlightenment but little evidence exists that they were seen as such by Africans. Many African soldiers fought on both sides, loyal to military professionalism, rather than nationalism and porters had mainly been attracted by pay or had been coerced. The war had been the final period of the Scramble for Africa; control and annexation of territory had been the principal war aim of the Europeans and the main achievement of Lettow-Vorbeck, had been to thwart some of the ambitions of the South African colonialists.[112] Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany's colonies were divided between France, Britain, Belgium, Portugal and South Africa. The former German colonies had gained independence by the 1960s except for South West Africa (Namibia) which gained independence from South Africa in 1990.[113]