Porters in East Africa during World War I.
The porters in East Africa during the First World War made it possible for them to conduct war with European methods. In order to supply around 130,000 soldiers on the British and Belgian side, well over a million porters were necessary. The history of the carriers on the German and Portuguese sides has hardly been researched.
Geographical and cultural requirements
In most parts of the world - with the exception of the mountains - at the beginning of the 20th century, loads were transported with the help of carriers, draft animals or on water. In East Africa, on the other hand, there is a lack of navigable rivers, and the tsetse fly as a carrier of the Nagana prevented the use of horses, donkeys, mules, oxen and camels up to an altitude of more than 1000 meters above sea level . In almost all African societies, carrying loads was considered women's work; even in traditional armed conflicts, women carried the weapons and food to the scene of action. This division of roles changed at the beginning of the 19th century. Long-distance trade, established by Arab and Swahili caravans from the coast, was carried out with the help of male porters. Until the Uganda Railway reached Kisumu on Lake Victoria in 1901, the Mombasa - Uganda route was also served by porters under British rule . Europeans continued to rely on porters for their expeditions, safaris and military operations - such as the Nandi campaign of 1894. When the war broke out in 1914, wearing was firmly established as a men's job. Mostly it had the character of forced labor, but in some cases it was also seen by young men as an opportunity to escape the tight conditions of a tribal society and to earn money.
Technique of wearing
Usually in almost all of Africa loads are carried on the head, but in mountainous areas - such as in Kikuyuland - the browband was (and is) common. Carrying 70 to 80 pounds (one pound = 454 grams) on your head can still be learned in adulthood. Carrying loads with a browband, on the other hand, has to be practiced since early youth, because only certain muscles in the neck area develop strongly. Europeans mostly used the less efficient method of carrying loads with shoulder straps, even if the backpack was occasionally held in place with an additional forehead strap.
Officially the load capacity was 50 pounds. In addition, there were personal belongings such as the blanket, the food bag, a machete or a saucepan. Since a porter needed two pounds of food a day, he ate his own payload in 25 days. The dilemma becomes clear in a song: “We are the porters, who carry the food for the porters, who carry the food for the porters, etc.” Under good conditions, a porter could travel twelve miles a day, with an average of 180 on a supply line Miles long and covered in 15 days. European officers were allowed to carry personal luggage of 40 pounds, NCOs 25 pounds. In order to transport even a ton over a distance of 150 miles, 750 porters were necessary, provided they were supplied on the way; 1800 porters in case they had to carry their own rations with them. In the second case, the effort increased exponentially with distance.
When fighting broke out, the porters were burdened on the way back because they had to carry the wounded back. In 1916, the convoy system was replaced by a depot system in which a depot was set up for the porters every twelve miles, where they were provided with provisions. The loads were handed over to the next group halfway between the depots. With this system, digestive diseases were greatly reduced because the food was now adequately cooked.
However, the term “carrier” does not adequately reflect the activity. "Porters" also dug trenches , built roads, repaired railway lines and maintained telegraph lines. Among them were translators, armed scouts, military policemen , agents, dock workers, technicians and animal drivers. Others served as cooks or servants.
Situation at the beginning of the First World War
Even before the war broke out, porters had occasionally suffered terrifying death rates, mostly from digestive diseases, an unfamiliar diet or poor sanitary conditions. In 1913 the poor conditions were discussed in a report by the Labor Commission . And although British plans included an attack on the colony of German East Africa when war broke out, when the war began in 1914 there were still no standards for nutrition and medical care for porters.
The government of India was responsible for the defense of the British territories in East Africa . It initially assumed a short campaign that would not require more than 20,000 to 30,000 carriers. Serious planning errors resulted from their ignorance of the site. In India, for example, it was apparently not known that any military operation was dependent on human carriers because of the tsetse fly . In some cases, attempts were made to use oxen or mules, but they perished before reaching their destination. Even the use of trucks, where there were passable roads at all, did not prove successful because they needed a large part of the payload for their own fuel.
Soldiers were sent to East Africa from India who proved inferior to the locals. They required four times as much luggage as a local soldier, required a special diet and had to be transported to the theater of war. From bad experiences on various occasions - outbreak of an epidemic during the Nandi campaign in 1895; Mutiny by Sudanese troops in Uganda in 1897; In 1899 a mass death among porters in a military caravan coming from Uganda - nothing had been learned. The attempt to conquer Tanga at the beginning of the war therefore failed.
When at the beginning of the First World War 1000 girders were to be dug under the Giriama on the coast, a revolt broke out. On August 17, 1914, they attacked the deputy district commissioner and killed a police officer. In September, a punitive expedition suppressed the revolt and the district was placed under martial law. As a result, around 400 Giriama were killed, hundreds of farms burned down and thousands of goats confiscated. To make peace, the Giriama had to surrender their leaders, provide 1,000 recruits for porter service and pay a fine of around £ 7,500 in kind.
Armed forces
British and Belgians
The British armed forces comprised around 120,000 soldiers, who - in that order - came from East or West Africa, India, South Africa, Rhodesia, Great Britain and the West Indies. The African soldiers belonged to the King's African Rifles , the West African Frontier Force or the Arab Rifles . Each soldier needed the support of ten porters, so that the British armed forces in the East African theater of war must have comprised a total of over a million men. On the other hand, the carrying work was mostly temporary or seasonal work. Many porters worked near their homeland and had only signed up for a specific military campaign for a few months. However, other porters served for two years and many hundreds of kilometers from home. The Carrier Corps was roughly twice the size of all the other military units combined.
In addition, the British provided nearly 130,000 porters to the Belgians , who intervened from the Congo with almost 10,000 African soldiers. Some of these men were organized in the Belgian Congo Carrier Corps - called Carbels - even though they actually came from Uganda. An unusually high number of porters who worked for the Belgians died compared to British units. In addition, it was customary among the Carbels for the soldiers' wives to go along with them, which was considered necessary to maintain morale. Some of the men did not see their homeland for over three years and were on the verge of mutiny. Uganda provided a total of 10,000 soldiers and 50,000 porters for British units. Around 250,000 porters came from Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia - on the southern front to German East Africa. Military operations began here in May 1916; the supply lines were sometimes extremely long. In Nyasaland the porter work was called thangata , which means something like “work without wages” and had previously been the usual word for forced labor. The use of carriers for deception maneuvers in which the carriers had to simulate the presence of combat troops was not authorized, but was nevertheless practiced several times.
Overall, the African soldiers and porters of the British armed forces came from an area that is now covered by fifteen African states. The four most important were:
| soldiers | carrier | |
|---|---|---|
| German East Africa | 2,000 | 321,567 |
| Nyasaland | 15,000 | 196.914 |
| Protectorate of East Africa | 10,500 | 173,539 |
| Uganda | 10,000 | 182.246 |
| Sum over all areas | 58,000 | over one million |
Many of the porters from German East Africa were originally recruited by the Germans or forced into porter service and then taken over by the British. In many cases, they were only active for a short time, while the porters from the British Protectorate of East Africa often served two years or more.
German
Only two railway lines ran through German East Africa , the Usambara Railway in the north and the Mittelland or Tanganyika Railway in the center of the colony. With the German withdrawal to the south, the importance of the porters for the East African protection force increased significantly. This was all the more true because the German side had hardly any motorized vehicles available, for which fuel was running low at the end of 1916. The historian Horst Gründer estimates that around 12,000 porters were in use in the rivers mouth of the Rufiji River alone . While there were about ten porters per soldier on the enemy side, there were generally fewer on the German side. The command of the Schutztruppe issued an order that a European was not allowed to carry more than 100 kilograms of carrier load on the march. Since a carrier load averaged around 25 kilograms, a German carried up to four carriers. This number later dropped to three or two due to a lack of porters. In addition, however, there were carriers for the ambulance, for the entourage , for staff or administrative offices and the like. A German field hospital disposal about 240 support, a battalion rod load 80 and a armory 25 carrier. According to the reports of the German contemporary witness and government doctor Ludwig Deppe , numerous porters suffered from ulcers and inflammation , especially in swamp areas . On the German side, around 7,000 porters died on the front lines. The losses in the stage and on the march were much higher. So Deppe wrote:
“If many porters now run away to return to their homeland, we must not forget that, under the pressure of the enemy, we often had to ruthlessly bring the porters together wherever we found them. Hundreds, even thousands, remained lying on the road or died under the strain or otherwise as victims of war. "
On the German side, however, the carrier was not the same as the carrier. The company carriers were integrated into the military organization, took over watch and reconnaissance and could become askari in the course of the war. They received pay and basic medical care. The landscape porters , who were forcibly recruited along the route, fared differently . Most of the time, they were considered unreliable and interchangeable by the German military. They were therefore under strict guard, were hardly taken care of and emaciated without hesitation.
Organization of the British carrier corps
Only a few members of the Carrier Corps wore a military uniform. They mostly went barefoot, were led by officers and, towards the end of the war, had the same right to rations as the fighting troops. The special porters who carried machine guns, signaling equipment, stretchers for the medical service, mine throwers or ammunition had a special status .
The carrier corps was initially set up under the name East Africa Carrier Corps with base in Nairobi . At the end of 1914, the Protectorate of East Africa (now Kenya ) and Uganda had separate transport corps. All non-combatants were placed under the Military Labor Bureau in February 1916 before the great offensive by Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts . The name belies the fact that almost all of the members were on active duty. The Bureau was responsible for the entire northern front, with the exception of the porters who worked for the Belgians or on the railways. Porter service on the fronts in Nyasaland or Northern Rhodesia, on the other hand, was organized on an ad hoc basis. In March 1918, the Military Labor Bureau finally took over the porters in the south. In the final stages of the war it was renamed the Military Labor Corps .
The carrier corps was headed by a District Commissioner named Oscar Ferris Watkins , who had already served in the Boer War . He had come to East Africa in 1908. In August 1914 he organized the first porters for the so-called B-armed forces, which were supposed to arrive from India. The porters were divided into five corps of 1,000 men, and Watkins was given the rank of captain. In addition, army officers also recruited porters on their own initiative, which ended in administrative chaos. With the establishment of the Military Labor Bureau Watkins received the rank of lieutenant colonel, which provided him with inadequate authority over other army officers, although he led by far the largest unit of the British. Internal disputes because of the poor treatment of the porters by the fighting troops were the rule. After all, it had since been made clear that porters were only provided by the Military Labor Bureau .
Watkins established a system in 1917 that identified wearers by their fingerprint and a metal badge. The possibilities for abuse by the overseers of the so-called gangs were thereby severely restricted. Previously, deaths or desertions had often not been reported by the guards in order to collect wages for the missing people. Another problem for the porters was that they were only paid at the end of their service period after several months. When it came to a dispute over incorrectly kept files, they could lose significant amounts. The central registers were kept in the porters' depot in Nairobi. In 1916 Watkins moved with the headquarters of the East African armed forces to Dar es Salaam ; however, the administrative center remained in Nairobi. Only porters who came from the former German East Africa were registered in Dar es Salaam.
At the beginning of the war, the pre-war system prevailed, according to which wearing was partly forced labor and partly voluntary. In 1915, the Native Followers Recruitment Ordinance introduced general conscription, which also applied to Europeans and Asians. At the end of 1916, British movements were seriously hampered by a lack of transport capacity when, of the approximately 150,000 porters recruited, only 62,334 were effectively left. The Chief Native Commissioner of the Protectorate of East Africa, John Ainsworth , has been tasked with directing a special mass levy of men. It ran from March to August 1917 when it was finally canceled due to the apparent shortage of people and because the military demand waned. Of the planned 160,000 girders, only 120,000 had been excavated. Porter recruitment reverted to the pre-war system.
The needs of the military competed with those of the plantation owners, with the need for labor for infrastructure work, for the railroad and in the ports. On the other hand, many Africans fled the military porter service to the farms, so that the supply of labor there sometimes even increased. Before the introduction of general conscription, the military authorities sometimes offered a wage that was well above the usual four to five rupees plus food with corn porridge for unskilled workers. The settlers finally enforced that the military did not pay more than five rupees a month for simple porter service (six rupees from the fourth month). Overseers earned twelve rupees , special porters 15 rupees and wore uniform-like clothing.
In some cases, the threat of reporting someone to the military authorities after the introduction of general conscription was also used by farmers as a means of exerting pressure to make workers compliant. The British ruled through the collaboration of chiefs, elders and overseers who provided labor, collected taxes, and kept British rulers informed politically. Veterans report that each family had to hand over a young man as a slave laborer, who in some cases was tied together with a rope that was pulled through a hole in the earlobe. Particularly zealous chiefs were awarded medals. Desertions were common, and entire village communities fled into the bush when an officer approached. Occasionally, the British also recruited through deception, for example when they arrested everyone present on a major court day and took away those who were fit for work. British missionaries also campaigned for the war effort and in some cases led their own carrier associations, such as the Kikuyu Mission Volunteers or the Bishop of Zanzibar's Carrier Corps .
The porters were subject to military law, which gave a commanding officer the right to a maximum of 24 lashes, 42 days in prison with or without forced labor and 21 days for loss of pay. In individual incidents, porters were so cruelly mistreated by white NCOs that they subsequently had to be treated in a hospital. The original plan was to give porters leave, which was eventually abandoned after many porters failed to return to service.
Nutrition and medical care
For a long time, the British military leadership did not want to take into account that members of different ethnic groups had different eating habits. Members of the Ganda and other ethnic groups who lived north of Lake Victoria mainly ate plantains . Unless the switch to a cereal diet was made very carefully, they reacted with diarrhea, which could be fatal. But even among porters used to grain, diarrhea epidemics occurred time and again , which led to lengthy disputes about the quality of maize or millet, which is still little known in many places. There were also beans, while far too few vegetables were usually consumed. A typical ration at the beginning of the war consisted of a pound and a half of flour, eight ounces of beans and vegetables, half a pound of meat (or beans as a substitute), and half an ounce of salt. The flour was often spoiled, especially since it was initially transported in sacks that were not waterproof. Cornmeal was later imported from South Africa, but it had to be cooked for a long time. Most recently, most of the porters ate rice brought in from India. European soldiers were fed canned beef and rusks in the field.
On some stretches the water was scarce, and because porters had to stand back from combat troops and the occasional draft animals, some porters also died of thirst. Various orders prohibited moving the porters unnecessarily during the greatest heat of the day. Due to lack of water, some routes were also covered at night, which is particularly difficult in the African bush.
Initially, the military leadership believed that porters should be deployed far away from their homeland in order to reduce the risk of desertions. However, this created new problems when, as in the spring of 1915, highland carriers were used to build roads near the coast, which was infested with malaria . Because they were not immune to malaria, the death rate was immense, so that the porters had to be replaced by the coastal population in August 1915. Conversely, many carriers from the lowlands in the highlands suffered from pneumonia . The predominant disease, however, was dysentery , which caused more than half of all illnesses and more than a third of all deaths in the hospitals. From June 1917 convalescent camps were set up in Mombasa, Voi, Nairobi and Kisumu. The Spanish flu pandemic broke out towards the end of the conflict .
Losses and political consequences
War Secretary Lord Kitchener had thought it a mistake at the beginning of World War I to wage war in East Africa at all. He wanted to be content with occupying the area around Kilimanjaro and the ports. In retrospect, the immense forces that were tied up in the hunt for the German protection force prove him right.
According to official information, the number of people who died in the porter service is said to have been 23,869, which triggered sarcastic comments when it was published. Norman Leys, a medical officer for the Protectorate of East Africa, cited figures given by a US delegate at the peace conference in Paris. Accordingly, of the 350,000 recruited porters, 42,318 died, including 41,952 from diseases and 366 from wounds. According to historian Geoffrey Hodges, the loss rate among porters deployed to the front was over 20 percent (missing and dead). He estimates that the average death rate was about ten percent, that is, of the more than one million porters he estimates, over 100,000 died in the military. This figure does not include deaths during repatriation, in the Belgian or Portuguese armed forces.
Upon return, some porters found that their land had been divided because they were believed dead. Because the fields had been neglected in the home areas, there was a famine in 1918. Contact with members of foreign tribes was new to many Africans. In the porter service, the members of a tribe mostly stayed among themselves, but many of them learned the lingua franca, Swahili, and thus expanded their knowledge of the world. For the first time they had seen whites fighting one another. Historians Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. and John Nottingham have pointed out that numerous future Kikuyu political leaders served in porter service during World War I.
The colonial government was prepared to pay “blood money” to relatives for a porter who had died in the service, but only if the deceased was a Christian or Muslim. No payments were made to the relatives of "Heiden". In 1918, the Legislative Council of the Protectorate passed an ordinance that unpaid funds should go to the tribes. The War and Treasury Offices refused to countersign this ordinance, which led to a storm of protest in Kenya (as the colony was now called). In 1922, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill finally decided that the now outstanding sum of 165,123 British pounds would not be paid out (benefits were still made to the relatives of porters or soldiers whose death had been proven). It was not until 1934 that Kenya received a special payment of £ 50,000 to settle the claims. Remaining from the East African War Relief Fund also was Alliance High School , one of the most famous schools in English-speaking Africa, was founded.
Porter service was also the start of personal registration in Kenya. With the Native Registration Ordinance , a metal badge was introduced in 1916 and confirmed in 1919. This turned into a small tin box that every African had to wear on a chain around their necks. It contained an identity paper with a fingerprint and proof of employment. This hated kipande system became one of the most important points of contention in political disputes with the colonial rulers.
Commemoration
At the end of the First World War, the carrier corps - unlike the King's African Rifles - was dissolved. The official works on war history concentrate on the military events and hardly mention the work of the porters. However, the people involved were aware of the importance of the porters. John Ainsworth, for example, the administrator of the Protectorate of East Africa, called the war a “war of the porters”. When a Military Labor Corps and a Pioneer Corps were re-established during World War II , there were no more evictions, and the porters received the same rations and pay as white soldiers. The men who were deployed in the Middle East, for example, also had the option of sending money home.
In principle, no medals of bravery were awarded to East African porters. On Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi there is a war memorial on which three figures depict a porter, a King's African Rifleman and an Arab Rifleman . The Kariakor market in Nairobi (from English Carrier Corps ) is located at the location of the first carrier depot. There is also a Kariakor in Mombasa and in Dar es Salaam , where a large depot was established after the conquest in 1916, it is called Kariakoo . In some parts of East Africa the age group who had to perform porter service was called Kaaria .
In South Africa the “ Comrades ” ultra marathon is a national event every year. It runs for around 87 kilometers and was founded by Vic Clapham, who as a soldier in East Africa had to cover 2,700 kilometers on foot in the First World War. With the ultra marathon he wanted to remember the hardships.
Research gaps
The history of the British carrier corps has been researched by Geoffrey Hodges, who died in 1994. He notes as a research gap that the statistics for the military railroad workers have not survived. From November 25, 1917, the theater of war shifted to Portuguese territory in Portuguese East Africa for almost a year. The Germans used some of the Askaris captured there as porters, but the history of the Portuguese porters is just as poorly researched as that of the porters for the German protection force. However, their number is far below that of the porters mobilized by the British. The traumatic consequences that the loss of numerous young men must have had on East African societies have also been poorly researched.
literature
- Geoffrey Hodges: Kariakor The Carrier Corps: The Story of the Military Labor Forces in the Conquest of German East Africa, 1914 to 1918 . Roy Griffin (Ed.). Nairobi University Press, Nairobi 1999. ISBN 9966-846-44-1 .
- Elspeth Huxley: Red Strangers . Penguin, London 2006. ISBN 978-0-141-18850-8 . (contains a literary description of the agency's work based on our own field research)
- Donald C. Savage and J. Forbes Munro: Carrier Corps Recruitment in the British East Africa Protectorate 1914-1918 . In: The Journal of African History . Vol. 7, No. 2, 1966, pp. 313-342.
- Elizabeth Watkins: Oscar From Africa: The Biography of OF Watkins . Radcliffe Press, London and New York 1995. ISBN 1-85043-948-6 . (Biography of the Commander of the Carrier Corps written by his daughter)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Unless otherwise stated, the presentation follows Geoffrey Hodges: Kariakor The Carrier Corps: The Story of the Military Labor Forces in the Conquest of German East Africa, 1914 to 1918 . Roy Griffin (Ed.). Nairobi University Press, Nairobi 1999. ISBN 9966-846-44-1 .
- ^ Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. and John Nottingham: The Myth of 'Mau Mau' Nationalism in Kenya . East African Publishing House, Nairobi 1966, p. 12.
- ↑ Gisela Graichen and Horst Founders: German Colonies - Dream and Trauma . Ullstein, Berlin 2005, p. 358, ISBN 3-550-07637-1
- ↑ Ludwig Deppe: With Lettow-Vorbeck through Africa . Verlag August Scherl, Berlin 1921, pp. 60ff.
- ↑ Gisela Graichen and Horst Founders: German Colonies - Dream and Trauma . Ullstein, Berlin 2005, p. 359, ISBN 3-550-07637-1 .
- ↑ Quoted from Gisela Graichen and Horst founder: German colonies - dream and trauma . Ullstein, Berlin 2005, p. 359, ISBN 3-550-07637-1 .
- ↑ Michael Pesek: The end of a colonial empire - East Africa in the First World War. Campus, Frankfurt a. M./New York 2010, pp. 161 ff., ISBN 978-3-593-39184-7 .
- ↑ Here, Hodges, p. 104, makes contradicting statements, according to which responsibility for Nyasaland was transferred to the bureau in August 1917 .
- ^ Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. and John Nottingham: The Myth of 'Mau Mau' Nationalism in Kenya . East African Publishing House, Nairobi 1966, p. 31.
- ^ Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. and John Nottingham: The Myth of 'Mau Mau' Nationalism in Kenya . East African Publishing House, Nairobi 1966, p. 30.
- ↑ Geoffrey Hodges: Kariakor The Carrier Corps: The Story of the Military Labor Forces in the Conquest of German East Africa, 1914 to 1918 . Roy Griffin (Ed.). Nairobi University Press, Nairobi 1999, pp. 19 and 21.
- ^ Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. and John Nottingham: The Myth of 'Mau Mau' Nationalism in Kenya . East African Publishing House, Nairobi 1966, p. 31f.
- ↑ Harry Thuku: An Autobiography . Oxford University Press, Nairobi 1970, p. 19.