Askaris

Askari simply means “soldier” in Swahili and Arabic. It was the name colonial armies in eastern and central Africa gave their African rank and file, wherever they came from. In the First World War the word was associated above all with the soldiers of the German Schutztruppe, who made up the great majority of its army in the East African campaign.

Soldiers of the Schutztruppe

The Germans began recruiting askaris in 1889–1890 to put down a rising on the East African coast; the first came from Sudan, from Mozambique and from East Africa itself. They were well paid and given a privileged position among the conquered population. For a quarter of a century they conquered the colony and kept order in it, and during the Maji Maji rising of 1905–1908 their scorched-earth methods brought disaster on many communities. They served in field companies under white officers and NCOs, trained to operate in small units, quickly and independently. Each company had its own porters and doctors.

According to Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, at the outbreak of war the Schutztruppe numbered 216 Europeans and 2,540 askaris, and the police a further 2,154 askaris. By the end of 1915 it had about 3,000 Europeans and 11,300 askaris. At the Battle of Tanga in early November 1914 roughly a thousand of his men, most of them askaris, defeated an Indian corps many times their number, and an askari counter-attack turned the enemy’s retreat into a rout.

When the Allies occupied the north of the colony, volunteers ran out and the Schutztruppe began taking men by force. Thousands of askaris were killed, died, were captured or deserted, often to the British King’s African Rifles, where in April 1917 two battalions of the 6th Regiment were formed from former German askaris. In November Lettow-Vorbeck crossed the Rovuma with about 300 Europeans and 1,700 askaris. For a year in Mozambique his column, with women, children and forced porters, lived by plunder.

On 25 November 1918 the force laid down its arms at Abercorn. According to the South African official account it numbered 155 Europeans and 1,168 askaris, and more than one and a half thousand porters and several hundred African women went with it. The Allies held the askaris in prisoner-of-war camps, where many died of influenza, and then sent them home without the pay owed to them for years. The West German government granted it only in 1964, and more than 300 veterans came to Mwanza to collect it.

On the British side

The African soldiers of the King’s African Rifles were also called askaris. In 1914 the regiment had three battalions and 2,325 Africans, and by the end of 1918 22 battalions and 30,658 Africans. In 1917–1918 it bore the brunt of the fighting against Lettow-Vorbeck.

Porters and civilians

The porters paid the highest price, for in a country without roads or pack animals almost all supplies were carried on men’s heads. In 1919 Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the British had up to about 137,000 porters on strength at one time, and that by the end of October 1917, 28,830 of them from East Africa alone had died. Today’s estimates of porter deaths on the British side range from about 90,000 to 105,000, the figure given by Edward Paice. Civilian deaths, as both armies took food and men, are estimated at between several hundred thousand and a million.

After the war the myth of the “loyal askaris” grew up in Germany, and Lettow-Vorbeck cultivated it to support demands for the return of the colonies. Historians have shown that those who stayed with him to the end were mainly professional soldiers from before the war, for whom the Schutztruppe guaranteed their standing, and that the myth ignored the violence the askaris inflicted on the colony’s people.