On 20 November 2018, Nyakundi Report looks back at the opening of the East African Campaign and the human cost that followed across what is now Kenya and Tanzania. The war began in this theatre on 15 August 1914, when German Schutztruppe troops entered Taveta and met British East African Police Border Detachment fire.
The first shot in that encounter was fired by British District Commissioner Hugh La Fontaine, who hit German officer Friedrich Broecker through the open window of the police station. Broecker, described as La Fontaine’s drinking companion from the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, became the first German casualty of the campaign.
Britain had declared war on Germany 11 days earlier, making armed confrontation between colonial forces in British East Africa and German East Africa almost unavoidable. The fighting in Taveta effectively ended the neutrality principle set out in the 1885 Berlin Act, which had said colonies should remain neutral if war broke out in Europe.
What followed was 20 months of bush warfare that killed hundreds of thousands of people and disrupted millions more. The campaign is still often treated in the West as a minor sideshow to the fighting in Europe, but in East Africa it was a major and devastating conflict.
The burden of the war fell heavily on Africans and Indians. Of the 250,000 soldiers involved, most were Africans, mainly East Africans, or Indians. In addition, about four million Africans from British East Africa — roughly 25 per cent of the population at the time — were drawn into the war effort as porters, labourers and support workers. Around 100,000 of them died from illness, exhaustion or malnutrition while carrying out those duties.
To keep troops supplied with food, water and ammunition, the British administration created the Carrier Corps. Men were recruited from as far away as the Belgian Congo and Mozambique and forced to haul heavy loads over long distances across difficult terrain, with road and rail networks too limited to support the campaign.
The Germans, meanwhile, used the geography of the region to their advantage. Under Colonel Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the Schutztruppe relied on guerrilla tactics and repeatedly disrupted British supply lines, especially the Uganda Railway between Mombasa and Port Florence on Lake Victoria. For the first two years of the war, that strategy tied down British forces far from the Western Front.
Despite being cut off by a British naval blockade, the German side managed to survive on a largely agrarian economy. Lettow-Vorbeck also benefited from the discovery that Cinchona officinalis, the quinine-bearing tree, grew well in the Usambara Mountains. The anti-malarial extract made from it was nicknamed “von Lettow Schnapps” by German soldiers.
One of the most important German positions was the fort on Salaita Hill near Taveta, southeast of Mount Kilimanjaro. On 12 February 1916, British, Indian, Rhodesian and South African troops attacked the site and were repulsed by the Schutztruppe. The allies lost 172 soldiers, including 138 South Africans.
Heavy reinforcements later allowed the British to take the hill a month after that battle, shifting momentum in their favour. By then, Lettow-Vorbeck had already shown that a smaller force could keep a much larger enemy occupied in a costly campaign far from Europe.
More than a century later, Salaita Hill still carries traces of the fighting. Glass shards, bullet cases and the outline of the old defensive wall remain visible among the volcanic rock and weathered trenches.
Many East African Campaign battlefields now lie inside national parks or near quiet rural settlements, and most have not been formally preserved. They still hold scattered evidence of a war that has faded from wider memory.
Maktau, not far from Salaita Hill, was a key British base in the campaign. Today it sits beside the dry edge of Tsavo West National Park, but in 1915 it hosted more than 20,000 British troops, 15,000 porters and 100,000 horses and mules.
Little of that scale remains visible now. The railway buildings are weathered and dust-covered, and the old station stands beside a pink bougainvillea tree. Across the grass-covered tracks, a small cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission contains a stone plinth bearing the names of Indian soldiers killed during the campaign.
