The Maji Maji Rebellion

                                      The Maji Maji Rebellion

Post-Rebellion Conditions

In late July 1905, The Matumbi people decided to declare war on the Germans by destroying a symbol of their oppression under German rule, the cotton plant.  Armed with spears and arrows, on the 31st of July, 1905, Matumbi tribesmen marched on Samanga destroying the cotton crop and a trading post.  In the aftermath of the attack, on August 4th, Kinjikitle was hung for treason.  However, prior to his death Kinjikitle declared that the key to Tanganyika victory, the medicine that promised to turn German bullets into water, had spread as far as Kilosa and Mahenge. After his death, on the 14th of August 1905, tribesmen attacked a small party of missionaries on a safari, spearing the missionaries to death. One of the men killed was Catholic Bishop Caspian Spiss. The next day, one hundred miles away, rebels captured a German post at Liwale. As Kinjikitle had promised before his death, news of and support for the rebellion spread across the territory. Rebels came together despite differences in culture and language to oppose German colonialism. Throughout August the rebels attacked German garrisons throughout the colony, however they were unsuccessful in causing a large number of fatalities.  

The common thread in many of the revolts, was the role of the maji; Kinjikitle’s medicine that promised to turn German bullets to water.  This medicine was put to the test on August 25th, when several thousand warriors marched on the German cantonment at Mahenge, which was defended by Lieutenant von Hassel.  The two attacking tribes disagreed on when to attack, and this resulted in native casualties as the first attack was met with gunfire.  Furthermore, the killing of individuals in possession of the maji began to influence the masses that the maji was not able to protect them, as it was promised to do. 

In October, the German government sent 1,000 soldiers to the territory to quell the rebellion.  Bound for the Ngoni camp, the troops were to be utilized in the South to reinstate the German power structure.  Heavily armed, the German soldiers purposefully eradicated the rebels food sources, so as to weaken their men.  While not an initial tactic,  the famine following the Maji Maji Rebellion was orchestrated deliberately by German forces.  “In my view”, Wangenheim reported on 22 October, “only hunger and want can bring about final submission. Military actions alone will remain more or less a drop in the ocean.”  Fighting finally subsided two years later in 1907, when German soldiers suppressed the last of the Maji Maji rebellion.  While the death toll is a tangible expression of the loss suffered, the broken spirit of the natives was unquantifiable.  Due to no fault of their own, the people of Tanganyika, fell victim to modern weaponry and the sheer numbers of the German forces.      

Post-Rebellion Conditions

The areas affected by the Maji Maji Rebellion were utterly destroyed in the aftermath of the war.Southern Usagara was described as wholly unpopulated.  Uvidunda lost half of its total population.  A missionary estimated that over three-quarters of the Pwanga died in the war. The total amount of African revolutionary deaths was ambiguous in the aftermath of the war.  Anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 Africans, or about one third of the area’s total population, perished throughout the course of the war.

        This sad reality can be attributed to the fact that the German military’s institutional preference was to win the war with “total, unlimited force.”  The German military’s tendency to “gravitate towards final solutions,” rather than continue with lesser, more diplomatic operations was firmly ingrained in the psyche of the military’s hierarchy.This meant that the rather than deal with the rebellion in a peaceful and diplomatic way, the Germans preferred the destruction of their African territory. The harmful racist ideologies that the Germans, and other European colonizers, possessed were more of a result of imperialism than a cause of it.  The heinous and brutal imperial practices that the Germans undertook to exploit resources from German East Africa developed the racist ideologies that justified the German Reich’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Africans, along with the post-war exploitation of the war’s survivors.  This was the root of the German troops’ “spiral of revenge” that they practiced during imperial rule. Three factors encouraged this spiral of revenge: 1.) the difficulty and frustrations of colonial warfare made worse by structural deficits in planning and administration, 2.) the enemy’s strange or “exotic” fighting practices, and 3.) the difficulties distinguishing civilians from warriors in guerilla wars.

        Along with that, there were no outside factors at the time to stop German atrocities on the rebelling regions of German East Africa during and after the war.  International law was widely thought of as inapplicable to a group of people that the western world believed were “expendable.” Additionally, observers who did not hold these imperialistic, racist notions were largely absent, and, as a result, could not check the unrestrained violence the Germans committed on the Africans they subjugated prior to and in the aftermath of the Maji Maji Rebellion.

        This culminated in not only the absolute wipeout of certain parts of the rebellion, but also continued imperialist racism in the years after the war. The atrocities committed by the Germans would continue well into the 20th century.

        A famine swept across the Tanganyikan lands, proving the most costly in Ungoni and highland areas.  This famine was spurred on through institutional racism spearheaded by unremorseful officers of the German Army. For instance, Captain Richter, who administered Songea in the aftermath of the rebellion, who “prevented cultivation and appropriated all food for his troops” was quoted saying: “The fellows can just starve.”  This, too, was the result of imperialistic notions of African inferiority.

        After the war, local power was primarily bestowed upon those loyal to the Germans during the rebellion. Kalimoto, prior the war an irrelevant sub-chief who, during the war, betrayed the Mbunga rebellion, became a leading chief of Umbunga and married the sister of Mlolere, the leading the most prominent Pogoro loyalist.   The Hehe, loyal to the Germans, regained control of Usagara and parts of the Usangu and the Ulanga Valley.

        Most tragically, the survivors saw their old lands overtaken by forest and wildlife. Elephants entered Matumbi for the first time in living memory.These wild animals brought disease with them, contributing, along with famine, to many deaths. In Ungindo, the British came to create the largest game park in the world.  Not only did the people of southern Tanganyika lose their battle to regain independence, but they lost their long, millennia old battle with nature in the process.

                                      REFERENCE

 Iliffe, John. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print.
 Gellately, Robert, and Ben Kiernan. The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.
 Gwassa, G. C. K., G. C. K. Gwassa, and John Iliffe. Records of the Maji Maji Rising: Part One. Nairobi: East African House, 1968. Print.
 Iliffe, John. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print.