And Home Was Kariakoo (5 page)

The Khoja Asians used to have guest houses in many of the towns in East Africa; I had stayed in them in Dar and in Mombasa. They were clean and cheap, though often rooms had to be shared, but among familiars you didn’t feel lonely in a strange town and there was plenty of free advice. I had been told there was a guest house in Moshi where I could spend the night, and also in Tanga, which was my destination. I got off at Moshi and took a taxi to the guest house, only to discover that due to the recent population depletions of Asians all over the country, it had been shut down. I had to look for another place to stay.

One of my fellow passengers was a young man called Pinto from Nairobi, a tour operator who had come from India only two years before. We found a hotel together and afterwards as we walked around were approached and befriended by a young Asian taxi driver called Dilip who took us to his home. The family was very modest, consisting of our friend, his young brother, and their parents. The father’s leg had been amputated after a car accident, and the older boy was the bread-earner. I wondered why they took us in—perhaps they expected taxi fares from us, perhaps they were simply lonely. Driving a taxi was not an Indian trade. Only later I concluded that they must be from one of the so-called lower castes, who had recently left their traditional occupations. When the old man lost his “company” job following his accident, he had to give up the flat that went with it, and the family was forced to spend six months in the temple. After dinner and listening to incessant complaints from the old man about the state of the country—the general neglect (the refrigeration at the morgue was broken, for one thing, and there was a stench in the town), the rising cost of living, the shortages—Pinto and I went back to our hotel, which was above a
noisy bar. It was the Hindu Navratri season, and during the night as the bar became quiet downstairs, I could hear strains of song from the temple.

Moshi, and its sister town Arusha, an hour away, always had an English-village feel to them, at least to those of us visiting from chaotic Dar. They were compact and neat, with tree-lined avenues and bungalows for houses; the weather was cool and the surrounding countryside lush and hilly. Moshi was the smaller town, with a set of streets named First Street, Second Street, and so on, giving it added distinction. But the wonderful thing about Moshi was Kilimanjaro, seen from the main street looming majestically over the town, the smooth, round, snowy peak clear in the pristine morning air, then gradually donning a veil of cloud as the day wore on. Elsewhere they talk incessantly about the weather, in Moshi they asked if there was a cloud cover yet on the mlima. This mighty mountain with its gentle contour remains the most awesome and yet heart-warming sight—even though I am not from the area—casting its benign gaze over the entire country. The story goes that originally—in the early days of colonization—it was part of British Kenya, but Queen Victoria presented it to her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (which had colonized Tanganyika) for his birthday, and the straight border between the two countries acquired its familiar bend in order to accommodate the change. At the nation’s independence, Brigadier Sarakikya of the Tanganyika Rifles planted the national flag on its peak, a momentous occasion symbolizing freedom, hope, ambition—an event that was commemorated on the highestdenomination postage stamp.

Our friend from the previous day, Dilip, took us around. There appeared to be a subculture of drifters and expats in Moshi—consisting of hotel managers, tour operators, and others—that he
took pleasure in showing off to us. The Asian section of town consisted of pleasant-looking, flat-roofed bungalows and townhouses built in the early 1960s. There was an older area that was eerily quiet, perhaps because there were no vendors or children in sight; the trees were ancient, and the bungalows staid, with high tiled or iron roofs. This would have been the old European area. Here we came upon a monument to “Hindu, Sikh, and Mohamedan” soldiers of the First World War. Close by, in a tidy compound enclosed by a white picket fence, was a rather extensive war cemetery where I walked around while the others waited with complete disinterest. The dead young men buried here wholesale in neat rows were all fully identified; many had been killed during the period March through May 1916. The cemetery was cared for by a British veterans’ organization.

Few people I met knew or cared that a protracted campaign of the First World War—which changed so much of the world—had been fought in this region, that their town in Africa reposing at the foot of Kilimanjaro had a fascinating, dramatic modern history that was connected to the larger events of the world; that that European war had also dramatically changed the course of their African nation.

When war was declared by the great powers of Europe on August 4, 1914, the two colonies, British East Africa (Kenya) and Deutsch-Ostafrika (Tanganyika), became willy-nilly a part of it. Far away from Europe in every conceivable way, the East African campaign would seem pointless, frivolous, and bizarre, a waste of resources and lives that could have no possible impact on the outcome of the actual war, which in the real theatre in Europe would end up consuming millions of lives. But the British Empire stretched across the globe, protected by its navy, and therefore every corner of it was potentially vulnerable and strategic. The war in East Africa was fought using
colonial proxies, Indians against Africans, and Africans against each other. There was a thriving Indian population in both the countries, but the Indian soldiers who fought on the British side were not local, they were shipped in from the Subcontinent.

Both colonies were recently acquired and settled. The dividing boundary had been drawn barely twenty years before. Kenya in 1914 had a mere 5,000 Europeans, of which 1,200 lived in Nairobi; the others, mostly farming families, were gathered in the lush highlands and the Rift Valley. There were 25,000 Indians. The Uganda Railway, completed in 1905, ran from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria—Mombasa to Nairobi and Kampala—following ancient caravan routes close to the border. Nairobi, founded as a way station and railway depot, had become the capital of Kenya, with a population of 20,000. In neighbouring Tanganyika there was a comparably small number of whites, concentrated in Dar es Salaam and Tanga on the coast, the highlands of the Kilimanjaro region in the north, and the Iringa region in the southern highlands. The Usambara Railway ran from Tanga up to Moshi, and like its Kenyan counterpart ran parallel and close to the border. Farther south, the much longer Central Line ran from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma on the other great lake, now called Lake Tanganyika. It was in this raw region, grabbed from its owners, and still unformed as colonies, that a two-year war took place.

Only days after the declaration of war, enthusiastic British settlers in Kenya, eager to fight for the motherland, had formed two ragtag volunteer corps, the East African Mounted Rifles and the East Africa Regiment. South of the border in Tanganyika, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a professional soldier who would go on to become a legend even to the British, began to gather settlers and recruit African askaris in preparation for engagement. Like sparks presaging
a forest fire, small units of armed men began darting across the border. These raids were indecisive, exploratory, and adventurous in nature, and more harassment than anything else. There were some notable engagements, however. On August 15 a German force of three hundred captured the strategic town of Taveta, twenty-five miles from Moshi, just inside the border in Kenya. This was a thorn in the British side, since from here the Germans could mount hit-and-run operations on the vital Uganda Railway. Farther east, on the coast, von Lettow-Vorbeck had his eyes on Mombasa. In late September, German askaris marched north along the coast and crossed the border but were beaten back.

Soon after, the British attempted two ambitious attacks on the German colony. In the first, in the Kilimanjaro area on November 3, 1914, an Anglo-Indian force of 1,500 men crossed the border and were soundly beaten by a German force half the size. In the second engagement, known forever as the infamous Battle of Tanga, a unit assembled as the Indian Expeditionary Force B, consisting of some 8,000 troops, arrived in a large convoy of ships to capture the port town of Tanga. They were humiliated by a much smaller but well-trained German-African force.

Finally in November 1915, worried by reports of these and other setbacks from the British colony, the Committee of Imperial Defence in London recommended that the conquest of German East Africa take place as soon as possible. This turned out to mean
immediately
, and the man picked to lead the invasion was Lieutenant-General Jan Smuts of South Africa, who arrived in Mombasa in February 1916. Smuts, a diminutive man, was of Afrikaaner background, therefore arguably an African. In the Boer War (1899–1902) he had commanded guerrilla raids against the British. He had tussled with Gandhi. He was as tough as von Lettow-Vorbeck.

Suddenly in early 1916 the quiet and arid border region between Kenya and Tanganyika, sparsely dotted with small villages, was overrun by thousands of soldiers speaking a dozen languages and from as many cultures: settlers wearing wide-rimmed sun hats, the British, South Africans, and Rhodesians in baggy khakis and helmets, Indians in a variety of turbans, smart African askaris in puttees and caps with a neck-flap. Armoured cars raced urgently on grass trails and new roads, vast tent villages sprang up, wildlife stayed away, and horses and pack animals raised the dust. Even today, this spectacle from the past makes you wonder. What would the natives in their rudimentary settlements—a few mud huts around a yard of packed red earth—someone at Mbuyuni, for instance, or Maktau—have made of this upheaval of their universe, this alien invasion that could as well have come from Mars? There are no accounts from their side, of course.

Smuts meant business. His plan was to attack the Kilimanjaro area from the west, throwing a full division at Namanga (where a present border post exists), and from the east along the Voi–Taveta axis, the two divisions later to join up. The British forces outnumbered Lettow-Vorbeck’s Feldkompanies by 18,400 to 6,000. A railway line had been extended from Voi to Maktau, more than halfway to the border, to transport the British troops. By March 5, British forces, including several mounted, infantry, and field artillery units, had amassed at Mbuyuni, some twenty miles east of Taveta, and Serengeti, a village farther up. On the evening of March 7 the South Africans marched down in two columns, and the next day had displaced German positions on the Chala Crater overlooking Taveta. On March 10, the 2nd South African Horse unit expelled the Germans out of Taveta, which they had occupied the previous year. Meanwhile, Salaita Hill, just outside Taveta, where the Germans had twice rebuffed the
British, had been occupied unopposed by other units on March 9.

The Germans retreated towards Moshi, making British advance as difficult as possible. Early on March 14 the South Africans under Major van Deventer reached Moshi. At about the same time the 1st Division, arriving from the west, established contact. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops retreated east, along the railway. Smuts pursued. But, as the official history of the East Africa Operations states, “Although the Germans had fallen back, they had not been effectively brought to battle, much less suffered tactical defeat.” Engage-and-retreat was in fact the tactic adopted by von Lettow-Vorbeck against the superior enemy forces, in a protracted guerrilla war across the country, north to south. There is some irony in the fact that the pursuing Smuts had himself used similar tactics against the British in the Boer War not long ago in South Africa.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck was never defeated and became a military hero and a man of legend.

The English poet and novelist Francis Brett Young was thirty-one when he accompanied Smuts’s invasion as a member of the medical corps and gives a wonderfully impressionistic account of that experience in his book
Marching on Tanga
. In novelistic fashion he begins,

The title of the book is somewhat misleading: the troops did not go to Tanga but, always in pursuit of the retreating Germans, marched eastwards along the railway for some distance, and then turned south. Falling sick near Handeni, Brett Young appears to have been sent back to England after a period of recuperation near Nairobi, where he completed his book in 1916. The manuscript was censored, which is perhaps why it is at times vague and short on graphic detail. But it has passages of beauty, and the whole East African experience seems to have come upon him like a dream. He ends,

Since the “British” soldiers (including the South Africans and Rhodesians) were all accounted for, one assumes that it was the dead Indians and Africans who were buried on the road, the former to be remembered anonymously in that memorial in Moshi, the latter by the Askari Monument in the centre of Dar es Salaam. Brett Young
went on to have a prolific career, publishing numerous books, some of which were best-sellers. His favourite novel, however, according to the Francis Brett Young Society, was
Jim Redlake
, now out of print, which uses some of the censored portions of
Marching on Tanga
.