That damned, elusive Prussian

‘Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?’ was the indignant outcry of Captain Berndt, as he rowed alongside the Guendolen. Captaining the Guendolen was Berndt’s British friend and drinking partner Captain Rhoades, a man noted for his ‘Rabelaisian wit’ and ‘unprintable songs’, but who had just steamed up to the German end of Lake Nyasa and disabled Berndt’s ship the Hermann von Wissman with a single shot. Rhoades was not drunk. It was August 1914, and the Great War had just — unbeknownst to the unfortunate Captain Berndt — kicked off in Africa.

When we think of the first world war we tend to think of exhausted Tommies drowning in freezing mud in the fields of Flanders. We tend to think rather less of ragged South African troops and native askari starving, burning, succumbing to malaria and infestations of jiggers in their toenails, being taken by lions and crocs, drenched in tropical rain, marching hundreds of miles across the most hostile countryside imaginable. But that was happening too, and it’s Edward Paice’s project in this extraordinary, admirably researched history to rescue the African theatre of war from dismissal as a sideshow.

Not long after war started in Europe —an event conveyed to a British district commissioner in Northern Nyasaland in the coded message ‘Tipsified Pumgirdles Germany Novel’ — it became clear that there was no chance of the African colonies being left out of the fighting. The German light cruiser Königsberg slipped out of Dar-es-Salaam just in time to avoid confinement, and was later to become a colossal headache for the Royal Navy. German East Africa’s civilian governor, Heinrich Schnee, at least ostensibly working to maintain détente in Africa, found himself fast losing ground to the determined preparations for war of his military opposite number, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. If von Lettow-Vorbeck initially comes across as a sort of Prussian Dr Strangelove, it’s not long before we see him vindicated.