East Africa: Tribal and Imperial Armies in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar, 1800 to 1900

423 Pages·2004·8.23 MB·English

by  Chris Peers

Series Editor: Ian Heath
First published in Great Britain in 2003
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Text copyright © 2003 by Chris Peers
Drawings copyright © 2003 by Ian Heath
The right of Chris Peers to be identified as the author
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ISBN 1901543-35-8
ISBN 978-1-90154335-3
Print ISBN: 9781901543094
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Other books by the same author:
Ancient Chinese Armies 1500-200 BC (Osprey 1990)
Medieval Chinese Armies 1260-1520 AD (Osprey 1992)
Imperial Chinese Armies 200 BC-589 AD (Osprey 1995)
Imperial Chinese Armies 590-1260 AD (Osprey 1996)
Late Imperial Chinese Armies 1520-1842 AD (Osprey 1997)
Warlords of China 700 BC-1662 AD (Arms and Armour Press 1998)
PREFACE

This book is unusual in approaching the era of exploration in East Africa as a
military subject, covering both the native peoples and their Arab and European
invaders in terms of their military organisation, battles and campaigns, and the
tactics and equipment of their fighting men. It is one of a series which will
eventually cover the entire continent. The area covered in this volume
comprises, roughly, the present-day countries of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
However, the territories of the Somalis and Gallas, comprising the part of Kenya
lying north-east of the Tana River, have been left for a future volume on the
Horn of Africa, while the peoples of the Equatoria Province of Sudan, whose
history is much more closely involved with Uganda than with the Arab lands to
the north, are included here.
Africa was unique as a theatre of operations in several ways. The most
obvious was the fact that in the 19th century — 400 years after its shores had
first been circumnavigated — it still needed to be explored at all. Most of the
coastal regions of tropical Africa were either arid and uninviting, or occupied by
powerful native or Arab merchant states which actively discouraged outsiders
from penetrating inland. Many parts of the world, such as Siberia and South
America, had been opened up along their rivers, but in Africa virtually every
river was blocked by huge rapids which made it impossible for boats to navigate
them. And most significant of all, the continent was infested with a host of
diseases which had earned the swampy coastal regions in particular the title of
‘the white man’s grave’. Malaria and other insect-borne fevers were especially
deadly to Europeans before the widespread adoption of quinine from the 1830s
onwards, and had caused the destruction of numerous expeditions. The situation
gradually improved during the remainder of the century as more effective
remedies were adopted, but disease continued to be a far more important cause
of death among both Africans and whites than enemy action.
One factor of which contemporaries were largely unaware, despite its
fundamental significance for the history of colonialism in Africa, should also be
mentioned here. Beginning in the 1880s, the accelerated volume of traffic across
the continent helped to spread diseases like sleeping sickness, which originated
in West Africa, into the eastern regions. Smallpox, and a series of devastating
cattle plagues, were probably also inadvertently spread by explorers. Then in the
1890s most of the world’s tropical regions were affected by widespread drought
and famine, of a severity which most tribes had not experienced for a century.
These environmental catastrophes weakened many African societies —
especially the traditional ones — both economically and psychologically, just at
the time when they were under attack from outside. This must be borne in mind
when attempting to understand why many tribes with a long-standing warlike
reputation, such as the Masai, Ngoni, and Baganda, failed to put up the
resistance to European occupation which might have been expected.
These adverse environmental factors combined to ensure that the armies
which operated in East Africa (outside of the exceptionally densely populated
and well organised kingdoms of what was to become Uganda) were very small
by European standards. The other main reason for the small scale of African
warfare was the impossibility of supplying large forces. Both food and water
were scarce in many places, and the unpredictable climate did not permit local
farmers to build up the sort of food reserves which might have been
commandeered for the benefit of military expeditions. The missionary W.P.
Johnson remarked in the 1880s on the strain which even a small peaceful
caravan could place on local resources, since, even if it was prepared to pay its
way, there would often be nothing to buy. Therefore a military or exploring
expedition of a couple of hundred soldiers and a thousand porters would be a
very large one indeed, and even lightly equipped native armies seldom exceeded
2 or 3,000. Arab slaving caravans might contain as many as 5,000 people on
their return journey to the coast, but they solved the supply problem by simply
not feeding the slaves, accepting a high rate of attrition in the process.
Having adapted over the course of millennia to these difficult conditions,
African societies were often very alien to European visitors, and vice versa. The
commonest native word for the white man in East Africa, mzungu, translates as
something ‘strange’ or ‘mysterious’. When, in the 20th century, anthropologists
began to study native cultures more scientifically, they often discovered that
their 19th-century predecessors had completely misunderstood important
aspects, such as the powers and duties of the civil and ritual chiefs. Sometimes
whole ‘tribes’ which had been confidently reported by the explorers — the
‘Wakwavi’ of East Africa and the ‘Bangala’ of the Congo, for example — were
found never to have existed. In fact the word ‘tribe’ itself has quite rightly fallen
into disfavour with modern scholars, who regard it as a meaningless and rather
derogatory term covering a wide variety of different types of political
organisation. Nevertheless, it has been retained here for convenience without any
claim to have a precise meaning.
This is a work of 19th-century military history rather than anthropology,
and the overwhelming majority of written sources derive from the European
explorers and colonisers, so the treatment of African societies in this volume
inevitably reflects their impressions. It is necessary to be aware, however, of
how far their assumptions and uncritically accepted stereotypes coloured their
reports. They would often rank native peoples in a crude racial hierarchy based
on aspects such as their skin colour or facial features. Such discussions have on
the whole been ignored here as not only offensive but irrelevant, but these
assumptions may well have inadvertently influenced accounts of more material
subjects like military organisation. The findings of 20th-century anthropologists
have therefore often been useful in explaining the sophisticated command
systems and organisational principles which lay behind what eyewitnesses often
present as no more than a horde of ‘savages’.
In most cases the terminology used has been that of the 19th-century
sources, if only because this will make it easier for the reader to refer to these
sources. Visitors to East Africa almost always came by way of the coast, which
was inhabited mainly by Swahili-speakers, and recruited their guides and porters
from among the Swahili. They therefore tended to adopt Swahili terms for the
other peoples whom they encountered. This language, like others of the so-called
Bantu family, uses a system of prefixes to modify words, rather than the suffixes
which we are used to in English. For example, an individual member of the
Gogo tribe is a ‘Mgogo’, while the plural — referring either to a group of them
or to the tribe as a whole — is ‘Wagogo’. The country in which they live is
‘Ugogo’, and the language they speak is ‘Kigogo’. Although the system is
similar in the related languages which were spoken in most of the interior, the
actual prefixes are sometimes different. Thus the people of the country which the
Swahili called ‘Uganda’ — the land of the ‘Waganda’ — called themselves
‘Baganda’, the kingdom ‘Buganda’, and their language ‘Luganda’. Bantu
prefixes were often used even for peoples who spoke totally unrelated languages,
and called themselves something entirely different: thus we encounter
‘Wamasai’ and ‘Wanandi’ — although never, for some reason, ‘Umasai’ for
Masailand, or ‘Wabari’ for the Bari tribe.
The procedure adopted here has been to retain the Swahili ‘U’ prefixes
for most of the tribal territories, as they generally have no other recognisable
names, but to omit them in other cases where they might be confusing. Thus we
refer to ‘Ugogo’ for the land, but to the ‘Gogo’ tribe rather than the ‘Wagogo’.
There are a number of exceptions. For example, ‘Masailand’ is used so
universally in 19th-century sources that there is no point in substituting another
version in an equally foreign language. Also, in order to minimise possible
confusion, ‘Bunyoro’ and ‘Buganda’ have been used for the native kingdoms
and ‘Uganda’ for the British Protectorate which later included them, even though
explorers such as Speke and Stanley use the Swahili ‘Uganda’ to refer to the
original Buganda kingdom. The expressions ‘Kenya’ and ‘Tanganyika’ are a
convenient shorthand, even though the former term did not come into use until
the very end of the century, and the latter was seldom used precisely in the sense
of the area later known by that name. Furthermore, as there was no generally
accepted spelling for any African language in the 19th century, writers of this
period use variants of even quite common names for people and places. When
quoting from such sources, names have been retained in the original forms
unless they are completely unrecognisable.
In most cases battles between Europeans and native tribes have been
described in the chapters dealing with the appropriate tribes, as illustrations of
the tactical methods which they favoured. One exception is the series of wars
fought by the British and German colonial authorities against the Arabs and
Swahilis of the coast in the 1880s and 1890s. The justification for this is that
these campaigns tend, from the Arab point of view, to be a rather unedifying
catalogue of defeats, and that they shed far more light on the organisations and
tactics of the colonial forces than they do on those of the natives.
In conclusion I would like to express here my thanks to the series editor,
Ian Heath, for his unfailing (though sorely tried) patience; to all those who have
assisted with the research for this book; and especially to Mark Copplestone,
who first rekindled my latent interest in the armies of Africa.
Chris Peers
December 2002
CONTENTS

East Africa

The Upper Nile
Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast
Between the Coast and the Lakes
The Lake Kingdoms
The Northern Frontier
The Explorers
British East Africa
German East Africa
Bibliography