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

Series Editor: Ian Heath

First published in Great Britain in 2003
by Foundry Books
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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
of this work has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 1-901543-35-8
ISBN 978-1-901543-35-3
Print ISBN: 9781901543094
Digital ISBN: 9781901543353

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

Typeset & Digital scanning by Kevin Dallimore
0181 658 2488
Digital conversion by Kevin Dallimore

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 mans 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 worlds 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.