German East Africa (German: Deutsch-Ostafrika) (GEA) was a German colony in the African Great Lakes region, which included present-day Burundi, Rwanda, the Tanzania mainland, and the Kionga Triangle, a small region later incorporated into Mozambique. GEA’s area was 994,996 square kilometres (384,170 sq mi),[2][3] which was nearly three times the area of present-day Germany, and double the area of metropolitan Germany then.
The colony was organised when the German military was asked in the late 1880s to put down a revolt against the activities of the German East Africa Company. It ended with Imperial Germany‘s defeat in World War I. Ultimately, GEA was divided between Britain, Belgium and Portugal and was reorganised as a mandate of the League of Nations.
. . . German East Africa . . .
Like other colonial powers, the Germans expanded their empire in the Africa Great Lakes region, ostensibly to fight slavery and the slave trade. Unlike other imperial powers, however, they never formally abolished either, preferring instead to curtail the production of new “recruits” and regulate the existing slaving business.[4][page needed]
The colony began when Carl Peters, an adventurer who founded the Society for German Colonization, signed treaties with several native chieftains on the mainland opposite Zanzibar. On 3 March 1885, the German government announced that it had granted an imperial charter, which was signed by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck on 27 February 1885. The charter was granted to Peters’ company and was intended to establish a protectorate in the African Great Lakes region. Peters then recruited specialists who began exploring south to the Rufiji River and north to Witu, near Lamu on the coast.[5][page needed][6][page needed][7][page needed]
The Sultan of Zanzibar protested, claiming that he was the ruler of both Zanzibar and the mainland. Chancellor Bismarck then sent five warships, which arrived on 7 August 1885 and trained their guns on the Sultan’s palace. The Sultan was forced to accept the German claims on the mainland outside a 10-mile-strip along the Coast. In November 1886 Germany and Britain concluded an agreement where they declared to respect the sovereignty of the Sultan of Zanzibar over his Islands and the 10-mile-strip along the coast, otherwise agreed on their spheres of interest along what is now the Tanzanian-Kenyan border [8]The British and Germans agreed to divide the mainland between themselves, and the Sultan had no option but to agree.[9][page needed]
German rule was established quickly over Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam, and Kilwa. The caravans of Tom von Prince, Wilhelm Langheld, Emin Pasha, and Charles Stokes were sent to dominate “the Street of Caravans.”[citation needed] The Abushiri Revolt of 1888 was put down with British help the following year. In 1890, London and Berlin concluded the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, which returned Heligoland to Germany and decided the border between GEA and the East Africa Protectorate controlled by Britain, although the exact boundaries remained unsurveyed until 1910.[10][11][page needed]
The stretch of border between Kenya and Tanzania, running from the sea to Lake Victoria, was surveyed by two British brothers; Charles Stewart Smith (British Consul at Mombasa) and his younger brother George Edward Smith (an officer, and later a general, in the Royal Engineers). Stewart Smith had been appointed British Commissioner in 1892 for the delimitation of the Anglo-German Boundary in Africa, and in the same year they both surveyed the 180-mile line from the sea to Mount Kilimanjaro. Twelve years later George Edward Smith returned to complete the survey of the remaining 300 miles from Kilimanjaro to Lake Victoria. [12]
Between 1891 and 1894, the Hehe people, led by Chief Mkwawa, resisted German expansion. They were defeated because rival tribes supported the Germans. After years of guerrilla warfare, Mkwawa himself was cornered and committed suicide in 1898.[13]
The Maji Maji Rebellion occurred in 1905[14] and was put down by Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen, who ordered to create a famine to crush the resistance; it may have cost up to 300,000 deaths.[15][16] Scandal soon followed, however, with allegations of corruption and brutality. In 1907, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow appointed Bernhard Dernburg to reform the colonial administration.[17][18]
German colonial administrators relied heavily on native chiefs to keep order and collect taxes. By 1 January 1914, aside from local police, the military garrisons of the Schutztruppen (protective troops) at Dar es Salaam, Moshi, Iringa, and Mahenge numbered 110 German officers (including 42 medical officers), 126 non-commissioned officers, and 2,472 Askari (native enlisted men).[19]: 32
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