It is surprising how little even the well-informed know of these far places which Germany has taken for her own. Fertile spots as any upon earth, covered with hard-wood forests and watered by many rivers, when seen from the shade of an awning over a ship's deck they are as alluring as the stage of a theatre set for a sylvan opera. Go a thousand yards back from that smiling coast, however, and the illusion disappears, for you find a country whose hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers combine to make it deserving of its title—“the white man's graveyard.” The statesmen of the Wilhelmstrasse must have taken a long look into the future when they raised the German flag over such lands as these. The returns they have yielded thus far would have discouraged a man less sanguine than William Hohenzollern. Though subsidised German steam-ships ply along their coasts, though their forests resound to the clank and clang of German railway-builders' tools, though the plantations of government-assisted settlers dot the back country, though she has spent on them thousands of lives and millions of marks, Germany's only returns thus far have been a few annual tons of ivory, copra, and rubber, some excellent but unprofitable harbours, and many lonely stations where her sons contract fevers and pessimism. But I would stake my life that this out-of-the-way, back-of-beyond, sun-blistered, fever-stricken German Africa will be a great colony some day.
From the care with which they are laid out, from the perfection of their sanitary arrangements, from the substantiality of their public buildings and official residences and their suitability to the climatic conditions, the travellers who confine their investigations to the coast are readily deceived into thinking that Tanga and Bagamoyo and Dar-es-Salam and Swakopmund and Duala are the gateways to rich and prosperous colonies. From the very outset, however, the imperial government based its claim for popular support in its colonial ventures upon the erroneous assumption that German colonies would attract Germans, and that in this way the language of the Fatherland would be spread abroad and eventually supplant that of Shakespeare. The Germans, however, have stubbornly refused to go to their own colonies, preferring those where English is the speech and where there are fewer officials and more freedom. To-day, therefore, you find the model German towns, so perfectly built that you feel as though you were walking through a municipal exhibition, almost wholly peopled by brass-bound, hide-bound officials, while the German traders are carrying on thriving businesses under the English flag at Mombasa and Zanzibar and Sierra Leone.
Now, Germany has no one but herself to blame for this condition of affairs, having brought it about by the short-sightedness of her colonial policy and the harshness and incapacity of her officials. Intending to found industrial colonies, she created military settlements instead, administering and exploiting them, not as if they were German lands, but as if they were an enemy's country. Nothing emphasises more sharply the purely military character of Germany's African colonies than the fact that there are seven soldiers or officials to every German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of the most trying climates in the world, the officials seem to take a malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil population, thus driving the traders—who form the backbone of every colony—to take up their residence in English ports and so paralysing German trade. The soldiers, for want of something better to do, are forever seeking advancement by making unnecessary expeditions into the hinterland for the purpose of “punishing” the natives, thus causing them to migrate by wholesale into British, Belgian, and even Portuguese territory, so that the German colonies are left without labour and the plantations are consequently being ruined.
The needless severity of Germany's colonial rule is graphically illustrated by the fact that during 1911 there were 14,849 criminal convictions in German East Africa alone, or one conviction to every 637 natives; while in the adjoining protectorate of Uganda, among the same type of natives but under a British administration, the ratio of convictions was only one in 2,047. There is not a town in German East Africa where you cannot see boys of from eight to fourteen years, shackled together by chains running from iron collar to iron collar and guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, doing the work of men under a deadly sun. Natives with bleeding backs are constantly making their way into British and Belgian territory with tales of maltreatment by German planters, while stories of German tyranny, brutality, and corruption—of some instances of which I was myself a witness—form staple topics of conversation on every club veranda and steamer's deck along these coasts. In German Southwest Africa the dearth of labour, owing to the practical extermination of the Herero nation in Germany's last “little war” in that colony, has become a serious and pressing problem. In a single campaign—which cost Germany five hundred million marks and the lives of two thousand soldiers, and which could have been avoided altogether by a little tact and kindness—half the total population of the colony was killed in battle or driven into the desert to perish. That is why the builders of the Swakopmund-Otavi Railway in German Southwest Africa—the longest two-foot-gauge line in the world—have to send to Europe for their labour. Until Germany makes a radical change in her methods of colonial administration, and until she learns that traders and labourers are more essential to a colony's prosperity than pompous and domineering officials, her colonial accounts will continue to stand heaviest on the debit side of the ledger.
Successful colonial administration in Africa, as in all tropical countries, is largely a matter of temperament, and the stolid sons of the Fatherland seem, strangely enough, to be more quickly affected by the demoralising climate and to be irritated more easily than either the English or the French. The Englishman's sense of justice and the Frenchman's sense of humour are their chief assets as successful colonisers and rulers of alien peoples, but the German colonial official, who is generally serious by nature and almost always domineering as the result of his training, possesses neither of these invaluable attributes and is heavily handicapped in consequence. It is no easy task with which he is confronted, remember. The loneliness and the privations of the white man's life, and the debility that comes from the heat and the rains and the fevers, when combined with the strain of governing and educating an inconceivably lazy, stubborn, stupid, and intractable people, make the job of an African official one of the most trying in the world. The loneliness and the climate seem to grip a German as they never do an Englishman, and he becomes irritable and ugly and unreasonably annoyed by trifles, so that when a native fails to get out of his way quickly enough, or to salute him with the punctiliousness which he considers his due, he flies into a rage and orders the man to be flogged. The native goes back to his village with a bleeding back and hatred in his heart, and, as likely as not, a bloody, costly, and troublesome native uprising ensues. The African native is, after all, nothing but an overgrown and very aggravating child, and his upbringing is a job for school-teachers instead of drill sergeants, and the sooner the imperial government appreciates that fact the better.
I went to German East Africa, which is the Kaiser's star colony, expecting to be deeply impressed; I came away deeply disappointed. It is only about fifty miles from Zanzibar across to Dar-es-Salam, the capital of the colony, but the local steamer, which is the size of a Hudson River tugboat and rolls horribly on the slightest provocation, manages to use up the better part of a day in making the trip. Seen from the steamer's deck, Dar-es-Salam presents one of the most enchanting pictures that I know, and every one who goes ashore there does so with high expectations. Imagine, if you can, a city of two hundred thousand people, with the imposing, red-roofed schools and churches and hospitals and barracks and municipal buildings of, say, Düsseldorf, and the white-walled, broad-verandaed, bungalow dwellings of southern California; with concrete wharves and cement sidewalks and beautifully macadamised roads and many public parks: imagine all this, I say, dropped down in the midst of a palm grove on one of the hottest and unhealthiest coasts in the world—that is Dar-es-Salam. The hotel is, barring the one at Kandy in Ceylon and another at Ancon in the Canal Zone, the best and most beautiful tropical hostelry I have ever seen, but, as it is owned and run by the government, for the benefit of its officials, its manager, a blond, florid-faced, pompadoured Prussian, was as independent as a hotel clerk in a city where a presidential convention is going on. Just as in the other German colonies, I found East Africa to be suffering from a severe attack of militarism. I saw more sentries and patrols and guards during my four days' stay in Dar-es-Salam than I did in Constantinople during the Turkish Revolution. I was lulled to sleep by regimental bugles and I was awakened by them again at daybreak, and I never set foot out of doors without meeting a column of native soldiery, their black faces peering out stolidly from beneath the sun-aprons, their spindle shanks encased in spiral puttees, their feet rising and falling in the senseless “parade step” in time to the monotonous “rechts! links! rechts! links!” of the German sergeant. But what struck me most forcibly about Dar-es-Salam was that it appeared to have no business. Apparently the soldiers had frightened it away. The harbours of Mombasa and Zanzibar and Beira and Lourenço Marques are alive with steamers taking on or discharging cargo (and quite two out of three of them fly the German flag), and their streets are lined with offices and warehouses and “factories” (over the doors of many of which are signs bearing German names), and their wharves are piled high with bales of merchandise going to or coming from the four corners of the earth; but in the harbour of Dar-es-Salam, as in all the other German harbours I visited, the only vessels are white German gun-boats or rusty German tramps; its streets are lined with government offices instead of business offices; on its wharves are a few puncheons of palm-oil, or other products of the bush, and nothing more.
Warundi warriors. German East Africa.