And Home Was Kariakoo (7 page)

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The Usambara (or Northern) Line, went from Tanga to Moshi, roughly parallel to the Mombasa–Nairobi line across the border. In the 1960s a link was effected between the two lines, connecting the towns of Voi and Korogwe, providing the exciting prospect of a railway journey from Nairobi (or even farther-away Kampala) all the way to Dar es Salaam. I recall it as a miserable journey, spoilt by the agony of a long wait in the absolute dark at Korogwe in the middle of the night, under a massive onslaught of mosquitoes. In German times the entire Tanga–Moshi corridor was well populated by settlers. Once, when sixteen German peasants arrived from Jaffa in Palestine, the
Usambara-Post
gave the opinion that they would make excellent settlers, used as they were to “a hot climate and
fevers.” They would not have thought that a war back in Europe would drive them away so quickly from their new home.

Tanga has given its name to one of the most ignominious British defeats of the First World War, in an encounter that has become known as the Battle for Tanga. Soon after the declaration of hostilities, a unit called the Indian Expeditionary Force B was set up under Major General Aitken in India with instructions to “bring the whole of German East Africa under British Authority.” Easier said than done. Said the confident Aitken, “The Indian Army will make short work of a lot of niggers”; and further, “I mean to thrash the Germans before Christmas.” In Tanga he would meet his nemesis, the wily von Lettow-Vorbeck.

On October 16, 1914, a convoy of forty-five ships left Bombay Harbour, among which were fourteen transport ships carrying some 8,000 Indian troops. Aitken knew little of the conditions in East Africa. Moreover, his Indians were ill-equipped and ill-prepared, coming from different regions and castes, speaking different languages, and eating different foods, a requirement that was often not met. Many had been newly drafted. They were overcrowded and unhappy. According to one British officer, the two-week voyage to Mombasa was “a hell on crowded ships in tropical heat.” To add to the Indians’ misery, upon their arrival in Mombasa they were refused shore leave to recuperate. And finally, to top off the sheer incompetence of the operation and foolish confidence of its commander, there was the lack of secrecy; the Germans knew of an impending attack from any number of sources, besides what common sense had already informed von Lettow-Vorbeck.

The British troops landed at a headland called Ras Kasone, two miles from Tanga town. But it was fifty-four hours later when they
began to advance, by which time von Lettow-Vorbeck had calmly reconnoitered the situation on his bicycle, having watched the transport ships from the land. His soldiers were in place and prepared. As the British—mainly the Indians—approached the town, through dense rubber and sisal plantations under a burning November sun, the Germans—mainly the askaris—fired. The Indians bolted in numbers. As the official history relates one instance, “The Madrasi troops, like the rest, were suffering much from the tropical heat and consequent thirst. In poor condition as a result of their miserable voyage, and short of sleep during the previous night, the companies of the 63rd began to disintegrate from the moment the German machine gun fire opened.… Nothing could prevent the Madrasi rank and file from pouring back and dispersing into the thick undergrowth of the rubber plantation.” One group from the mainly Gurkha Kashmir Rifles, however, reached the Kaiserhof and tore down the German flag, before being forced to flee.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck writes of this battle, such as it was,

And I would be told by a cultural officer in Tanga how his father recalled collecting chapatis from the bodies of dead Indian soldiers.

As it turned out, it was not only the askari bullets that created panic and mayhem among the Indians. The bees in their hives up in the trees, having been disturbed by gunfire, had also viciously attacked the soldiers. Bees and askaris, then, routed the poor Indians. And to give credit where it was due, the Battle for Tanga has also been called The Battle of the Bees.

The next morning, on November 5, Colonel Meinertzhagen from the British side went to meet the German command bearing the white flag of truce and medical supplies, and was warmly received at the Kaiserhof and given a breakfast. Meinertzhagen was a brilliant intelligence officer, a soldier, an ornithologist, and later a memoirist. The memoirs are valuable—few people have recorded the events of those times in East Africa—though he is generally regarded as an exaggerator. He was also a racist thug who took satisfaction in killing. In his accounts of the early colonial years in Kenya he seems to have enjoyed bayoneting Africans, including women. In Tanga, this is one account of his behaviour:

The official history calls the Tanga expedition “one of the most notable failures in British military history”; it helped to prolong the war in East Africa and made a hero out of von Lettow-Vorbeck. The British casualties, wounded, dead, and missing, amounted to 817; the German, 147.

One day in Toronto I received a letter from someone called Ann Crichton-Harris; she wanted to talk to me about Tanga. A few days later in a coffee shop I met a cheerful, enthusiastic woman of middle age, and with her was a young friend who had recently escaped from Ethiopia via Djibouti and was keen to write about that experience. Ann’s story was remarkable, though—as I’ve come to realize more and more—of a sort not unusual in Canada with its historical connection to the British Empire. Ann’s grandfather, Dr. Edward Temple Harris—known as “Temple” to his family—was in the Indian Medical Service (IMS) in Bangalore when war was declared; soon after, he was recruited as a captain into the Indian Field Ambulance and accompanied the Expeditionary Force B to East Africa. He landed at Tanga with Aitken’s doomed party. Dr. Harris wrote seventeen letters to his brother Tatham, which were hand-carried to India by IMS contacts and therefore not censored; they are chatty and candid, and sympathetic to the common soldier, and he describes his own fear in the face of fierce German machine-gun fire. After the Battle for Tanga, Temple was sent to Nairobi to recuperate from an attack of dysentery before being sent to Mombasa and then Voi. Here, like the other doctor, the novelist Francis Brett Young, he was a member of the medical corps of Smuts’s army as it pushed into German East Africa. Following Edward Harris’s letters, which came into her possession, and using her own research, Ann had written a book, titled
Seventeen Letters to Tatham
, describing vividly both the Battle for Tanga and the invasion at Taveta under Smuts. Her mission had taken her off to Tanga, a place she would never before have contemplated visiting. Here was someone whose chief interest had been her Cornish heritage now speaking as an expert about the landings at Ras Kasone, the fates of
the various British regiments, and the layout of the Voi–Taveta plain. She had a photo of herself taken with an old German askari in Tanga.

I saw Tanga as a quaint town with remnants of the old architecture, but essentially in a state of decay. A typical house in the Asian section of the town had arched verandas on the ground floor, and second-floor balconies enclosed by latticed wooden barriers or wire mesh. Robbery was evidently a problem. The old European houses were more solid. The roofs were corrugated iron or tile. No longer was it the neat colonial town; the railway didn’t run, the streets were potholed, the sisal market had been destroyed first by the arrival of synthetic fibres and then by the nationalizations of the estates during the two decades of socialism. But it seemed the Germans still loved Tanga. There was a German program in place to preserve buildings from their colonial days.

The Asian population in Tanga had declined considerably. Half the Khoja khano, a large two-storey white building within a
fenced compound, was in disuse for lack of people and partitioned off. It was a bleak sight. The khano and the Khoja development consisting of modern bungalows—portending the great optimism and cheer of the 1960s—were in the neighbourhood called Ngamiani—“where the camels are.” Perhaps there was a camel station here a long time ago. But for the Asians who remained, business seemed to be fine. Samji’s wife spent a good two hours every evening counting out the day’s take. (To be fair, the counting took long partly because the currency had inflated so much.) They had four children outside the country. One of their friends, Ramji, had all his five children overseas. Both men were satisfied with their lives; they had cars, servants, remained busy. It was the wives who insisted on leaving. I couldn’t help thinking of men of their age who had immigrated to Canada only to become useless and lonely, waiting to grow old and eventually die in a nursing home. For the women, emigration often was a matter of prestige and status. The Nanjis have gone, so should we the Ramjis; we are not nobodys. I held my peace.

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The next evening Samji and his son put me on the bus to Dar.

The name of the bus, painted with a flourish on one side, was Scud. (The first Gulf War was a recent memory.) It was also decorated with pictures of Indian actors and the action-movie character Rambo. It left the station at 8:30 p.m. and at around midnight broke down. Groggy from sleep we got off one by one and came to stand around the right front tire, where the driver and conductor were inspecting a leak—oil or water, it wasn’t clear. The mood was light, as though this were the order of the day, with joking, cussing, laughing. A bright moon lit up the pavement and the landscape. After some two hours, the driver gave up tinkering and caught a ride back to Tanga to fetch another bus. A young Bohra man borrowed a
thousand shillings from me, frantic to get to Dar on time for something; when an overcrowded bus stopped, he got in and left. I never saw him again. The rest of us slept in a row at the side of the road, in front of the bus, using our bags as pillows.

In the morning it was surprisingly, intensely cold. It was after five, and I saw that we had stopped near a village and a roadworks; women were going off in a line to fetch water, barefoot and wearing khangas round the waist. A roadside stall had sprung up and we had sweet black tea and mandazi. The talk was fast and free and the government was openly criticized, with that casual sense of coastal humour. The freedom of the people was refreshing after the sombre, repressive mood that I had witnessed in Kenya. Someone mentioned that there could have been lions prowling about in the night. Yes, and they always dragged off a person sleeping somewhere in the middle of a row, not the end. A nervous tingle crawled down my spine. I thought I had been clever when I placed myself third or fourth from one end. I could imagine those man-eaters of Tsavo who had so terrorized the railway Punjabis, dragging them off even from their tents. On the Dar–Arusha route, the men around me said, a driver had abandoned a woman with two kids on the highway for not having tickets; one kid and the mother were eaten by a lion and the driver was in jail.

The relief bus arrived at seven, much to everyone’s surprise.

A man complained, “Would the mzungus (white men) have made tools if you didn’t need them?” Apparently our previous bus had lacked the appropriate tools. But the statement said much about the speaker’s faith in the abilities of his own people.