Chapter 7Inadvertent Annexation In East Africa Germany

Historical Background

On the eve of the annexations in November and December 1884, what would become German East Africa was divided among dozens of small chiefdoms, many of which were under the loose control of the sultanate of Zanzibar, just across the Zanzibar Channel from central Africa’s east coast. Up the coast to the north lay more of the sultanate’s territory in modern-day Kenya, and to the south lay Mozambique, where the Portuguese had had a presence since the early sixteenth century. To the west, in the heart of Africa, sat what would soon become the Congo Free State, a colony that would be privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium. These were the early days of the European “Scramble for Africa,” when a great deal of territory, particularly in the interior, remained unclaimed.

There were two key leaders in the German capital, Berlin, responsible for issues of territorial expansion and empire. The first was the emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm I, the German head of state who had ultimate authority and the final word on any decisions regarding territorial acquisition. The second was Otto von Bismarck. As the chancellor of the German Empire and, effectively, its foreign minister, Bismarck’s personal influence on foreign and imperial policy in this era is difficult to overstate. A leader whose very name has become synonymous with Realpolitik, Bismarck was tough, energetic, and uniquely rational in his thinking about international affairs.2 The German Second Reich did have a state secretary for foreign affairs in Paul von Hatzfeldt, but his was much more of a supporting role, drafting memos and executing decisions made by the chancellor. The empire also had a colonial secretary in Heinrich von Kusserow, but this position was under the authority of the foreign ministry, not itself at the cabinet level.3 Finally, until the end of World War I, Germany did not have a single national war or defense ministry, with this role being divided among several major states, such as Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg. Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Chancellor Bismarck were the crucial leaders in the capital who would be inadvertently dragged into the acquisition of East Africa.

The 1880s saw the emergence of a number of German civil society organizations advocating for colonialism.4 Among the more radical of these was the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation (GfdK; Society for German Colonization), formed in March 1884. It aimed to go beyond mere advocacy and lobbying and would actually fund and organize private expeditions and activities directly aimed at attaining colonies for the empire.5 The GfdK was cofounded and led by a twenty-eight-year-old historian and philosopher by the name of Carl Peters. An ardent German nationalist, Peters was a firm believer in the colonial cause, could be dictatorial in his treatment of others, and was deeply and profoundly racist.6 Peters was the key peripheral actor who would present Berlin with the East African fait accompli.

Peters made himself something of a known quantity in German Foreign Office circles. This was due not only to his leadership role in the GfdK but also to his periodically pitching various colonial schemes to foreign office personnel. By the fall of 1884, however, after a number of his proposals had been shot down by the foreign office, Peters and the GfdK were feeling pressure to get some sort of expedition underway.7 Having raised funds from their now roughly 350 members, the organization’s leadership felt it had to move forward or potentially face an open revolt among shareholders.8

In mid-September 1884, Peters and the GfdK came up with a plan: to acquire territory on the East African mainland across from the island of Zanzibar. On September 20, Peters once again wrote the foreign office, but this time he phrased his message as an announcement rather than a request. Then, without awaiting a reply, Peters and his colleagues hastily packed their belongings and departed.9 The ragtag expedition consisted of Peters and three companions: Count Graf Joachim von Pfiel, a German aristocrat; Carl Jühlke, a lawyer; and August Otto, a young businessperson.10 On October 1, they boarded a steamer at Trieste for a five-week journey that would end at Zanzibar.11 As Peters later wrote, reflecting on this decision, he had “decided to accept the risk of retrospective rejection by the Imperial Government of the Reich.”12 Just like that, his fait accompli had been launched.

As noted earlier, Bismarck was less keen on imperial ventures than many of his European contemporaries, a sentiment well summed up by his 1881 statement that “as long as I am Reichskanzler, we shall not pursue a colonial policy.”13 This promise would not hold—of course—as Germany had recently burst upon the imperial scene, claiming South-West Africa in April 1884, Cameroon and Togoland in July, and New Britain and northeastern New Guinea in November.14 Yet, Bismarck was often reluctant in these acquisitions and had very little interest in what Peters and his colleagues were planning in East Africa. Just two days after Peters’s departure, on October 3, the German Foreign Office composed a response to the announced expedition, which was awaiting him upon arrival in Zanzibar on November 4. The cable, which had been personally approved by Bismarck, stated explicitly that the government had given them no encouragement or assistance for their venture and that they could not count on protection for any territorial claims they might stake out—they were there at their own risk and on their own responsibility.15

East Africa

Once in Zanzibar, Peters and his colleagues hastily prepared for their expedition to the mainland. They hired porters, servants, and interpreters and purchased food, arms, and other equipment.16 In the early morning of November 10, they set out on a hired dhow across the Zanzibar Channel toward the mainland. They would ultimately leave behind much of the food they had purchased for the expedition to make room for gifts for local chiefs, and they lacked medicine and other essentials for tropical travel.17 They disembarked at Saadani on the East African coast, and, after some organizing, began their expedition into the interior on November 12.18

Peters and his colleagues moved with speed. In a little over a month, they covered hundreds of kilometers of ground and concluded at least ten treaties with local chiefs in the regions of Usagara, Nguru, Useguha, and Ukami.19 The process of treaty making followed a consistent pattern. They would, first, ask permission to camp on a chief’s territory. They would then circulate rumors among the people of Peters’s extraordinary power and influence. This was followed by offering the locals rum and gifts. Then the treaty would be signed, and the German flag hoisted. Peters followed this by giving a short speech, before the ceremony closed with a cheer for the kaiser and the firing of three volleys.20 Then, the expedition would move onto the next chiefdom, and the process would begin anew. Peters and his colleagues ultimately claimed some 140,000 km2 of territory in this manner.21

Yet, in almost all other respects, the expedition was an utter fiasco. Otto, the merchant, was constantly drunk, and bad blood developed between Peters and Pfiel, to the point of Pfiel apparently firing his revolver at Peters during a particularly nasty quarrel. Peters severely burnt his foot a few weeks in and thereafter had to be carried by porters in a hammock. The effects of a lack of food, medicine, and equipment quickly began to show themselves, with porters falling ill and abandoning the expedition, and the Germans suffering severe and recurrent fever. Otto would ultimately die in an Usagara goat shed, and Pfiel almost certainly would have died as well had he not been stumbled upon by a traveling French scientist after he had been abandoned by Peters. After thirty-seven days in the interior, Peters and Jühlke, starving and grievously ill, staggered into a French mission church in the coastal town of Bagamoyo on the evening of December 17.22 Peters later recalled that, when he saw the cross and heard the resonant sound of the organ, he “broke into a cramped sobbing as all the tension of the previous weeks poured forth in a flood of tears.”23 (See figure 7.1.)

Berlin Reacts

After a few days of recovery on the coast, Peters returned to Zanzibar and telegraphed the GfdK in Berlin with news of his acquisitions. The GfdK then contacted the foreign office and a representative of the organization met with Colonial Secretary Heinrich von Kusserow on December 29, requesting government protection for Peters’s claims.24 Kusserow decided to await a more comprehensive report on the acquisitions before informing and making a recommendation to Bismarck, which would arrive in the form of a formal letter of request from Peters about a month later. In the meantime, Peters embarked on the long journey home, where he would arrive in early February 1885.25 The GfdK followed up with the foreign office a week after Peters’s return, again requesting protection, but also authorization for further annexations in the area. At this point, it had been almost seven weeks without a definitive response from the government, and Peters started to get anxious.26

By February 15, Kusserow felt that he had enough information and sent a detailed memo to the chancellor.27 The timing of Peters’s fait accompli was complicated by the fact that the imperial powers were just wrapping up the Berlinhosted West Africa Conference.28 Suddenly springing an East Africa protectorate upon the other great powers, after having said nothing about it through months of discussion of colonial matters, would undoubtedly come as a surprise and, to some, an unwelcome one.

Despite the awkward timing, the very fact of Peters’s annexations helped generate two constraints that made returning the territories difficult for leaders in Berlin. For one, the job was already half done. While Bismarck and the foreign office had tried to dissuade Peters with the strongly worded cable of October 3 referenced earlier, now the picture had changed considerably. Peters and his colleagues had laid claim, without significant resistance, to a large portion of East Africa, and they were likely to press on to the borders of King Leopold’s newly constituted Congo Free State. They had also promised, in letters and memos to the government, that the colony could be operated at minimal expense, that governance and development of East Africa could be handled by the GfdK, and that the territory was suitable for the cultivation of a wide variety of valuable crops.29 Thus, Peters’s successful acquisitions presented with his persuasive arguments meant that the costs of acquisition had been definitively sunk.

The second reason Bismarck would have trouble rejecting the fait accompli was political. While the core of the colonial movement in Germany was relatively small, colonialism and empire were increasingly popular in some influential German circles.30 A federal election had been held in late October 1884, and the Bismarck-aligned Conservative and National Liberal parties had made colonial policy an important theme of their campaigns. Their relative gains, and the losses of the Left Liberal party, were widely perceived to be due, in important part, to their divergent views on Germany’s growing overseas empire.31 By accepting German East Africa, Bismarck could strengthen his own domestic political support and that of his allies in the Reichstag (German parliament), at relatively low cost. As the chancellor had written to a colleague just three weeks before the East Africa decision landed on his desk, for “reasons of domestic policy the colonial problem is a vital question for us. . . . At present public opinion emphasizes colonial policy so strongly in Germany that the position of the Government within Germany largely depends on its success.”32

Besides these constraints on returning the territories, there were also few geopolitical risks associated with retaining them. While clearly the British might be surprised, even alarmed, by German gains in the region, they had made very clear to Bismarck in correspondence in January and February 1885 that their interests were mainly confined to the island of Zanzibar itself, not the East African mainland.33 London was also not in a strong position to resist any German moves in East Africa. In what would become known as Germany’s “Egyptian lever” (bâton égyptien) the British were heavily reliant on German diplomatic support for their occupation of Egypt, and the German government used this to their advantage repeatedly.34 As the British prime minister William Gladstone acknowledged in December 1884, the Germans “could do extraordinary mischief to us at our one really vulnerable point, Egypt.”35 And Bismarck, reflecting on this fact in January 1885, noted that “Egypt . . . is merely a means of overcoming England’s objections to our colonial aspirations.”36

The timing of Peters’s fait accompli was also fortuitous with respect to the potential geopolitical risk for Berlin. British imperial forces under General Charles Gordon had been under siege at Khartoum since March 1884, and, in February 1885, Russian forces occupied the border town of Panjdeh in Afghanistan (then a British protectorate), sparking a major crisis between the two powers.37 Under these circumstances, London could, and likely would, do little to forestall Berlin’s gains in the region. As the historian Arne Perras notes, “The attractiveness of Peters’s scheme [for Bismarck] lay in the fact that it made a further colonial claim possible without provoking an imperial showdown” with London.38

Berlin Decides

Therefore, after some brief correspondence with his consul general in Zanzibar and a few meetings with Kusserow, Bismarck decided on February 24, 1885, to establish a protectorate over Peters’s acquisitions in East Africa—just nine days after becoming aware of them.39 Two days later, Bismarck informed Kaiser Wilhelm I of the acquisitions and advised him to accept them as a protectorate. The following day, the kaiser signed an imperial charter, proclaiming East Africa as a German protectorate, and this fact was made public on March 3, 1885.40 Without having planned on it or having played any role in its actual annexation, the German Empire had just acquired what would soon become its largest and most populous imperial holding.41

Bismarck would approve further annexations sought by the GfdK, informing Peters on July 11, 1885, that “the company should take what it feels confident to take. . . . We shall see later what we can back officially.”42 But Peters was already well ahead of him. He had ordered his subordinates to engage in further annexations in East Africa on February 8—nearly three weeks before East Africa was officially made a German protectorate—and by July they had extended the territory hundreds of kilometers in each direction.43 The sultan of Zanzibar would raise a protest over the claims, but, in reality, there was little he could do without overt and forceful British backing. After Bismarck sent five German warships into the harbor of Zanzibar on August 7, 1885, the sultan formally recognized all German claims on the mainland.44 East Africa was to remain German and would go on to be the Second Reich’s most important colony—a status it would retain until it was invaded by a joint British-Belgian force in November 1914, in the opening months of World War I.

In November 1885, Germany and Britain agreed to set up a joint commission to determine the limits of Zanzibar’s territories on the mainland and to demarcate their respective spheres of influence there.45 The following October, the two sides came to an agreement, with Kenya, to the north, falling within the British sphere, and Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, in the south, falling within the German sphere.46 And while the sultan of Zanzibar retained control over the East African coast, Germany was able to lease the ports of Pagani and Dar es Salaam, providing it important “windows” to coastal trade.47 However, the treaty left many areas of possible contention unsettled, the most important of these, as the following case shows, being Uganda.48

For his part, Peters would retain a central position in Germany’s new East African empire. Far from being punished for his disregard of official orders, he was instead tapped to organize and ultimately lead the chartered company that was to run the East Africa protectorate, the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (DOAG; German East Africa Company).49 However, titles and responsibilities were not nearly enough to put a leash on the young administrator, as Peters was far more interested in expanding the empire than running it competently.50 And when stories began to circulate in European capitals of a certain German national under siege in southern Sudan by a large Mahdist army, Peters saw it as a golden opportunity to strike out once again.

Historical Background

Kenya and Uganda were largely independent in these years, divided up among numerous kingdoms and chiefdoms of varying size. Since 1885, Germany had had a small coastal protectorate around the mouth of the River Tana in Kenya, known as “Wituland,” with the remainder of Kenya being considered as falling within the United Kingdom’s sphere of influence.51 Uganda’s status had yet to be defined by the colonial powers. To the south, of course, lay the new German protectorate of East Africa, and to the east lay the Belgian king Leopold’s Congo. To the north from Lake Victoria flows the Nile River, through Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt, before emptying in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, just 50 km west of the Suez Canal. Much of the interior of these territories was unknown to the imperial powers, though this was rapidly changing with all of the private-chartered companies operating in the area.

For the time being, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck retained his position as the key leader in Berlin responsible for German imperial policy. However, with the death of Kaiser Wilhelm I in March 1888, the German throne was to be occupied by a new emperor—first in the form of Frederick III, who himself died just three months later, passing the title of kaiser to his son, Wilhelm II. Wilhelm II’s accession was viewed by many with apprehension, not least by Bismarck himself. At just twenty-nine at the time of accession, Wilhelm was impulsive and confident, with only a superficial knowledge of government, military, and international affairs. Yet, he was also stridently nationalistic and expansionist in his foreign policy views, seeking to reorient the empire’s foreign policy toward a more aggressive Weltpolitik.52 It was Wilhelm II who would make the ultimate decision regarding the fate of any territory claimed in Kenya or Uganda.

The key actor on the periphery was, again, Carl Peters. Still only in his early thirties by the late 1880s, he remained very much the unconstrained peripheral agent and a thorn in Berlin’s side. As the local head of the DOAG—the chartered company that administered East Africa on behalf of the German Empire—he would prove to be a hopeless administrator, with the company operating on the verge of bankruptcy until they were bailed out by the German government in 1887.53 Peters was also a cruel administrator, having further developed the strong sadistic streak that had been evident during his earlier annexations in East Africa.54 He and his subordinates regularly committed atrocities against the local population in and around the company’s stations throughout East Africa, including arbitrary detention, torture, murder, and sexual slavery.55 At the end of 1887, Peters was recalled to Berlin by the DOAG, though it would not be long before he returned.56

The occasion for Peters’s return to East Africa was what became known as the “German Emin Pasha Relief Expedition.” Emin Pasha (born Eduard Schnitzer) was a physician and colonial administrator of German origin who had converted to Islam and entered the service of the British Empire as a medical officer for General Charles Gordon in Sudan.57 With the fall of Khartoum and the death of Gordon in 1885, the spread of the Mahdist Army throughout Sudan forced Emin to retreat to southern Sudan, near the Uganda border, where he put out a call for help to the British government in July 1886.58 Word of Emin Pasha’s plight reached London in late September 1886, and the news quickly spread to other European capitals.59 His story captured the imagination of European publics and publishers, and advocacy organizations and relief committees quickly sprang into being, pushing for rescue expeditions.60 For colonial organizations and private-chartered companies in the region, this was clearly an opportunity, and a British Emin Pasha Relief Committee was established, in November 1886, and an expedition set off in January 1887.61

The idea of a rival German expedition developed more slowly. The German Emin Pasha Relief Committee only formed in June 1888, with Peters—having been recently recalled from East Africa—very much at the center of it.62 Publicly, Peters would claim that the expedition’s purpose was “to furnish Emin Pacha, in his isolated position in the Equatorial Province, with ammunition and men, and to enable him to maintain his position.”63 Privately, however, he was more candid, noting that the “German Emin Pasha expedition was no pleasure trip, but a large-scale colonial, political enterprise.”64 Emin Pasha’s rescue was a mere pretext. The broader aim on the part of Peters and the committee was the extension of Germany’s East African empire, to encompass Uganda, southern Sudan, and the Nile basin.65

Like Prime Minister Salisbury, Bismarck was reluctant to get involved. When the committee made a formal request of the chancellor for German government funding in July 1888, Bismarck would decline, noting that “the rescue of Emin Bey would be primarily an Egyptian-English interest.”66 Yet, many around him were more receptive. The expedition, for instance, garnered the support of prominent figures from each of the major parties in the Reichstag.67 And the young kaiser himself, in August 1888, had the foreign office pass on his “warmest sympathies for the success of the enterprise” to the committee.68 Under these conditions, Bismarck felt that he had to play along, writing the committee on August 15, 1888, that, while the expedition was “alien to our colonial interests,” he recognized its “high-minded purpose” and similarly wished that “the patriotic efforts of the committee may succeed in carrying out this difficult venture.”69 Peters would later write that, at this point, he and the committee felt that “His Majesty the Emperor and Prince Bismarck [were] sympathetically welcoming the carrying out of a German Emin Pasha Expedition.”70 With these endorsements, they felt they had all the backing they needed.

Berlin and East Africa

In Kenya and Uganda, leaders in Berlin faced important principal-agent problems with respect to actors such as Peters on the frontier. First, a divergence of preferences would develop between Bismarck and the expedition. While Bismarck was, at first, reluctantly supportive, events on the ground soon changed, leading the chancellor to alter his stance. In September 1888, a rebellion broke out on the coast of German East Africa.71 The introduction of new taxes on commerce, as well as the heavy-handedness of German colonial administration, led to an armed uprising that quickly spread to the interior.72 By the end of the year, all territory under the control of the DOAG was in open revolt. Bismarck was dismayed by this turn of events, and, in December 1888 and January 1889, he managed to convince the Reichstag to fund a military operation to suppress the rebellion.73 As part of the pacification campaign, the chancellor announced a naval blockade of the East African coast, and Prime Minister Salisbury agreed to send British naval vessels to participate.74 Under these conditions, an officially endorsed expedition to the interior seemed out of the question, and Bismarck began erecting barriers to its success.

On September 14, Bismarck wrote a lengthy memorandum to the kaiser, arguing against the expedition and claiming to see no advantage of “such an eccentric extension” of Germany’s African territories.75 The following day, the chancellor informed the DOAG that he would take “no further interest” in the expedition unless they got rid of Carl Peters—who Bismarck blamed for the mess in East Africa—arguing that Peters was “entirely incapable of leading such a difficult venture” due to his “lack of caution, and excessive self-confidence.”76 Bismarck then began planting stories in German newspapers, critical of Peters and the expedition, in an effort to sway public opinion. The chancellor also began meeting with members and supporters of the committee, individually lobbying them to turn against the enterprise.77 Thus, Bismarck quickly became strongly and openly opposed to the expedition.

A second problem was that there were information asymmetries favoring the German Emin Pasha Expedition in the periphery. While Zanzibar had been connected to the global telegraph network in 1879, coastal Kenya would not see a telegraphic connection until 1890, at Mombasa.78 This made the expedition difficult to communicate with, and potentially control, once they were on the mainland. As Peters remarked in recounting events there, once they were in the interior, the expedition would be “masters of the situation.”79 Thus, the principal-agent problems facing Berlin made unauthorized peripheral expansion more likely.

Kenya and Uganda

Peters and the committee would not be discouraged by Bismarck’s opposition, completing their preparations in Berlin over the course of January 1889. On February 25, Peters left for East Africa. In contrast to his cheerful departure of five years earlier, this time he seemed to leave with a sense of foreboding, later writing that his departure “was characterized rather by seriousness and emotion than by joyful hope.”80 Peters arrived in Zanzibar on March 31, 1889, and immediately ran into trouble. For one, the Somali soldiers he had recruited in Aden for the expedition were barred from disembarking by Zanzibari authorities, forcing Peters to leave them, for the time being, on the East African coast at Bagamoyo.81 Peters also quickly learned that the six hundred local porters he had planned on hiring had been prohibited from joining his expedition by the sultan of Zanzibar.82 Just days before Peters’s arrival in Zanzibar, Bismarck had also notified Prime Minister Salisbury that their joint blockade should apply to all armed vessels in the area, which led to the confiscation of all the weapons Peters had purchased for the expedition.83 When Peters went and complained to the British naval officer who was holding his weapons, the captain’s response was simply: “C’est la guerre!” (That’s War!)84 And the local German consul proved to be of no help either, refusing to mediate Peters’s conflicts with the British and Zanzibari authorities.85

After nearly a month of frustration, Peters telegraphed the Emin Pasha committee in Berlin on April 29, asking them to contact the German Foreign Office and plead his case. When he had not heard back, he telegraphed again on May 6, and then, receiving no reply, again on May 10. On May 13, he finally received a curt telegraphic response from the committee, informing him that the “Foreign Office refuses all mediation and support.”86 Peters was livid. “If the Imperial Government did not wish that the German Emin Pasha Expedition should be undertaken,” he replied on May 17, “it should have forbidden the project” from the start. He added that “to have allowed the development of the project to the present point, and now to permit its being hindered under every imaginable pretext, . . . and even with the co-operation of the German authorities, is certainly a very peculiar method of advancing German interests and German honour.” However, while Peters was outraged, he was not deterred. As he continued in the very same telegram, “in the face of the difficulties in every direction, in face of the intrigues with which we have to fight daily, all of us here, I am proud to say, are only the more firmly resolved to carry on the undertaking to the utmost verge of possibility.”87 The German Emin Pasha Relief Expedition would go on.

On June 1, Peters crossed from Zanzibar to Bagamoyo, on the mainland, in a privately chartered vessel.88 From there he continued south to Dar es Salaam. Peters’s resolve would only strengthen with time and distance, later recalling that he “considered it more consonant with our national honour and our national interest to perish, on the sea or on the land, with my whole expedition, than to retreat before this paltry mass of obstacles and intrigues.”89 From Dar es Salaam, the expedition was officially launched on June 7, heading north up the East African coast by boat, with plans to land on the Kenyan coast near Kiwayu Island, just north of the German protectorate of Wituland. Since, by this point, Bismarck had instructed local German officials to neither let the expedition through the blockade at sea nor to pass through Wituland, this seemed the most promising approach.90 After a difficult journey up the coast, the expedition arrived at Kiwayu Bay on June 15.91 While Peters and the committee had initially planned for an expedition of upward of seven hundred, the various hurdles put in their way by the German government had shrunk their numbers to a little over one hundred.92 The twenty-five Somali soldiers Peters retained were armed only with hunting rifles, and the expedition had no goods whatsoever with which to buy passage through tribal territories.93 It was not exactly an auspicious beginning.

The expedition began its march toward and then up the River Tana on July 26, 1889.94 Their ultimate destination was Wadelai, some 1,200 km away in northern Uganda, where Emin Pasha was supposedly fending off attacks from the Mahdist Army. Once the expedition got underway, it became clear that Peters’s faculties for brutality had developed considerably since his East African expedition five years earlier. Conditions were difficult early on, and, as porters began to disappear in the night, Peters had some of them flogged, others shot, and, ultimately, all of them put in chains to prevent further escape.95 For the local population as well, the German Emin Pasha Relief Expedition would amount to a veritable campaign of terror. Peters and his followers plundered and razed villages, raided thousands of cattle, held dozens of captives, and battled anyone who resisted their advance.96 Peters had no evident misgivings about the conduct of the expedition either, claiming to have “found that in the end only the bullets of a repeater . . . make an impression on these wild sons of the steppe.”97

While the ultimate aim was to find Emin Pasha, and to annex territory around the Uganda-Sudanese border area, Peters would claim various territories for the German Empire as he progressed. The expedition’s first protectorate treaty was made on September 12, 1889, and they claimed new territory every few weeks from then on, planting a series of German flags in their wake as they advanced.98 Peters would discover along the way that Emin Pasha had long been rescued by the British expedition, having left from Wadelai for the East African coast in April 1889, months before Peters’s expedition had even begun.99 However, this ultimately mattered little. He resolved to press on to Uganda, where he had heard that the kabaka (king) of Buganda was in need of help against internal challenges, and Peters saw this as an opportunity to claim an even greater prize for the empire.100 Peters would be frustrated in this final ambition—the kabaka had no interest in a treaty of protection—and he had to settle for a treaty of amity and cooperation, which was signed on February 28, 1890.101

Buganda would be the culmination of the expedition, and, in mid-March, Peters and his followers began their journey back to the coast, traveling south on Lake Victoria and returning through German East Africa.102 They reached the coast at Bagamoyo on July 16, 1890, after having traveled over 3,000 km in a few weeks shy of a full year.103 Over the course of the expedition, Peters had signed between eight and ten treaties of protection.104 The question now was what Berlin would do with them.

Berlin Reacts

By April 1890, it was clear in Berlin that Peters had made it as far as Uganda, and by June news of his treaties began to reach European capitals.105 While Bismarck and other German leaders had clearly tried to prevent the expedition before it was launched, now that it had seen a measure of success, Peters’s actions had generated some constraints on leaders in Berlin. For one, the expedition had sunk the costs of acquiring these territories for the German Empire. Peters would be returning in mere months with a handful of admittedly dubious, though likely defensible, treaties of protection that stretched through Kenya and Uganda. If German leaders wanted these territories, they were theirs for the taking. And Peters’s martial successes in dealing with local tribes, though troubling from a humanitarian standpoint, showed that resistance may not be as heavy as might have been expected.

Perhaps a more important reason it may have appeared difficult to readily relinquish Peters’s claims, however, was that the expedition itself generated domestic political pressure in favor of imperial expansion. Peters had become among Germany’s most famous colonial figures, and he and the expedition were glowingly presented in the press and public as the embodiment of German courage and national honor.106 This was also the height of the “Scramble for Africa,” and the German public, like most European publics, was swept up in the rising tide of colonial enthusiasm.107 Expansionist fervor was strongest among some of Bismarck’s most important supporters in the Reichstag, narrowing the chancellor’s latitude in response.108 And Britain’s participation in the naval blockade only served to inflame these passions. As Herbert von Bismarck, the chancellor’s son and foreign minister, wrote to their ambassador in London on July 27, 1889, news of the confiscation of Peters’s weapons “had caused extreme excitement among the German public” and had “triggered a press campaign against England.”109 Peters and the committee did their own part to foster this public support. For instance, before leaving, Peters made public statements emphasizing the extent of support for the expedition in the Reichstag, in an effort to put pressure on Bismarck.110 The committee in Berlin also helped stoke moral outrage over the confiscation of Peters’s supplies by publicizing the issue, and using it to raise further funds.111 In short, the very fact of Peters’s having launched the expedition placed constraints on leaders in Berlin, hampering their ability to reject the territories he claimed.

However, there were also severe geopolitical risks associated with retaining Peters’s territorial claims. The key problem, of course, was the United Kingdom. While much of Kenya was formally independent, it clearly lay within Britain’s sphere of influence according to an agreement the two powers had come to in October and November 1886. This first agreement was followed up by what was known as the “hinterlands agreement” of July 1887, in which Prime Minister Salisbury and Chancellor Bismarck agreed that they should discourage territorial annexations in the hinterlands of each other’s spheres.112 Thus, Bismarck was on record, multiple times, recognizing many of these territories claimed by Peters as lying within the British sphere.

Another key factor was that Germany’s position vis-à-vis the United Kingdom, while strong in 1885 when the German East Africa claims were settled, had weakened considerably. With Britain looking increasingly likely to stay in Egypt for the time being, Bismarck’s support there became less crucial, and his bâton égyptien began to lose its bite.113 Germany’s own conflicts with both France and Russia, as well as a visible rapprochement between those two great powers, also meant that Germany increasingly needed Britain on its side.114 Friedrich von Holstein, an influential member of the German Foreign Office, wrote in October 1888 that “our colonial crises lie upon us like a nightmare, and we need England of all places. Our relations with the English government are being most carefully cultivated.”115 This sentiment was echoed at the highest levels, with Bismarck writing in early 1889, “At present we need England if peace is to be maintained.”116 In January of that year, Bismarck went as far as to make an offer of a formal alliance to Prime Minister Salisbury.117 While Salisbury would politely decline, it was an unmistakably clear signal of Bismarck’s view of his diplomatic position at the time.

Yet, perhaps the most important reason Germany faced geopolitical risk in considering Peters’s annexations was that the United Kingdom increasingly viewed the entire Nile Valley, which included large portions of Uganda and Sudan, as a core geostrategic interest.118 When Britain invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882, it gained control of the Suez Canal, a crucial choke point in passage between Europe and British India. And the security of Egypt, in turn, was seen as depending critically on that of the Nile. Genuine, though perhaps not all that well founded, fears of a rival great power coming in and diverting or obstructing the flow of the Nile thus led the British to view the entire course of the Nile—from Lake Victoria in Uganda, through Sudan, and into Egypt—as a crucial imperial interest. Once the United Kingdom had determined it would stay in Egypt—which was publicly announced in November 1889—Uganda became utterly indispensable.119 Even Germany’s protectorate in Wituland, on the Kenyan coast, began to be looked on with increasing anxiety.120 And the British made their feelings known. For instance, in December 1888, Prime Minister Salisbury asked Bismarck to define his attitude to the German Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, a veiled notification of Britain’s special interests in the area.121 And, during a visit to London in March 1889, Herbert von Bismarck was astonished by how quickly each of his interlocutors brought up East African affairs and potential colonial crises there.122 As Prime Minister Salisbury put it in March 1890, his government was firmly resolved to defend the “Nile Valley against the dominion of any outside power.”123

A Dismissal and a Decision

Given his diplomatic acumen, Chancellor Bismarck was sensitive to these risks early on. In his September 1888 memorandum to the kaiser, he argued against supporting the Emin Pasha Expedition on the grounds that it was likely to antagonize the British, which regarded Egypt as a vital interest.124 In December 1888, Bismarck personally assured Prime Minister Salisbury that he would give the Peters expedition no official support whatsoever.125 The following June, with the expedition just about to commence, Bismarck had his ambassador in London assure Salisbury that “Uganda, Wadelai, and other places to the east and north of Lake Victoria Nyanza are outside the sphere of German colonization.”126 And to make his views known more publicly, in August 1889, Bismarck stated in the German newspaper Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung that his government was opposed to the expedition on the grounds that “England regards [it] as an interference in her sphere of interest.” “English friendship,” he added in the article, “is far more valuable for us than anything which the expedition could hope to achieve.”127 The chancellor had made up his mind before Peters’s expedition even got its start.

However, a change was to come that would shake the Wilhelmstrasse to its core. As noted earlier, with the death of Wilhelm I in March 1888, the German throne was soon occupied by his grandson, Wilhelm II.128 The young nationalistic kaiser had dramatically different foreign policy views from Bismarck and was less pliant than his grandfather had been on these issues. After clashing with Bismarck for twenty-one months, particularly on Russia policy, Wilhelm dismissed the chancellor in March 1890, while Carl Peters was still on the Emin Pasha Expedition, annexing territory deep in the East African interior.129 This change was seen with alarm in many European capitals, not least in London. Salisbury had been deeply concerned with the rise of Wilhelm II and referred to Bismarck’s dismissal as “an enormous calamity, of which the sinister effects will be felt in every part of Europe.”130 Wilhelm II was also more sympathetic to the Peters expedition than his grandfather or Bismarck had been, raising new questions about how he would respond to Peters’s fait accompli.131

As it would turn out, the new government in Berlin would see the expedition much like the old one, desiring to avoid conflict with London rather than claim new East African territory.132 In fact, leaders in Berlin wanted to move rapidly toward a settlement of their outstanding conflicts with London in the region, before, as their ambassador in London put it, “an intolerable situation” developed.133 In early May 1890, the new foreign minister, Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein, gave his British interlocutors “the positive assurance that any action . . . taken by Dr. Peters would be considered as null and void by the German government.”134 He was echoed a few days later by another foreign office official, who, in conversation with a British interlocutor, affirmed that his government recognized that “Uganda at least as far as one degree south is in the British sphere.”135 And news that Peters had signed some sort of treaty with the kabaka of Buganda, which arrived in Europe in late May 1890, made leaders in Berlin only more eager to get an agreement with London as soon as possible.136

While the back-and-forth between the two governments would last a few more weeks, the ultimate result was the Anglo-German Treaty of July 1, 1890.137 According to the terms of this agreement, the United Kingdom gained the German protectorate of Wituland, territory between Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, and recognition of its sphere of influence over Uganda and its protectorate over Zanzibar. In return, Germany gained some small concessions in West Africa as well as Heligoland, an archipelago of less than 2 km2 off of Germany’s North Sea coast.138 With this agreement, Germany’s presence in the area was limited to German East Africa proper, which, after the failures of the DOAG, had recently been converted to a full-fledged state-run colony.139 Thus, Britain effectively gained everything it wanted, and stopped the threat of German expansion in East Africa in its tracks.140 Peters’s fait accompli had been firmly and thoroughly rejected before he had even made it out of the interior.

When Carl Peters arrived back on the coast at Bagamoyo on July 16, 1890, and learned that his claims had been relinquished, he was so enraged that he was rendered speechless.141 Upon his arrival in Zanzibar a few days later, he cabled Berlin, trying to get the decision reversed, but it was no use. What was done was done.142 He shortly thereafter departed for home, arriving on German soil on August 18, 1890.143 German leaders recognized, however, that they would have to handle Peters with caution. He still had a large popular following, was well connected with the German press, and had proven himself to be an able political agitator. To both placate his anger and indulge his narcissism, the new chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, personally telegraphed Peters, promising that he would be rewarded by the kaiser if he could remain on his best behavior. A few weeks later, Wilhelm II would bestow upon Peters the Order of the Crown, Third Class, and he received other decorations from the king of Saxony and the grand duke of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach.144 Peters would be back in East Africa just one year later, serving as an imperial commissioner for German East Africa in the Kilimanjaro region. However, he was soon forced to resign in disgrace after his penchant for brutality helped spark yet another popular armed uprising against German rule.145

This chapter presented the comparative case studies of successful and failed inadvertent expansion by Germany in East Africa in 1885 and in Kenya and Uganda in 1890. This chapter is unique in that it presented the book’s only two cases of inadvertent expansion via political annexation, as opposed to armed conquest. Both cases support the theory of inadvertent expansion presented in chapter 1. First, the Kenya and Uganda case showed unauthorized peripheral expansion to be a manifestation of a principal-agent problem: a divergence of preferences between Berlin and the East African periphery and a lack of telegraphic communications hampered Berlin’s ability to communicate with, and potentially control, the expedition. Second, in both cases the very act of engaging in territorial expansion generated constraints that made withdrawal appear difficult from the perspective of leaders in the capital. Peters’s faits accomplis both sunk the costs of territorial acquisition and helped generate domestic political pressure on leaders in Berlin in favor of acceptance. And third, both cases showed how expectations of geopolitical risk play a crucial role in driving decisions of whether to accept or reject the territorial fait accompli. In the case of East Africa in 1885, a lack of geopolitical risk, when combined with domestic political pressure, convinced Bismarck that the potential costs of accepting the territory were sufficiently low as to merit its acquisition. In contrast, in the case of Kenya and Uganda in 1890, geopolitical risk in the form of British imperial interests convinced both Bismarck, and then Wilhelm II, that the costs of acceptance were far too great, resulting in territorial relinquishment.

At least part of what is striking about these two cases are the key leaders in the capital who ultimately accept and reject the faits accomplis. In the case of German East Africa in 1885, it was Otto von Bismarck, the reluctant imperialist and practitioner of Realpolitik—who famously said, “All this colonial business is a sham”—who made the ultimate decision to retain the territory his agents had claimed.146 In contrast, in the case of Kenya and Uganda in 1890, it was Wilhelm II, the aggressive nationalist and proponent of Weltpolitik—who would aim to give Germany its “place in the sun”—who exercised restraint in deciding to relinquish the territorial claims.147 The cases of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, and the theory of inadvertent expansion more broadly, illuminate the various constraints—both domestic and international—that leaders operate under, pressuring them to make decisions that are at odds with what might be expected based on their foreign policy views.