Making Enemies: British and German Missionary Personnel in East African Internment Camps during the First World War^*

Abstract

In August 1911, a Protestant missionary conference was held for the first time in Dar es Salaam in German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika). This interdenominational conference was similar to those that had been held in other colonial locations. Until the development of railway networks had made travel far more feasible, the vast distances of German East Africa had hindered such collaborative missionary conferences.¹ Over five days, fourteen missionary representatives from the Berlin Mission, the Leipzig Mission, the Bethel Mission, the Moravian Church and the English Church Missionary Society came together to discuss mutual issues and to plan common work for the greater goal of evangelizing some 7 million Africans in German East Africa. During the conference week, a mission festival was also held, with over 350 local people in attendance, both Christians and non-Christians. The participants considered such demonstrations of local interest as well as the collaborative spirit among missionary groups to be part of the success of this Anglo-German conference. To facilitate further collaboration, a subsequent conference was planned for 1914 at Kilimanjaro.² Subsequently, a large colonial exhibition under the patronage of Governor Heinrich Schnee was planned for Dar es Salaam in August 1914, and it was thought more prudent to hold the next interdenominational mission conference in the colony’s capital during the colonial exhibition.³ Looking forward to the next Anglo-German conference, Martin Klamroth of the Berlin Mission opined, ‘May the next conference prove to us that the hopes we all placed in this union have not been in vain.’⁴ His hopes were not realized. By August 1914 the colonial exhibition and the interdenominational conference had been cancelled, and the outbreak of the First World War halted any further Anglo-German collaborations.

The war created animosity between British and German religious groups that contrasted starkly with the spirit of internationalism and ecumenicalism in Dar es Salaam in 1911 and, indeed, with the spirit of the celebrated Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910, an event hailed as the pinnacle of collaboration between British, Continental and North American Anglican and Protestant missionary groups.⁵ Missionaries working in the German colonies in Africa did not expect the war to reach them or even that they would be affected by the war. They had no idea they might be captured and interned in colonial spaces, and when they were, they considered their internment disrespectful of both their profession as missionaries and their status as Europeans.

This article details the experiences of German and British missionaries as prisoners of war in the entangled setting of colonial East Africa during the First World War. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of the situation and how personal experiences fed into political actions in the years after the war. It argues that while the Anglo-German relationship prior to the First World War had been characterized by competition and collaboration between religious groups, the war prompted a shift in perspective among many German and English missionaries, who increasingly embraced a more nationalistic outlook, an attitude that aligned with broader public opinion. The focus here on the narratives of individuals in East Africa is particularly helpful in light of the entangled political environment, in which German and British missionaries were interned in both German and British colonial spaces. East Africa, a heterogeneous space containing an estimated 177 micro-nations, was involved in the conflict amongst the four major European empires of Britain, Belgium, Germany and France.⁶ By describing the experiences of interned Protestant men in colonies that were part of both the British and German empires at various stages, this article provides new insights into how the war soured Anglo-German relations. The writings of individuals informed the institutional positioning of religious groups from belligerent nations.

The article begins by providing an overview of social and cultural approaches to the First World War and to civilian and prisoner-of-war camps. It then examines in chronological order of internment the narratives of three men: the German Johannes Hofmann (Leipzig Mission missionary in British East Africa, interned from 1915 to 1916); the Englishman John Briggs (Church Missionary Society missionary in German East Africa, interned from 1915 to 1916); and the German Traugott Bachmann (Moravian missionary in German East Africa, interned from 1916 to 1919). In a final section, the article considers how the narratives of interned missionaries in East Africa contributed to broader Anglo-German tensions after the First World War even amidst attempts to mend rifts between religious groups. The article makes the larger point that the experiences of religious actors in colonial Africa had a significant impact on the broader Anglo-German relationship both during and after the First World War.

I. The First World War and Civilian and Prisoner-of-War Camps

The experiences of people in military and civilian camps in Europe has been a focus for those writing about the First World War. In 1931, Hans Weiland and Leopold Kern published a two-volume account with 477 contributions that included personal recollections, a statistical appendix and hundreds of photographs, maps and illustrations documenting experiences of internment.⁷ Most of this material focused on Europe, where around 8 million people were held captive over the course of the war, of whom around 1.3 million were German-speaking.⁸ Weiland and Kern’s work includes only a short section on prisoners in Africa, all of whom were of European origin. The only (former) missionary narrative included, that of Hermann Röseler, is one of reconciliation, which—as this article will demonstrate—was not representative of the majority of missionaries interned in Africa.⁹ Weiland and Kern undertook this massive project to maintain social awareness of the plight of prisoners of war, but despite their efforts, prisoner-of-war memoirs did not figure in the collective memory of the Great War in the twentieth century.¹⁰

The last few decades have seen a growing number of social and cultural histories of the First World War that detail the experiences of people located in Africa during the war, expanding the scope of the investigation of those affected by the war.¹¹ Anne Samson notes that this development pushes beyond the more conservative focus on local and military aspects of the war, which have been extensively studied, to offer a deeper understanding of the experiences of communities of both Africans and Europeans who were not part of the military operations.¹² The experiences of Africans are not well documented in European archives, despite the fact that in Africa substantially more Africans—as well as troops from other colonial spaces such as India—were involved in the conflict than Europeans.¹³ As Michelle Moyd notes and as scholars from Africa such as De-Valera Botchway have highlighted, the involvement of Africans is vital to our understanding of the war as a global event, yet their experiences are rarely included in European narratives of the war.¹⁴ When they are present, it is often in the context of European spaces.¹⁵ By drawing on the writings of interned European missionaries in Africa, this article demonstrates the connections between experiences in Africa and the changing nature of Anglo-German relations. Yet these writings do not provide us with insights into Africans’ experiences of the war. The missionary reports examined here reproduce broader surviving European evidence in that they often say little about local people’s experiences, even though African Christians ran the missions in the absence of interned Europeans. The war had consequences for African Christianity: for example, the opportunity for the nationalization of local churches led to the severing of some of the hierarchical relationships with Europe.¹⁶ These consequences could not be foreseen in the immediacy of the war when the reports were written.

As Heather Jones has noted, ‘The sheer global range of the prisoner of war camp network during the First World War is staggering.’¹⁷ Not only were there prisoner-of-war camps in Europe, but there was an extensive network in non-European spaces. Prisoners, Mahon Murphy has shown, were transferred around this intercontinental network, often making it difficult to track their movements.¹⁸ Thus, for example, German missionaries from East Africa were sent from camp to camp in East Africa, then to camps in South Africa, then to British East Africa, then to British India, and then to Egypt; on their release they returned to Europe.¹⁹

We know that British clergy engaged in nationalistic and imperialistic rhetoric, greeting the war, Aimee Barbeau notes, ‘as an opportunity for religious renewal and solidarity in pursuit of a national vocation’.²⁰ The same can be said of religious leaders in Germany.²¹ Nonetheless, the voices of missionaries have frequently gone unheard. We know little, for example, of how missionaries in East Africa responded to the war between their respective nations and the tensions that continued after it ended.

This article draws on records found in government and missionary archives in different countries and on more than one continent, which is typical of the demands of archival research on prisoners of war in colonial spaces.²² All of the accounts studied here are by European men, reflecting the gendered and racial character of archival material.²³ Although the article therefore inevitably privileges narratives left by European male missionaries, it attempts to read these records against the grain to maintain an awareness of African engagement in the war, which in turn provides insight into the intercommunal complexities of the situation.

II. German(s in) East Africa

When Traugott Bachmann arrived in German East Africa (present-day territory in Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda) in 1892, he was twenty-six years old; the German colony was just seven years old.²⁴ Bachmann was one of many European Christian missionaries in German East Africa who had been part of the missionary work in East Africa that had begun in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century. German colonialism is often seen as starting with the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 (also known as the Berlin Congo Conference, West Africa Conference or Berlin West Africa Conference), when major European powers gathered at the invitation of Otto von Bismarck, the German imperial chancellor, to discuss and regulate European colonization as well as trade in Africa. This process of formalizing European colonization in Africa was undertaken, as many historians have critically noted, without the consultation or participation of Africans.²⁵ At the conclusion of the conference, the General Act of the Berlin West Africa Conference, dated 26 February 1885, was signed by representatives of the fourteen participating states. At this time a number of British missionary societies were already working in East Africa, including the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, the London Missionary Society (LMS), and the United Free Church of Scotland. After the conference and the regulation of colonization and trade in East Africa by European powers, there was a renewed attempt by Europeans, including missionary groups, to expand and consolidate gains from the ‘scramble for Africa’.²⁶ Amongst the ideals agreed upon was a respect for religious liberty, with the General Act allowing for religious toleration and freedom of consciousness. The act allowed Protestant and Catholic missionary groups of various nationalities to work within the colonial spaces of states other than their own. Further German colonial laws allowed non-German missionaries in German East Africa to erect buildings for worship and to express their religion freely.²⁷ With the subsequent German territorial claims on East Africa and the formalization of the administration of German East Africa, German missionary societies looked to expand their work in these new territories, despite the financial strain that many German religious societies were already experiencing. National pride and an assumed moral responsibility for people living in German colonial spaces were two reasons why German missionary groups were anxious to work in the newly acquired colonies.²⁸

In 1884, German traders had signed their first treaties with local leaders; further treaties signed in the late 1880s defined the borders of German East Africa and British East Africa.²⁹ Twelve such treaties were initiated by the German ‘explorer’ Carl Peters, founder of the Society for German Colonization (Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation), who travelled to East African Tanganyika and made twelve treaties with East African chiefs of Uzigua, Uluguru and Usagara. Historians have described these treaties as bogus.³⁰ For Peters, however, they had the desired effect of producing an imperial charter (Schutzbrief) from Bismarck in early 1885 that declared the areas under ‘treaty’ to be within the sphere of German colonial influence from the day after the Berlin conference closed.³¹ By 1890, much of mainland held by the sultan of Zanzibar had been ceded to Germany, an act that was resisted by many people, including mainland Arab traders.³² Resistance to German colonial rule was widespread amongst many groups, including the Hehe (Wahehe), who had been fighting the Germans since 1891 under the leadership of Sultan Mkwawa. The conflict made it difficult for the young Bachmann to travel through their territory to reach the first mission where he was stationed, Rungwe; the fighting necessitated a detour via lakes and rivers.³³

Bachmann was a Moravian missionary, a member of a Pietist-inspired missionary group that had originated in Germany and by the end of the nineteenth century had spread across all inhabited continents. It had begun its work in the southern Nyasa region of German East Africa in 1891 along with the Berlin Missionary Society, with which the Moravians divided the mission field. The Bethel Mission (originally Die Evangelische Missionsgesellschaft für Deutsch Ost Afrika) was already working in Dar es Salaam when the Berlin and Moravian missions began. Soon after, in 1893, the Leipzig Mission established its first missions in the north of German East Africa. It had already set up a mission in 1891 amongst the Wakamba people in East Africa. Initially the Leipzig Mission believed that this earlier mission was on German territory, but it fell under British administration, which caused concerns about the treatment of the German Lutheran missionaries. By 1913 the sale of the mission site to the American-based Africa Inland Mission was under serious consideration.³⁴

The Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded in London in 1799 and one of the oldest Christian missionary groups in East Africa, had begun work there in the 1840s through Ludwig Krapf, a German. By the 1870s, the CMS had extended its missionary work into Uganda, hoping to realize a plan for a chain of CMS missions linking West Africa with East Africa.³⁵ The first CMS mission in what would become German East Africa was established in 1878 as a support station for the supply route from the coast.³⁶ When the territory was subsequently claimed by the Germans, support from the British public for the CMS missions amongst the Wakaguru and Wagogo people of central German East Africa was lacklustre, evidence of a clear preference for missions in the British Empire.³⁷ Alongside the more-established British and German missions in German East Africa, in 1903 the German Seventh-Day Adventists also set up a mission. Three Catholic orders added to this Protestant religious mix: the Fathers of the Holy Ghost, the Benedictines and the White Fathers. These groups competed for converts to Christianity amongst the 6 million to 9 million Africans living in the area. The Christian religious setting was further complicated from 1909, when the Africa Inland Mission established new mission fields in German East Africa, taking over the 22-year-old CMS Nasa (also Nassa) mission in Usukuma.³⁸ The Africa Inland Mission was already working in British East Africa and the Congo, although its plans to extend further into German East Africa were thwarted by the outbreak of war.³⁹

Protestant missionary groups in German East Africa were united in their religious competition against Catholics and Muslims. The various Protestant groups had established a united front through publications and by means of informal networks that had then been secured by the inaugural Protestant mission conference held in Dar es Salaam. Bachmann attended the 1911 conference and noted that he felt out of place as all the other participants were so scholarly. He had been working on a station remote from other Europeans and felt inadequate.⁴⁰ He was glad not to be allocated any duties or responsibilities. John Briggs, a member of the CMS, and his colleague Thomas Westgate, from the Canadian CMS, were assigned to a number of collaborative translation projects, including mission schoolbooks.⁴¹ The war put a stop to other planned actives such as collaborative exhibits for the 1914 colonial exhibition in Dar es Salaam and a common Protestant journal. National feelings became stronger than religious ties.

III. Lutherans in British East Africa: Johannes Hofmann

Some of the first Germans to be interned in East Africa were in British colonies. By December 1914, Johannes Hofmann, one of the five missionaries of the Leipzig Mission in British East Africa, had already been detained. He had worked from 1886 amongst the Wakamba in Ukamba, an area in British East Africa near the border with German East Africa. The British and Americans had been seeking to create the United Native Church, which had isolated the Lutheran mission to such an extent that it was not able to expand. By early 1914, the United Native Church was seen by the Leipzig Mission as a threat to the Lutheran presence.⁴² Rather than be relegated to a small area, the Leipzig Mission decided to transfer its work and sell its three British East African missions to the Africa Inland Mission.⁴³ After its withdrawal from British East Africa the Leipzig Mission would, according to its plan, focus on its mission in German East Africa in the Kilimanjaro, Meru and Pare mountains. The decision to transfer its work over to the Africa Inland Mission was approved by the Leipzig Mission’s general assembly in June 1914.⁴⁴ Any concerns about theological differences between the confessional groups were seen as manageable, given that any affected Wakamba would be likely to follow the Germans into German East Africa.⁴⁵ In this instance, religious belief was considered more significant than arbitrary colonial borders.

Before this land transfer could be undertaken and anyone relocated, the war broke out. This left the German missionaries as enemy aliens in a British territory unable to provide the religious supervision that reflected the Christian practices of the Wakamba.⁴⁶ With the war making communication between Germany and East Africa difficult, Carl Paul, the director of the Leipzig Mission, used his connections with the Africa Inland Mission to request that its headquarters in Philadelphia gather information about Leipzig Mission missionaries in both British East Africa and German East Africa. This information was assembled by Charles Hurlburt, general director of the Africa Inland Mission, who was stationed in British East Africa. Hurlburt was asked to help the Lutherans wherever possible.⁴⁷ Religious leaders from the United States and Switzerland, both neutral countries in the earlier stages of the war, were often asked to assist German missions. Political sensibilities made support from missionary organizations in Britain impossible.⁴⁸

The Leipzig Mission had an inkling that missionaries might become prisoners of war.⁴⁹ And indeed, on 12 August 1914 Hofmann received a letter from A. S. Kitching, acting provincial commissioner in Mombasa, British East Africa, informing him that a state of war existed between ‘this country and Germany’.⁵⁰ Kitching assured Hofmann that he and his family could remain where they were as long as they did not ‘assist in any way the enemies of the state in which you reside’.⁵¹ Missionary groups tended to assume that they would be considered by governments as politically neutral, and as a result they were affronted by the idea that they should become prisoners of war.⁵² Although Hofmann was not initially interned, he was not allowed to leave the district of Kitui and, due to censorship restrictions, was not allowed to receive private letters, although the district commissioner, Stuart Scholefield, was willing to act as an intermediary.⁵³ The good will between Scholefield and Hofmann was demonstrated when, on 3 December 1914, Scholefield vouched under oath for Hofmann’s good character after the latter had been charged with communicating with Germany via non-approved means.⁵⁴ Just over a week later, however, Hofmann was taken into custody, and on 14 December he and his family were transported away from the mission station of Ikutha.⁵⁵ By 29 December 1914 he had arrived in Bombay (Mumbai) and was subsequently transferred to Ahmednagar, British India. This camp accommodated thousands of Germans, including missionaries to India and British East Africa.⁵⁶ Hofmann was reunited with other Leipzig Mission missionaries at Ahmednagar but was separated from his wife, Emilie (née Itzerott). The abruptness of his deportation meant that he had not been able to pack as he would have liked, and he was already lamenting that he did not have with him the books that would allow him to undertake his translation work.⁵⁷ Like many other missionaries, he held one of the most distressing aspects of being a prisoner of war to be the lack of work to fill the day, although Ahmednagar, it must be noted, was well served with a tennis court, football field, boxing ring and theatre, along with a well-stocked library.⁵⁸ Fortunately for Hofmann, he was quickly transferred to a civilian camp at Belgaum, India, where he was reunited with his wife and 8-year-old son and allowed to work as a chaplain.⁵⁹ Hofmann’s internment ended in early 1916, when he was shipped back to Germany on the SS Golconda.⁶⁰

Missionaries in the camp had no means to communicate regularly with their headquarters in Leipzig or the mission in East Africa and had no access to funds, which created further tensions and ill-feelings towards the British. Hofmann relied on small loans from women at the internment camps.⁶¹ The substantial funds that had been transferred into the Leipzig Mission’s accounts at a German bank in Mombasa were inaccessible due to the internment of the banking staff in the early weeks of the war.⁶² Finding out what had happened to the funds in order that the Leipzig Mission could close the account was a prolonged affair, with the Hamburg-based bank not permitted access to the accounting books in Mombasa. As the bank could not view the documents itself, in 1920 it engaged a former African worker at the bank to copy the books in order to gain some clarity about the financial affairs of the mission and the bank in general.⁶³ Such events demonstrate the entangled and protracted nature of colonialism in religious, political and economic issues.

The political and religious connections between East Africa, India, the United States, Germany and Britain are exemplified in a letter that Hofmann wrote while en route to the British internment camp of Ahmednagar, when he asked Hurlburt to request that Africa Inland Mission missionaries in East Africa care for the abandoned Leipzig Mission stations. Hofmann also requested that Hurlburt inform the influential Joseph Oldham, secretary of the 1910 World Missionary Conference and now secretary of the Continuation Committee in Edinburgh, of this arrangement. Oldham subsequently wrote to Carl Paul, director of the Leipzig Mission, informing him that Hurlburt had agreed to the request.⁶⁴ This convoluted network reflects the breakdown of normal communications during the war and indicates that the Germans preferred to look to Americans, rather than the British, for support. Before the Africa Inland Mission takeover of the former Leipzig Mission station in mid-1915, local Christian men had managed the mission in the absence of European missionaries. In the letters Hofmann received from Joseph and Benjamin, Wakamba men who were associated with the mission, they reported on the mission’s situation and progress.⁶⁵ Many of the African Christians remained loyal to the Lutheran Hofmann, wishing for him to return and take over again from the Africa Inland Mission, for doctrinal differences were leading to conflict.

The Leipzig Mission’s antagonism towards the British was heightened in 1916 when it was told that the British government had permanently taken over the mission.⁶⁶ Its members were further incensed when in the following year the British colonial government in East Africa sold off the Leipzig Mission’s station and personal property at auction. These actions broke the Leipzig Mission’s trust in the British colonial government, with the organization protesting that the expropriation contravened the Hague Convention of 1907, which prohibited the confiscation of private property.⁶⁷ The items sold at auction in British East Africa included private possessions and animals, including a pet dog, that the missionaries had left behind when the missions were hastily cleared of German personnel at the end of 1914.⁶⁸ When it came to the sale of possessions of the Leipzig Mission, the organization turned to the German Foreign Office for support, creating further political antagonism and a paper trail that continued into the 1930s.

IV. Anglicans in German East Africa: John Briggs

The first missionaries to be detained in German East Africa were British. Although many British civilians in German East Africa were interned at the beginning of the war, it was May 1915 before missionaries of the CMS in Ugogo and Ukaguru were taken into custody.⁶⁹ This delay was a result of the areas in which the CMS was active being farther from the frontier or the coast. In August 1914, CMS missionaries had travelled to Dodoma to ask the German district magistrate (Bezirksamtmann) about the status of British missionaries given that Britain and Germany were at war. They were cordially received and informed that they would be able to stay but should desist from missionary work or from ‘exercis[ing] any further influence over the native population of the Ugogo’.⁷⁰ Fear of insurrection was not particular to British East Africa, but rather, as Priyamvada Gopal has noted, an anxiety that had circulated in British colonial and imperial circles since the eighteenth century.⁷¹ Similar anxieties had been present amongst Germans in German East Africa since the beginning of colonial control, which had subsequently been punctuated by wars, uprisings or rebellions against the German colonial rulers, including the violent Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905–1907.

When war broke out, the tensions between the German administration and the British missionaries were heightened and projected onto local people. Word of the new situation was transmitted through a local government official, who had visited the missionary stations and, John Briggs subsequently recorded,

publicly denounced the iniquity of the English in forcing this war on Germany, warning the people to have nothing to do with a nation so desperately wicked. He told the Christians, and especially the teachers, to sever their connexion with the English Mission by either going over to Mohammedanism or returning to heathenism, and to destroy at once their Bibles, hymn books, Prayer Books, and all other books printed in England, which, he said, would get them into trouble if found in their possession.⁷²

Previously, Europeans had worked together within East Africa in general, forming a united front against local people, whom they believed inferior. War broke this European solidarity. By suggesting to Christian Africans that adherence to English religious practices would get them into trouble, the Germans sought to undermine any future British religious authority. As was typical of missionary narratives, Briggs assured his readers that any German threats had been ignored; rather the local Christians remained loyal to the CMS and to Christianity.⁷³ Other information was gleaned through publications such as the Swahili paper Pwani na Bara (Coast and Inland), which CMS missionaries dismissed as being overly patriotic towards the Germans. This four-page monthly paper produced by the Berlin Mission had first been published in 1910 and had a circulation of between 2,500 and 5,000 copies. As it frequently contained glowing reports on the German emperor and his family, it is not surprising that it was partial to describing Germans in a positive light.⁷⁴ The Daresalam Zeitung, to which the CMS missionary Thomas Westgate had access from February 1915, was dismissed as being just as one-sided.⁷⁵

For the first few months of the war, CMS missionaries remained largely unaffected. They were able to remain on their stations, provide Sunday services and evening prayers, and dispense medicine, although all other missionary activities were suspended.⁷⁶ That working relations between the CMS and the Berlin Mission remained cordial is evident from Karl Nauhaus’s offer of support for the CMS and his suggestion that the Berlin Mission could care for the CMS missions if the missionaries were interned. In light of a lack of funds, nothing came of this plan.⁷⁷

By April 1915 the policy of leaving the missionaries alone had changed. Ada Schnee, the wife of the colonial governor, Heinrich Schnee, noted that her husband interned women and missionaries in German East Africa as retaliation for the dreadful treatment of German women in the German colonies of Cameroon and Togo at the hands of the British and French.⁷⁸ For the British missionaries in German East Africa, this change in policy meant the loss of their freedom. In May 1915, CMS missionary John Briggs, who had spent a total of forty-six years in Ugogo in central Tanzania, was arrested. He reported that in addition to the Europeans on the mission station, at least thirty African Christians, many of whom were teachers at mission stations in Ugogo, were arrested and brutally treated.⁷⁹ As enemy civilians in a German colonial space, Briggs, his wife and his fellow missionaries were taken first to the internment camp at the CMS sanatorium in Kiboriani, then to Buigiri, and then to Tabora, where a military internment camp had been established; they were interned for sixteen months in total. As was also found in many German reports from the period, Briggs focused on the low quality of the food as well as the indignities faced by European missionaries when being guarded by African soldiers.⁸⁰ Briggs noted of these guards,

They were not bad fellows in their way, and would have been as respectful as most East Africans are to the European if they had not been encouraged either deliberately, or at least by the behaviour of the Germans themselves, to be rude to the English ‘schwein,’ as they called them. Orders were generally given to the prisoners through these native soldiers, and they had to be obeyed at all times—indeed it not infrequently happened that a man was punished for being ‘rude’ to a native soldier. This sort of indignity was one of the most trying features of life in the camp, and it is not an unfair conclusion to draw from it that the Germans were deliberately trying to degrade the English and lower their prestige, even though by doing so, as they must have known, they were running the risk of irreparably damaging that of the whole white race in Africa.⁸¹

Mahon Murphy has argued that symbolic violence to the standing of Europeans within the colony’s racial hierarchy was also evident in many German reports. He argues that many Germans claimed that the British ‘through the mobilisation of their multiracial empire for war and by turning against the Germans in Africa, had betrayed the common Christian civilising mission’.⁸² This damage to imperial prestige, Briggs proposed, was part of a broader attempt to ‘spark unrest and rebellion’.⁸³

Briggs was told that during his time in the internment camp the missionaries would be ‘the Kaiser’s guests’ and thus needed to take nothing with them.⁸⁴ As in many other reports from the time, however, Briggs complained about looting on the abandoned mission stations that occurred under the watch and sometimes at the hands of German soldiers.⁸⁵ The personal property of the British missionaries was not respected, behaviour deemed a slight against European respectability and international convention. Of all these perceived injustices, the worst ‘indignity’ was the reimagining of racial hierarchies that placed the English below the Germans, creating rifts in a unified European sense of racial superiority. Similar claims were made against the British by Germans interned by the British in German colonies, such as in Cameroon. These accusations are indicative that Europeans believed they had a collective responsibility to safeguard European respectability in front of Africans, in order to maintain racial hierarchies beneficial to Europeans.⁸⁶

After nine months at Kiboriani, the British captives were moved in February 1916 to the plains of Ugogo and to the CMS mission station of Buigiri, which had been turned into an internment camp.⁸⁷ There were about forty Europeans at this camp. The number increased when some ten Italians were transferred there, only to be released later when the Germans realized, according to Briggs, that the Italians were not at war with the Germans.⁸⁸ The stay at the Buigiri camp was short, with the group moved to Tabora at Easter 1916 amidst rumours that the English were about to invade German East Africa from the north. From the beginning of 1915, the German administration, including Governor Heinrich Schnee and his wife, Ada, had moved to Tabora from Dar es Salaam.⁸⁹ Despite its stricter discipline, Briggs preferred Tabora to the other camps, partly because it was better managed.⁹⁰ German reports of the camp suggest that the conditions there were brutal for the British.⁹¹ Up to 130 Europeans were interned at this camp by the Germans.⁹² Additionally, an uncertain number of Africans, including some of the teachers and adherents of the mission stations, were housed in the nearby ‘native internment camp’.⁹³ Also interned at Tabora were numerous Askari, African soldiers, who were reportedly maltreated at Tabora.⁹⁴

The legality of interning women and religious workers was questionable. The holding of women as prisoners was a concern for both the British and the Germans, for doing so might contravene international conventions as well as moral sensibilities.⁹⁵ As a solution, women and religious workers were permitted to live outside the camp and report at regular intervals to the commanders. As there was less security outside the camp and those who lived beyond its boundaries had to source and cook their own meals, those permitted to avoid the internment camp still often preferred to live within its confines.⁹⁶ Similar stories of choosing the ‘safety’ of internment with food over freedom without food were also related in other captive narratives of the period.⁹⁷

Rumours about when the captives might be released spread through the camps. That day came for Briggs on 19 September 1916, when he was freed by Belgian forces.⁹⁸ The Germans at Tabora dreaded the Belgiam arrival, for they were concerned about the safety of German women at the hands of African troops from Belgiam Congo.⁹⁹ When Tabora was taken, the camp was transferred to Belgian control and subsequently housed German prisoners of war, including women, children and men in the same spaces. According to Ada Schnee, the conditions were now much worse than when the Germans had interned the British, as when the British left they had taken with them everything that provided comfort, leaving the Germans who were interned subsequently with the bare minimum.¹⁰⁰

V. Germans in German East Africa: Traugott Bachmann

On 21 July 1916, two months before the Belgian troops freed Briggs and other British missionaries at Tabora, the German missionary Traugott Bachmann and his wife were interned in the British prisoner-of-war camp Blantyre, in Nyasaland (current day Malawi).¹⁰¹ The camp at Blantyre had been established primarily for the internment of women, but as he was aged over fifty, Bachmann was also placed there, along with similarly aged male missionaries from the Berlin Mission.¹⁰² Bachmann passed through more camps in his 26-month internment in prisoner-of-war camps than either Hofmann or Briggs. His carceral journey included time at camps in East Africa and South Africa and then another fifteen months in a civilian camp, Sidi Bishr, in Egypt. He was released in late October 1919, well after the war had ended.¹⁰³

In mid-August 1914 news of the war reached Mbozi, the mission station in the south-west of present-day Tanzania where Bachmann was located. For the first two years of the war he was protected by German troops. The border to British-controlled territory was only a nine-hour trek from the mission, and in order to deter British troops, a fort was built at Rwiba, between the border and Mbozi, with more Europeans therefore suddenly inhabiting the area than Bachmann had previously seen.¹⁰⁴ Local Christians at Mbozi were caught up in Bachmann’s enthusiasm for the war and his belief that Germany would win. They did express to him, however, their concerns about the way in which Europeans fought, disagreeing with the presence of females in the war camps, the duration of the war beyond three days and the involvement in the fighting of Christians, who were thus implicated in murder.¹⁰⁵ These concerns fed a fear amongst German missionary groups that Christian Africans would become disillusioned by the violence of the war between European nations and begin to question the Christian message offered by European missionaries, undermining Christianity in Africa and leading to nationalistic movements.¹⁰⁶

At Easter 1916, after the fall of Rwiba and as Briggs was being transferred to his third camp, Bachmann had his first encounter with the English enemy. Rather than retreat into the interior of German East Africa, where food was scarce, Bachmann decided to stay at Mbozi, believing he had no reason to fear the English. A British commander whom Bachmann referred to as simply Sillitoe gave word that the missionaries would be allowed to stay and requested they travel around the country to pacify the locals, Africans and Europeans alike, before staying at Rwiba for a couple of weeks.¹⁰⁷ To Bachmann’s disappointment, the time at Rwiba marked the beginning of his internment, even though the German troops under the command of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck were still undefeated.¹⁰⁸

Bachmann and other missionaries were first taken to the Moravian mission station of Mwaya, which British soldiers had extensively looted, again against international convention.¹⁰⁹ From there they were taken to camps at Barre, Fort Johnston, Zomba and Blantyre. At this last camp, communication with the outside world was limited to two letters a week. Bachmann used some of his rationed letters to inform the mission headquarters in Germany about the state of the Mbozi mission during the two years that it had been cut off from the outside world.¹¹⁰ He requested reading material be sent from Germany, including Moravian missionary periodicals and the Herrnhuter Losungen (Daily Watchwords), an annual Moravian publication that contained Bible verses for every day of the year.¹¹¹ The choice of these texts was indicative of the importance of the global community of the Moravian Church, which connected him to places well beyond the camp environment.

Bachmann’s new status as a political enemy of Britain affected ecumenical relations with British missionaries. For example, during his time at Blantyre, Bachmann was allowed to take a trip to the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa at Mponda. He was saddened to find the British missionaries now very cool towards the Germans in an obvious display of wartime nationalism.¹¹² More disappointment followed when, on 19 October 1916, the men were separated from their wives; they would be reunited only in late November 1919.¹¹³ In preparation for their transportation to India, the men were sent to Mombasa, in British East Africa. There they heard of the great hardships that the British were suffering at the camp of Tabora and that the harsh treatment of the Germans by the British was ostensibly retribution for the miserable conditions at Tabora.¹¹⁴ A similar argument was recorded by Briggs, who noted in his papers that if the English imposed rules against German prisoners, the Germans would surely impose the same rules on British prisoners.¹¹⁵ Retribution for brutalities against prisoners was a common concern and practice among the belligerent nations.¹¹⁶

In March 1917 Bachmann was sent to his fifth camp, at Tanga in German East Africa. During his time in the internment camps, particularly before the confiscation of his beloved ‘Erika’-brand typewriter, Bachmann remained able to write, with his work including a booklet on the life of the African evangelist Ambilishje that was subsequently published.¹¹⁷ The mission directors hoped that this story would encourage more people to pray for the orphaned mission community, thus locating ‘spiritual progress’ on the mission within broader geopolitical contexts.¹¹⁸ In January 1918 a further voyage was undertaken, not to India as expected but to Egypt, where Bachmann was held first in the Tura camp near Cairo and then in the camp at Maadi.¹¹⁹ Tura held around 600 prisoners, and Maade around 1,000.¹²⁰ Replicating many reports of the time, Bachmann described the awful conditions, including hunger, sickness and boredom. Lacking his typewriter and books, he found he had very little to do.¹²¹ The term ‘barbed-wire fever’ (Stacheldrahtfieber) was coined during the war to describe the mental agony of prolonged confinement without meaningful work or hope of freedom.¹²² That experience continued to affect many post-internment lives. In Bachmann’s case, he turned down an offer of linguistic work with the renowned German African linguist Carl Meinhof in the postwar years because of his ‘head troubles’.¹²³ In August 1918, and thus for the final months of the war, the men were moved to the civilian camp of Sidi Bishr, also in Egypt. Filling the camps with Germans from all walks of life created, according to another inmate, an environment in which patriotism was all the greater and the sense of the English as a common enemy was enhanced.¹²⁴

On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, Bachmann was still in the camp, and he remained there until October 1919. Camp life was difficult, especially after a life in which the missionaries controlled their environment, dictated the terms of engagement, assumed their superior knowledge, monitored moral and physical behaviour and were supported in their daily life through the labour of Africans.¹²⁵ Bachmann compared their plight to that of forty kings, all used to getting their own way, confined within a camp, united only by their hatred of the English.¹²⁶

VI. Back in Europe

In October 1919 Bachmann was still at Sidi Bishr, along with forty other men from various German missionary groups who had formerly worked in German East Africa, including Karl Nauhaus from the Berlin Mission and a missionary named Raum from the Leipzig Mission, who had both been at the Dar es Salaam conference in 1911.¹²⁷ A further eighty German missionaries remained in civilian or prisoner-of-war camps in Egypt, Japan, India, France, Spain, Great Britain and Australia, reflecting the global distribution of camps.¹²⁸ Even as lists of German missionary prisoners were being collated in Germany, arrangements were being made for the influential Anglican Joseph Oldham to meet with representatives of the German missionary societies to start to rebuild international ecumenical relationships.¹²⁹ Communications between British and German missionary bodies had continued throughout the war, albeit often very cool. Various issues still needed to be resolved, including the situation of German mission property, German access to mission fields in former colonies, the repatriation of German missionaries and compensation for looted private property, which ensured that among missionaries Anglo-German tensions remained high.¹³⁰ Whether Germans would be allowed back into former colonies was not yet clear. James Ogilvie of the Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Committee wrote in 1919 to Oldham to express his personal opinion:

I feel strongly that there should be a time limit tried for missionaries of belligerent nations entering territories accepted of their former enemies, eg. 10 or (preferably) 20 years. This would keep the German missionaries out for a fair length of time. But it would not keep Americans out of what was a Turkish Territory, seeing that America & Turkey have not been at war!¹³¹

Distrust, desire for retribution and anxiety about the state of Protestant missions generated propaganda from missionaries that heightened tensions. In the early years of the war, when German missionaries were being deported from Cameroon, the leadership of the German Protestant missionary societies under the German Protestant Mission Committee (Deutsche Evangelische Missions-Ausschuss), an umbrella committee of the most prominent Protestant mission societies in Germany and Switzerland, were outraged at the treatment of German missionaries in British and German colonies, with some members wishing to make a public matter of it.¹³² Some missionary bodies, such as the Basel Mission, which was based in Switzerland and greatly affected by the deportations, were reluctant to be so obviously partisan.¹³³ In a ‘top-secret’ letter, Oldham opined to Friedrich Würz of the Basel Mission that the heated emotions aroused by the complex situation had placed the national bodies against each other and that the opinions of each party held some truth.¹³⁴

After four years of war, including extended periods of internment, the willingness to forgive and forget was limited. Bachmann heightened continuing tensions through emotive lectures in Germany that expressed his hatred for how the British had treated Germans in internment camps.¹³⁵ Many publications, from both religious and military sources, detailed brutal treatment of missionaries as prisoners and the slight to the German people it included.¹³⁶ These publications were facets of the propaganda war conducted by all sides in the conflict, which used rhetorical devices such as ridicule, scapegoating and distain for the political and cultural ideas of the enemy.¹³⁷

Briggs published his memories of his time in imprisonment in a CMS publication that appeared in 1918 with the title In the East Africa War Zone. He was dismissive of the German administration during the war period as well as the German Lutheran missions in the colony, opining that Britain should have purchased the colony when it had the chance, rather than leave it in the hands of the brutal Germans.¹³⁸ His major accusation ran,

the German Government were themselves arranging propaganda against the English by every means at their disposal, which probably included their own Missions; and they could not believe the English Government had made preparation for the same and used the English Mission for that purpose. It has been found many times during the war that the Germans invariably accuse other people of the very things that they are themselves doing, in that way seeking to find excuse for their own conduct. Something of this sort is the only possible explanation of the absurd as well as brutal attempt which they made to extort under torture from the native teachers confessions of things which they had never done, and to obtain from them by the same means information against the English missionaries which they were quite unable to give.¹³⁹

Briggs’s book was indicative of anti-German propaganda of the period, particularly in deploying rhetoric of a kind known in Weimar Germany as ‘lies of colonial guilt’ (Kolonialschuldlüge).¹⁴⁰ Simply put, this concept suggested that the Germans did not deserve to have their colonial possessions returned to them as their treatment of ‘subject races’ had not been befitting of good colonial masters.¹⁴¹ The CMS should take over the religious work of the Germans, noted Briggs’s colleague Thomas Westgate.¹⁴² In his book In the Grip of the German, published in 1918 and based on a hand-written diary he had kept during 1915 and 1916, Westgate made clear that he wished for the British Empire to ‘make it impossible for Germany ever again to repeat her crimes’.¹⁴³ These sentiments reflect what the Anglican historian Rowan Strong has identified as ‘Anglican Imperialism’, which posited that the imperialist reach of Britain, and its further colonial expansion, was justified in the Church of England, which believed itself divinely appointed to bring Christianity to non-Europeans.¹⁴⁴ This religious rhetoric, Aimee Barbeau notes, ‘complicated standard narratives about modern secularization by signalling the interconnectedness of religion, national culture, and politics during the early twentieth century’.¹⁴⁵

Discussions between British, German and US missionary groups were strained in the period immediately after the war, particularly after a German missionary in a spirit of reconciliation had stated at an international missionary meeting at The Hague in October 1919—whilst the Paris peace talks were still underway—that Germany had been morally wrong to invade Belgium.¹⁴⁶ His words led to further tensions, heightened emotions and splits between the British and German groups as well as among the German missionary groups, particularly because none of the members from the Allied nations acknowledged their own nation’s wrongdoings. These circumstances help explain why Karl Axenfeld of the Berlin Mission tried to direct matters behind the scenes. Rather than attempt to calm the waters in a meeting with Joseph Oldham, Axenfeld was more interested in being present when ‘our East Africans from Egypt’ returned.¹⁴⁷ When they did return, they did not experience anything like the pomp and ceremony that had greeted Germans who had been interned in East Africa who had walked through the streets of Berlin in February 1919 or the triumphant marches of Paul Lettow-Vorbeck and Heinrich Schnee in March 1919. The German missionaries faced an uncertain future in Germany and a question mark hovered over whether they could ever return to the mission field. Many of them brought with them a new hatred for the British that stemmed from the treatment they had endured in the internment camps, a sentiment that sat neatly with the resentment that many Germans felt towards the British in light of the ‘lies of colonial guilt’ and ‘lies of war guilt’ (Kriegsschuldlüge) that would dominate the German political landscape.¹⁴⁸ For many missionaries it was morally wrong for men of religion to have been treated like men of war.

VII. Conclusion

In the postwar years, hostilities, tensions and distrust overshadowed Anglo-German relations. These same sentiments were evident in the relationship between British and German missionary groups, with accounts of harsh and unjust treatment from formerly interned missionaries from East Africa contributing to the larger mass of propaganda from many parts of the globe. The negotiations to allow German missionaries back into the former German colonies were slow, complicated and punctuated by a nationalist intransigence coloured by recollections of the treatment of missionaries overseas.

In 1925, German missionaries received permission from the British government to return to their abandoned missions in territories under British mandate. These missions were home to loyal African Christian communities, but they were also sites of bitter memories of religious potential and cooperation destroyed by war. The Anglo-German missionary relationship had been substantially damaged by the war. Although ecumenical relations began to improve from the mid-1920s, German mission societies, spearheaded by the German Protestant Mission Committee, collaborated with the revisionist colonial movement in the interwar period to demand the return of the German colonies and to clear Germany’s reputation in the face of the ‘lie of colonial guilt’.¹⁴⁹ Religious competition and collaboration had once marked the Anglo-German relationship, but the effects of the war led many German and English missionaries to become more nationalistic. The missionary experience examined in this article has demonstrated that their relationship was not a story dictated by national fronts before, during and after hostilities, but rather a more complicated narrative of religious and supranational entanglements that were frayed by the war.

Footnotes