The use of non-white mercenaries in conquest and policing was common to all colonial powers, solving problems of expense in maintaining large colonial armies, as well as susceptibility of European soldiers to disease in tropical environments. Thomas Morlang overviews the use of indigenous mercenaries and police throughout the German overseas empire in Africa, China, and the Pacific, emphasizing that they were neither the ‘loyal subalterns’ that postcolonial German discourse often asserted, nor the brutal henchmen of colonial overrule, but something in between: men who enlisted for better pay or the possibility of war booty, greater social power, and prestige, and sometimes because they were compelled to do so or had few other alternatives in the colonial economy. Each chapter looks at a different colony in the German empire, and at how the composition of colonial soldiery and police differed based on local circumstances. The book ends with a brief overview of the fate of former colonial mercenaries after the end of the German colonial empire.
Early attempts by German concession companies to create company police to guard warehouses and assert local control led to formal colonialism and ongoing conquest and control, demanding fighting forces trained in European weaponry and tactics. Only in German Southwest Africa and Kiaochow were white soldiers the mainstay of the military force. Colonial armies were racially hierarchical, commanded by German officers and NCOs, with some indigenous non-commissioned officers, and general troops drawn from different indigenous people. Colonial rulers preferred soldiers from external colonies who would not sympathize with local people, especially from ethnicities regarded as ‘martial’, such as Vai or Kru from Liberia, Hausa or Yoruba from Nigeria, ‘Sudanese’ from the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, or Shangaan from southern Africa. Difficulties with finding adequate recruits often meant that the first generation were really forced laborers, including some ransomed slaves made to work off their redemption price as soldiers or police. Soldiers from external colonies tended to be better paid and more trusted. Over time, local people were incorporated more fully into colonial armies, forming the majority of soldiers by the end of colonial rule. Tensions over religion and ethnicity often kept troops from forging an esprit de corps, which served German purposes, since there was always great fear that mercenary armies would turn against them or lead anti-colonial uprisings. Muslim soldiers were often preferred, as they were considered to be more disciplined, in part because they refrained from alcohol. Colonial soldiers were hated by local people because of the brutalities they committed, stealing food and livestock, raping women, forcing people to work in their fields, and in many ways profiting from colonial rule. Their greater earning power than most other Africans also made them good marriage prospects, and figures who were often looked up to. Some invested their wages to become rural power brokers or urban traders after the end of their service.
Because of gaps in the primary literature that often rendered colonial soldiers invisible, except as a nondescript mass, the author illustrates the individuality of colonial troops with a life history in each chapter. Surviving evidence exists mostly for those veterans with unusual life trajectories. For example, Kleist Sykes, born in the German East African town of Pangani in 1894, was the son of a Nyaturu woman and a Shangaan mercenary from Mozambique recruited for the original Schutztruppe created to put down the Bushiri uprising in 1889 and conquer inland regions under German rule thereafter. After education in reading and writing at the government school in Dar es Salaam, which enabled him to keep a diary of his service, Sykes himself joined the Schutztruppe in 1906. He was promoted to lance corporal in the early stages of the First World War, ended up in a Belgian POW camp in 1917, and, after the war, became a clerk in the British railway administration. Sykes went on to help found the Tanganyika African Association that eventually spawned the Tanganyika African National Union, the political party that brought the colony to independence after Sykes's death. His life story nicely illustrates the ambiguities of collaboration and resistance enmeshed in the lives of other colonial mercenaries.
The breadth and comparison offered in this fine book is at the expense of a detailed analysis of how colonial soldiers were entangled with the political economies and local cultures of individual colonies. Nor does it mention the role of irregular troops (such as rugaruga or Maasai in German East Africa) who were instrumental in colonial conquest. Morlang points the way for future, fuller treatments of the complicated role of colonial troops in the German colonies.
