In the late 1800s, European colonizers built armies of African recruits to conquer the territories that later became colonies. European metropolitan governments generally demanded that their men-on-the-spot keep the costs of establishing formal rule over colonies low. Colonial armies thus drew on African recruits since they cost far less than deploying large numbers of European soldiers to Africa. Colonizers also reduced costs by using these same African soldiers, their families and dependents, and others as labor sources, both in garrison and on campaign.

This essay examines one colonial context—German East AfricaFootnote ¹—to illustrate some of the complex interrelationships between labor and the military. African soldiers of the German colonial army, known as askari, were initially recruited to defeat a rebellion led by coastal patrician leaders against German trading interests. The first recruits to the Wissmanntruppe, named after its founder, Major Hermann von Wissmann, came from disparate locations, including Egypt, Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), Eritrea, Somalia, and the Swahili Coast.Footnote ² In 1891, the army became the Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika (Imperial Protectorate Force for German East Africa). After about 1895, most askari who volunteered to join the Schutztruppe came from within German East Africa. These included Wanyamwezi, Wasukuma, and Manyema men from the central steppe and lake regions of German East Africa. Additionally, a number of the original “Sudanese” soldiers from Egypt continued to serve in the senior askari ranks throughout the German period.Footnote ³ The askari thus came from many different locations with distinct socioeconomic histories, yet they brought with them certain common understandings of how they might achieve and reinforce claims to higher status than the majority of colonized subjects living within German East Africa. Most notably, they sought to build large households composed of wives, children, and other dependents as visible markers of status and prestige. Their service in the Schutztruppe, with its relatively high wages, uniforms, and extractive practices, provided a singular route for them to achieve such status. The Schutztruppe's conquest of German East Africa greatly limited previously existing options for young men to achieve manhood through the performance of soldierly masculinities, since it was not in the organization's interest to foster competing military identities. Askari who volunteered to serve in the Schutztruppe did so because they intended to become “big men” in their local contexts.

Before they could fully achieve such status, however, askari had to prove their dedication as members of the Schutztruppe and servants of colonialism. As they advanced through the ranks, they subordinated aspects of their individuality to German colonial authority and ideologies, including the racist and civilizationist ideals of “educating Negroes to work.”Footnote ⁴ Even if the askari perceived themselves as being of higher status than most East African colonized subjects by virtue of their authority and ability to use force, German officers and administrators expected and needed them to contribute concretely to colonial economic goals. They thus acted as laborers when they were not engaged in other duties, such as military training, expeditions, or warfare. If not training or otherwise occupied, they worked on construction and beautification projects around the colonial military and administrative centers known as bomas. In addition to their own labor assignments, askari guarded and oversaw prisoners sentenced to work on chain gangs. Their roles in the colonial labor regime underscore the degree to which colonial militaries, labor, and punitive structures reinforced one another on a daily basis. Recognition that these features of colonial governance were intertwined highlights another key point: Colonial states' political and economic viability, and their political authority, depended on their African soldiers and the free and unfree labor forces they recruited, conscripted, and supervised.

The Schutztruppe and other colonial armies in Africa conceded early on that their African soldiers' effectiveness correlated directly to whether they had their families with them at their stations and on the march. Indeed, the initial contingent of “Sudanese” soldiers recruited from Egypt in 1890 insisted that they be allowed to bring their families with them to East Africa, thus setting a precedent that became the norm for Schutztruppe askari. Later, when Wanyamwezi, Wasukuma, and Manyema men became the majority of the rank and file, they too drew on past precedents in East African caravan culture by incorporating wives, children, and dependents into boma and campaign life.Footnote ⁵ The presence of family members and dependents were the living proof of an askari's claims to manhood and prestige; therefore, askari status clearly rested on gendered understandings of how to mobilize and apportion labor within the household. At the same time, askari families and dependents contributed substantially to the labor pool on and around the bomas, and they frequently accompanied military columns on expeditions.Footnote ⁶ Their involvement in both military garrison life and life on the march drew on previous northeastern and eastern African military and work labor practices.Footnote ⁷ Their work, usually uncompensated, helped control the costs of colonial administration, while also ensuring the efficient handling of military logistical functions during peacetime and wartime. Dependents and family members took care of intensive tasks such as cooking, laundry, maintaining uniforms and other equipment, and tending to livestock and garden plots. They also accompanied askari on campaigns, doing all of their usual peacetime work, as well as carrying the askaris' equipment and providing care to the wounded and sick. Labor performed by the askari and their household members thus contributed directly to German officers' ability to maintain their positions of authority, enabling rapid Schutztruppe mobilization for the many punitive expeditions and campaigns the army carried out during their first fifteen years of rule over German East Africa (ca. 1890–1907).

The labor relationship between the Schutztruppe organization and askari households signified more than just the colonial state's unsurprising reliance on its employees as a labor source. As a pair of scholars observed in 1987, “. . . we may conclude that armies have never been only agents of war. Nor have they been merely byproducts of economic forces, wresters of raw material from unwilling colonials or iron fists of capitalism.”Footnote ⁸Askaris' and their dependents' interpretations of the demands made of them were shaped by local understandings of reciprocal obligation between themselves and the Schutztruppe officers. In other words, askari and their family members provided their labor in exchange for guarantees from Schutztruppe officers that their status vis-à-vis other East African colonial subjects would be maintained through wages and privileges that these others, as outsiders, did not receive. For the “Sudanese” askari, whose professionalization as soldiers took place amid their youthful experiences as “military slaves” in northeastern Africa, German East Africa gave them a new start toward establishing their own lineages and households outside of the Anglo-Egyptian context, which had limited their possibilities for upward mobility and thus the full achievement of manhood.Footnote ⁹Askari recruited from the central steppe regions of German East Africa looked to the privileges imparted by Schutztruppe membership to help them become men of standing and authority in ways that harkened back to nineteenth-century patterns of social mobility.Footnote ¹⁰Askari and their dependents thus performed labor as part of local understandings of client obligations to patrons. At the same time, they also served German colonial military goals of controlling subject populations in East Africa.

This last point also highlights the askaris' positions as men of status and means within the colonial political economy. They were tied to the Schutztruppe organization because their social status and their economic well-being came from their army employment. Of all colonial employees, including porters, clerks, translators, and teachers, the askari earned the highest salaries. Their cash-wealth, along with their access to livestock and other war spoils and goods they expropriated from villagers around the bomas, enhanced their abilities to attract new dependents to their households. Large households were markers of high status in most East African cultures, since “wealth in people” signaled the householder's ability to care for large numbers of dependents, as well as his (and, rarely, her) ability to mobilize people for labor. Once established as heads of large households, their positions as labor overseers gave them access to potential new dependents, who expanded the sizes of their households, thereby increasing their status. Askari positioned themselves and their dependents at the heart of colonial economic, social, and political structures, and these positions in turn enabled their pursuit of status and respectability in the East African context.

By situating the German East African Schutztruppe case within larger scholarly discussions of the historical intersections of labor, gender, and militarization, this essay will show that colonial military experiences offer exceptionally rich sites for understanding how these intersections simultaneously served state and household-level needs. The essay has three major sections. The first provides a brief overview of where this piece fits within African historiographies of the military and labor. The second section describes the immediate context of the Schutztruppe's labor requirements around the bomas, including the roles of askari themselves and their household members. In the third section, I discuss labor culture while Schutztruppe columns were on campaign. The essay concludes with some reflections on the costs and benefits, both tangible and intangible, of this tightly wound labor relationship between the state, its military agents, and their households.

Historiographies

Several historiographical subfields inform my argument. First, social histories of African colonial militaries provide rich evidence to support some basic arguments about their sociological commonalities. Colonial armies showed remarkable consistency in their recruitment practices, and in the sometimes grudging initiatives they undertook to include family members in barracks life and field expeditions.Footnote ¹¹ This body of scholarship also reveals the limits of soldiers' willingness to fight for colonial goals. Although European officers routinely labeled their soldiers “loyal,” a closer look reveals that African soldiers' loyalties had far more to do with their own understandings of social hierarchies and relations than with any abstract loyalties to European causes or governments.Footnote ¹² The Schutztruppe askari, for instance, fought for the Germans because German officers bolstered their African troops' superior social positions vis-à-vis other East Africans through high rates of pay, provision of attractive uniforms, equipment, and firearms, and the ability to exercise personal authority under the guise of state authority. When German officers failed to meet their reciprocal obligations as patrons, askari registered their objections through desertion or other indiscipline.Footnote ¹³ By interpreting the histories of colonial militaries through the lens of African social relations, these scholars help us see African colonial soldiers as participants in local sociocultural practices and dynamics alongside their roles as agents of colonialism and as soldiers.

African labor historiography has long been one of the best-developed subfields within African history. As early as 1984, it had covered so much ground that historian Bill Freund produced a fifty-eight page historiographical article analyzing its accomplishments. In 1996, historian Thaddeus Sunseri observed that “[t]he historiography of labour migration in Africa has been dominated by South African paradigms” that posited a “kraal to compound” model unsuitable for understanding the history of migrant labor patterns in other parts of the continent.Footnote ¹⁴ Left out of this model, according to Sunseri, are any considerations of “how peasants and labour migrants, men and women, contributed to the shaping of colonial political economies.”Footnote ¹⁵ Sunseri offered a corrective to this South African intellectual “hegemony” in his 2002 book Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania, in which he argued that African labor migrants played central roles in shaping colonial policy. He also demonstrated that the history of labor migration in Tanzania was in sore need of gendered analysis to redress the literature's failure to note how women participated in labor migration, and how they helped shape colonial policy and practice, while also adapting to rapidly shifting social and work relationships between men and women in rural areas.Footnote ¹⁶ Sunseri's work lays a valuable foundation for understanding the extent to which Africans exercised decision-making power in colonial labor regimes. It also suggests that colonial work contexts should be understood as amalgams of European and African influences, and not solely as top-down, oppressive apparatuses imposed by profit-obsessed European colonizers.

Historian Stephen Rockel's innovative 2006 study Carriers of Culture also made a significant intervention in East African labor historiography by drawing attention to the social and cultural history of nineteenth-century East African caravan porters.Footnote ¹⁷ Critical of historians' lack of attention to precolonial wage labor practices like porterage, as well as scholars' tendencies to assume that free wage labor was a colonial creation, Rockel argued that “there was indeed a large free wage labor force in East Africa that emerged prior to the development of the colonial capitalist economy.”Footnote ¹⁸ Like Sunseri, Rockel also insisted on the need to incorporate gendered analysis into historical treatments of African workers. His research revealed that East African women had well-established histories of involvement with the caravan trade as porters, traders, and healers, as well as their perhaps more expected roles as “caravan wives” who cooked, cleaned, and provided companionship and sexual services for male caravan members.Footnote ¹⁹

The migrant and mobile labor cultures analyzed by Sunseri and Rockel are in many ways analogues to the military labor culture explored in this essay. On the plantations studied by Sunseri and in the caravans studied by Rockel, men and women often found ways to set their terms of employment, despite harsh and often unfair colonial labor regimes. They formed communities of belonging that offered companionship, mutual aid, entertainment, and nourishment. Similar processes occurred around the bomas as well as on campaigns when askari constructed camps for overnight stops, or when family members and porters provided logistical support to Schutztruppe military columns.

Bringing together African military history and African labor history are a number of mainly article-length studies that examine the social and economic histories of wartime recruitment of soldiers and porters, especially for the British colonies during the world wars.Footnote ²⁰ This scholarship illustrates that the line between paid, voluntary labor on the one hand and forced labor on the other could be quite blurry. This was particularly true in times of military crisis, like the world wars, when colonial manpower needs outstripped availability of willing laborers. These studies also consistently show that African soldiers and porters protested poor treatment by wartime colonial labor regimes. Because of the lack of viable motor or rail transportation in many parts of the continent, porters were especially prone to abuse in wartime. Nearly all military materiel was transported by head porterage. The carriers generally received meager rations and often were not paid for their labor. Whereas in previous colonial wars soldiers and porters could anticipate receiving a wage, as well as portions of war spoils and loot, in the world wars soldiers and porters might not see wages until after the wars ended, if at all. In general, the story of wartime labor recruitment is a somber one that clearly reveals how easily colonial authorities slid into exploitative labor relationships with subject populations.

This essay intervenes in these overlapping literatures by analyzing labor as an integral function of military life around the bomas and on campaign. The patterns sketched in the scholarship described above resonate with other histories of warfare that emphasize the gendered social and cultural histories of military communities.Footnote ²¹ Here, I use the case of German East Africa to argue that in colonial armies, labor needs and military needs were inextricably connected and vital to the accomplishment of everyday needs, whether in peacetime or wartime. Askari household members brought locally informed understandings of the labor relationship to their interactions with colonial officials. Household involvement in military logistics kept costs low, adding an element of unpredictability to the accomplishment of colonial labor goals, but also tying the askari and their dependents closely to boma life. They formed local colonial cultures based on the opportunities the bomas created for trade and social exchanges, interactions, and conflicts, as well as the everyday movements of people into, out of, and around the stations. In this way, the formation of colonial cultures around the bomas had at least as much to do with East African household economies, status hierarchies, and socioeconomic relations as it did with German state-building goals.

It therefore should come as no surprise that askari household members also made up a significant portion of the Schutztruppe's labor resources during military expeditions. Much like the long-distance caravans analyzed by Stephen Rockel, Schutztruppe columns incorporated large numbers of women and children, many of whom were dependents of askari. These “campaign communities” carried out many of the columns' logistical functions, and also provided mobile versions of askari households, contributing to camp sociabilities and reinforcing status hierarchies away from the bomas.

Labor in the Bomas

The network of bomas used by colonial officials to exercise authority over the peoples of German East Africa spread out across the territory, encompassing militarily and economically strategic sites. In 1903, about thirty of these stations existed across German East Africa, and over the entire period of German rule, some sixty stations or military posts came and went.Footnote ²²Schutztruppe officers designed the network of garrisons to protect the areas they considered vital to controlling the colony's key economic and geopolitical sites. These included long-distance caravan routes, lakes, mountain regions, and eventually railways. The military garrisons served throughout the German period as administrative centers, usually coincided with civil districts that broke the huge territory into more manageable administrative units.

The events and outcomes of the Maji Maji War of 1905–1907 forced colonial authorities to rethink the military's dominant role in German East African colonial administration. The Maji Maji War began in the southeastern portion of the colony in July 1905 and spread rapidly across the southern and central regions, involving thousands of East Africans from seemingly disparate groups in violent acts directed against European and African representatives of colonial authority. The Schutztruppe was initially caught off guard by what appeared to be a coordinated rebellion. After receiving German and African military reinforcements, the Schutztruppe fanned out across the colony to pursue and capture the rebels, ultimately resorting to a scorched-earth strategy to counter the rebels' guerrilla activities. Some 300,000 Africans died through the combined effects of wartime violence, widespread famine, and disease.Footnote ²³ Colonial Secretary Dernburg, who took office in 1906, determined that the Schutztruppe bore considerable responsibility for provoking the devastating conflict.Footnote ²⁴ In the Dernburg Reforms, he sought to redirect German East Africa's colonial mission away from “destruction” and toward “preservation.”Footnote ²⁵ But despite real efforts to expunge military influence from senior leadership positions in the districts, “[t]he acute lack of civilian personnel . . . led to military officers continuing to perform administrative and political functions.”Footnote ²⁶ More often than not, top colonial officials in the districts were either current or former Schutztruppe members. Moreover, veteran askaris' residences dotted the lands around the stations and along major travel routes, unofficially (but effectively) extending the government's reach into areas that otherwise would have had less of a military presence. The network of bomas ensured that there was a military presence within striking distance of all but the most remote parts of German East Africa.

Because of the distances between them, the bomas were multipurpose sites that included administrative offices, housing for Germans and askari, military training areas, storage areas, armories, and market halls. The Schutztruppe had to undertake considerable new construction at each site, followed by constant upkeep and renovation once the structures were built. A military doctor stationed at Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria noted, for example, “There is always building going on, here a bastion, there a storage space, a work shed, a European's house; the huts for askari, boatsmen, court messengers, etc., all have to be renovated about every three years.”Footnote ²⁷

The constant processes of construction, renovation, and expansion of station buildings relied wholly on African labor. This labor force came from a combination of waged employees, people who were serving chain-gang sentences, and others whose status could be considered unfree. Colonial officials learned through trial and error to adjust their construction expectations to local labor practices and raw materials.Footnote ²⁸ Workers, recruited by local leaders and gathered by askari, were summoned to the bomas each morning by a drum or bell.Footnote ²⁹ After reporting to the bomas with their tools, askari supervisors divided them up into work groups, and they set to work on station construction and upkeep.Footnote ³⁰ They worked until about eleven a.m., took a break during the hottest hours of the day, and resumed work in the afternoon from about three p.m. to five p.m. Drum or bell signals marked the beginning and end of each work session.Footnote ³¹

The use of drums and bells to divide workdays into shifts reflected German obsessions with efficient, industrial time management, which often collided with African work ethics and sensibilities about how time and work should be organized.Footnote ³² In general, German colonial officials considered “work” an integral part of the overarching civilizationist ideology to which they subscribed.Footnote ³³Schutztruppe officers registered great frustration over what they perceived as laziness on the part of their African workers. Yet they could not afford to alienate local laborers if they wanted their stations to be built in a timely manner. Laborers shared information about different Europeans' treatment of their workers, so that an employer with a reputation for harshness might encounter difficulties in recruiting new labor volunteers.Footnote ³⁴ Officers who wanted to paint themselves as good employers thus compromised somewhat, perhaps by allowing African laborers to take breaks on their own schedules or otherwise modifying their expectations of what constituted a day's work. In one case, thirty African laborers of all ages hired to clear the area around a new boma being built at Kilosa in 1891 structured their workday around tobacco-smoking rituals, which the station commander found disruptive and irritating.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, in a clear articulation of differences between German and East African work ethics, he noted that he “could not recognize work” in what he observed of these laborers. Not wanting to anger them or acquire a bad name for himself, he pretended to be sympathetic to their need for recovery time, paid them “horrendous money,” and let them go.Footnote ³⁶ After this experience, the commander turned to local leaders to procure building materials and the necessary porters to move them to Kilosa—a solution that distanced him from the labor negotiations and the frustrations and cultural misunderstandings likely to result from them. The African labor brokers and the laborers themselves found this an agreeable arrangement, since transporting the building materials to the station would be a “short one-time exertion,” not an extended labor commitment that would take away from the workers' own domestic labor demands.Footnote ³⁷ After receiving all the building materials, his Shangaan askari built the boma, thus avoiding the problem of hiring local laborers who felt no urgency to conform to Schutztruppe labor expectations.

African laborers came to the stations for employment opportunities that could lead to being incorporated into askari or German officer households as domestic servants or gun-boys, the boys and young men who served as military assistants to officers and soldiers. The proximity of askari charged with supervising or guarding station laborers promoted the development of new relationships that could lead to outsiders joining Schutztruppe households. For example, although African men and women cultivated the station gardens, askari trained in gardening techniques helped to ensure “oversight and careful work” as an additional ten to twenty people came to work in the station garden each day, yielding a wide range of produce, including vegetables, potatoes, and wheat.Footnote ³⁸ The stations never achieved total self-sufficiency, but these cultivation efforts contributed to small local food economies and to the reshaping of East African markets around the bomas.

Askari, and sometimes those who aspired to become askari, also tended the station's livestock herds. Colonial administrator Otto Stollowsky snidely recounted an anecdote about a police-askari named Fataki who began his “fiscal career” as a swineherd at a military station in Uzagara. When the station launched a recruitment effort for new auxiliaries, Fataki volunteered. He later moved out of the auxiliary force and into the regular police force, becoming “Hof-Askari”—an orderly or assistant to the local civilian administrator.Footnote ³⁹ One of the ways that askari became wealthy over the course of their careers was by acquiring their own herds of livestock. Thus askari roles in guarding and managing the stations' herds provided them with experience they might later use as owners of livestock themselves.

Owning livestock was of critical importance to East African men who wanted to fully participate in local economies, since it demonstrated both prestige and material wealth. A male householder's ownership of a sizeable herd of livestock gave him the means to provide respectable bridewealth for his sons, laying the basis for successful marriage negotiations with suitable women. The transfer of livestock to a woman's family completed the marriage, which in turn ensured that any children born in the marriage would belong to the man's household and future domestic labor force, instead of to those of the male members of the woman's family (i.e., her father or older brother).Footnote ⁴⁰ As historian Jeff Guy succinctly puts it for southern Africa, “the transfer of cattle between homesteads was in fact a transfer of labour power: the labour power of the wife herself in the homestead and the land attached to the homestead, and the labour power of the children which she produced as wife and mother.”Footnote ⁴¹ In addition, livestock holders could lease animals to clients in need of animals for labor, thereby positioning themselves to gain income from the client's use of the animal. Livestock holders could also slaughter animals for feasting on festive occasions. In doing so, wealthy householders demonstrated that they could afford to slaughter a portion of their herds, thereby also demonstrating their largess to their communities of belonging and competitors.Footnote ⁴² In the quest for “wealth in people” that characterized many East African societies, African men who did not acquire their own livestock herds were at a distinct socioeconomic disadvantage compared to those who did.

To get to a position where askari could own livestock, however, they first had to work their way up from rank-and-file to senior soldiers, and this journey involved labor. From the earliest moments of the Schutztruppe's history Germans used as a labor force, askari were used as a labor resource, and this continued through the remainder of the German period in East Africa.Footnote ⁴³ In fact, indications are that lack of available askari could bring construction plans to a halt.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Tabora commander remarked in his 1899/1900 annual report to the Gouvernement in Dar es Salaam that the station badly needed a new market hall, but that he had decided, “out of a lack of askaris,” to repair the existing one instead.Footnote ⁴⁵ In short, askari comprised a significant portion of the colonial labor regime.

When not training, on campaign, or conducting other duties as messengers, guards, or escorts, askari worked alongside or supervised other, often unfree laborers at clearing land in and around the stations and constructing new buildings, including their own homes, animal stalls, schools, and market halls.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1911, the commander at Mpwapwa reported to the Gouvernement in Dar es Salaam that his askari had performed all tasks associated with the construction of a new building: They broke rocks for use as bricks, laid the bricks, and plastered them with clay. The commander claimed to have constructed the building in question at no cost to the government by using local and recycled materials, as well as his askaris' labor.Footnote ⁴⁷ A number of askari also received specialized training as craftsmen. Following their early-morning training routines, they worked around the station: “A number of askari patched shoes and clothes, others laid bricks, one supervises the garden work, one is trained as a military hospital assistant, two are police, the ordnance-askari cleans the Maxim gun, others watch the tribute-workers . . . .”Footnote ⁴⁸ By using askari to perform such a wide range of station work, often alongside chain-gang prisoners or laborers working to pay off their tax commitments, government officials kept construction and operating costs low.Footnote ⁴⁹ Theoretically, this work scheme kept otherwise idle askari busy and out of mischief. It also facilitated their ability to supervise station laborers and chain-gang prisoners, who often enough were one and the same.

As the colonial state expanded its reach across German East Africa through conquest, local negotiation, and administrative bureaucratization, the askari took on increasingly diverse roles as state agents, but their involvement in colonial labor continued as well. When they were not involved in military campaigns, their workaday lives involved training regimens and a range of constabulary duties as tax collectors, guards, escorts, messengers, and even as medical assistants to traveling doctors and veterinarians. Along with many others, they also participated in building the railways, a key strategic project for the colonial state that employed thousands of paid migrant laborers, unfree workers paying tax debts or tribute, and prisoners.Footnote ⁵⁰ They worked in gangs, each of which was responsible for performing different physically demanding tasks such as clearing trees from around the rail line, laying track, and excavating earth to be used for building embankments. The number of voluntary workers available on rail construction sites varied according to the harvest seasons, since workers were unlikely to take on arduous railway labor for pay during periods when their fields needed tending. Similarly, if their fields yielded adequate food for them and their households, they had less need to hire out their labor for pay. On the other hand, local food shortages motivated laborers to work on the railways since they would get regular food rations (posho) while employed by the state, thus helping to alleviate burdens on household economies.Footnote ⁵¹ An askari who helped build the central railway line from Dar es Salaam to the interior recalled it years later as “ceaseless, thankless hard work” with “no respite or time off.”Footnote ⁵² Germans oversaw the operations and used public floggings to get results from their laborers where verbal abuse failed.Footnote ⁵³ Mortality rates for railway construction workers may have been as high as five percent, primarily because workers were subject to “positively awful” work conditions and disease environments.Footnote ⁵⁴ In these harsh settings, askari faced many of the same difficult conditions as migrant laborers who came to work on the railways.

What differentiated them was their role in the disciplinary regime. Askari also had the responsibility of guarding and punishing the vast numbers of unfree laborers, including prisoners in chains, who supplemented the wage labor force on the railway project and other colonial work sites. Indeed, the anthropologist Karl Weule, who visited German East Africa in 1906, observed that “Two elements predominate in the life of the streets [in the coastal town of Lindi]—the askari and the chain-gang[.]”Footnote ⁵⁵ In addition to the prisoners' daily “backbreaking work” on the railway line, they maintained the camps that housed the workers, overseers, and engineers along the line.Footnote ⁵⁶ The chain gangs included men and women of all ages, whom overseers constantly accused of working too slowly. Viewed as slaves by the Germans and other laborers who worked for wages, these prisoner-laborers received severe treatment from their askari guards and from white officials concerned with preserving their authority in a context where they were vastly outnumbered.Footnote ⁵⁷ Prisoners judged indolent by overseers were subject to terrible physical and verbal abuse from the askari guards.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such violence against prisoner-laborers and other subordinate groups expressed, defined, and consolidated some askaris' positions as authority figures in the railway labor regime and within the colonial state more generally.

The askaris' positions as guards gave them daily access to prisoners of both sexes and of all ages. Many of these relationships were undoubtedly shaped by violence and harsh treatment. Yet the close proximity between guards and prisoners in these work contexts generated possibilities for the askari to incorporate dependents into their households.Footnote ⁵⁹ The familiarity that developed between askari guards and their prisoners over the duration of the confinement period could lead to new household arrangements based on mutual obligation. In this capacity, askaris' roles as babas, or “fathers,” to people in search of patronage, protection, and community membership help explain why relationships between prisoners and guards sometimes appeared overly friendly to colonial observers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Even more confounding to colonial officials was the fact that chain-gang prisoners seemed not to express any sense of dishonor over their status. In fact, evidence suggests that in some cases, serving an extended sentence on a chain gang might provide better living conditions than what they had previously experienced.Footnote ⁶¹ They worked hard and had no freedom of movement, but they also received regular meals and decent shelter, and they shared each other's company after the workday ended.Footnote ⁶² Of course, this argument should not be taken too far,Footnote ⁶³ but it is worth noting that the hierarchical relationship between the askari guards and their chain-gang prisoners likely encompassed acts of both kindness and violence. Most importantly, these kinds of relationships offered prospects for economic security as members of askari households. Such complex dynamics likely shaped askari households in ways that are difficult to demonstrate conclusively but which seem to provide the best explanations for why people might have sought to become askari dependents.

Askari households incorporated and accommodated a range of different dependent relationships, which reflected complex gendered understandings of, and struggles over, appropriate kinds of work for different kinds of men and women. Household dependents included wives, children, and domestic servants, including those children and teenagers known as askariboys.Footnote ⁶⁴Askariboys were personal servants to the askari, responsible for handling all of their employers' personal needs at home and on campaign, while also contributing to the askaris' overall household work force. A list of the askariboys' duties is instructive, since it indicates the range of tasks household members had to accomplish each day:

Their day-to-day work thus encompassed tasks typically imagined as women's work, highlighting the infantilized positions they occupied, which often were subordinate to the women in the household. Askari wives married to higher-ranking soldiers considered themselves deserving of leisure time; thus they exempted themselves from certain kinds of physically demanding work.Footnote ⁶⁶ In other instances, wives performed certain kinds of household labor, such as cooking and weaving mats but refused to do others, such as cultivating or collecting firewood or water.Footnote ⁶⁷ In such cases, askari had to buy food at local markets and hire help to perform labor-intensive work like carrying water and firewood. On the other hand, wives, daughters, or other female dependents of rank-and-file askari likely had to perform most of the work required in the household. These examples suggest that status and gender relationships within, and probably between, askari households were structured largely around domestic labor demands.

Gendered understandings of suitable work also shaped hierarchical relationships between men. The Schutztruppe authorized each askari to take one boy with them on expeditions and helped cover costs for their care, thus formalizing the hierarchical status and labor arrangement between them.Footnote ⁶⁸ Despite being male, askariboys occupied the bottom position in the household hierarchy and thus worked very hard for their meager monthly pay, which they received from their babas. Their masculinities were shaped on the one hand by their desire to emulate askari soldierly qualities and status, but on the other, by their ability to run a household effectively.Footnote ⁶⁹ The hardships of their domestic labor notwithstanding, their service as apprentices to professional soldiers positioned the askariboys to learn vital skills that would help them become Schutztruppe recruits themselves.Footnote ⁷⁰ As adults, they could then achieve higher status and become heads of their own households. In this way, the new economies that grew up around the colonial military stations had the potential to reproduce themselves through household-level interactions. In addition, these economies allowed young men to bypass traditional routes to achieving respectable status, especially the ability to marry at a time of their choosing as opposed to being at the whims of senior men who controlled bridewealth. The miseries of working in an askari household thus might yield great rewards and social flexibility in the long run.

The colonial centers and the economies that developed around them also attracted a variety of small businesses that catered to the needs of the boma communities, and these too reflected gendered divisions of labor. Askari wives, as well as women from neighboring communities, participated in various trading and service activities both within and outside of the stations. Local traders who lived in makeshift villages surrounding the bomas sold meat, produce, and other goods to the askari communities.Footnote ⁷¹ At the larger stations, rows of kiosks, shops, and eateries along the main streets helped small outposts grow into major towns. For example, “beer-women” prepared and sold palm wine and other local brews, sometimes setting up small bars frequented by askari.Footnote ⁷² The beer-brewing women made up only a small portion of the various agents who waited each month for the askari to be paid so that they could sell them their goods, often on credit. Askari reputedly were not very savvy when it came to spending their wages, and many were deeply in debt to traders.Footnote ⁷³ Not surprisingly, brothels also existed in close proximity to the bomas, especially in larger towns that also served as major transportation entrepôts.Footnote ⁷⁴ The bomas, like military bases elsewhere, became focal points for a wide range of economic and social activities that were allowed to continue in the interest of the troops' morale, even when these caused the askaris' superiors headaches. More money entered into local economies as a result of the presence of military stations.Footnote ⁷⁵ In another indication of the level of interaction occurring between askari and local inhabitants, a colony-wide Gouvernement circular reported that askari had been accused of accepting gifts and services from local populations while traveling on duty, in lieu of paying local prices for goods. In the governor's opinion, such behavior constituted an “abuse of power” on the askaris' part, which might also result in local residents gaining undue influence among the askari. The governor found it particularly problematic that these gifts “usually came in the form of large quantities of beer.”Footnote ⁷⁶ East Africans understood the askari not just as agents of the state, but also as consumers of particular kinds of goods and services. As the military stations expanded, they became colonial centers, helping to draw diverse people to their environs, and intensifying the pace at which new economic, social, and cultural connections developed between a diverse variety of colonial actors—German officers and administrators, soldiers and their dependents, other African colonial employees, laborers, traders, and the many colonized subjects who regularly came to the bomas for official and unofficial purposes.

“Campaign Communities” and Military LaborFootnote ⁷⁷

The different kinds of expeditions mobilized by colonial authorities served a variety of purposes, but nevertheless they included remarkably similar elements. Each comprised a mixture of Europeans, soldiers, dependents, and porters. These “campaign communities” set up camp at the end of each day's march; sought out and collected food, water, and firewood; and carried all of the Europeans' and askaris' equipment and provisions. In his work on women in early modern European armies, historian John Lynn contends that “[a]rmies on the march resembled cities in complexity and size, exceeded in population only by the largest European urban centers.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In German East Africa, the “campaign communities” that traveled with the Schutztruppe columns instead might be described as resembling the bomas, because they provided mobile versions of the services and social groups found at the military stations. Dependents and porters did not typically accompany askari into combat,Footnote ⁷⁹ but they nonetheless experienced the difficulties and dangers of life on the march, including recurring food and water shortages, animal attacks, diseases, exhaustion and injury, and military ambushes. Despite these hardships, campaign community members also helped replicate boma sociabilities and domestic labor arrangements in the camps they constructed as overnight stopping points along their routes.Footnote ⁸⁰

Expeditions were central to the everyday routines of colonial administration, and the diaries and memoirs of European colonial officials, geographers, scientists, and others who traveled through German East Africa are filled with vivid descriptions and anecdotes describing the wide variety of expeditions they undertook across the colony. Colonial expeditions fell into several categories, with all of them involving the askari and their communities to some degree. First, colonial officials went on small expeditions to accomplish administrative tasks such as tax collection, or holding the multipurpose community judicial proceedings known as shauri.Footnote ⁸¹ On such expeditions, askari acted as messengers, armed guards, and escorts. They protected Europeans and porters from ambushes, hunted game, and arranged for the provision of food and water for all members of the expedition's train, including other soldiers, their dependents, servants, and porters. For example, a colonial officer's 1910 district tour, which went from Songea in the southern highlands to Lake Malawi (Nyasa), included a “very small” caravan of eleven porters and one overseer, two servants, a cook, a launderer, one senior African soldier (ombasha, or sergeant) and six rank-and-file askari. “But,” he snidely remarked in his diary, “the gentlemen askaris brought another ten boys along, and beyond that, this time we also had two women in the retinue; to whom they actually belong, I have still not been able to determine.”Footnote ⁸²

Even Reuss's relatively small expedition required thirty-five people. While this might at first glance appear extravagant, these numbers reveal German and askari expectations about the labor required for such tours and about who would perform such labor while on the march. Noncombatant African members of the caravan understood that they were linked to their patrons, whether European or African, through their labor. Reuss's inability to identify who the women “belonged to” was perhaps symptomatic of his incapacity or unwillingness to interpret their status within the context of askari household arrangements. The women may have joined the caravan as laborers, or they may have been askari wives whom Reuss did not recognize. Their statuses and exact roles in caravan or expedition life—like those of many women who have been labeled “camp followers” throughout military history—are obscured by “terse” and “disappointingly sparse” source materials which were usually produced by men. In addition to the brevity of any commentary on women as members of the campaign communities, men who wrote these diaries and memoirs often assumed that the women were prostitutes or concubines, leveling moral judgments against them or blaming them for their soldiers' misbehavior.Footnote ⁸³ They may indeed have provided sexual services to the soldiers on the expedition, but if so, these liaisons would need to be interpreted against the spectrum of possible domestic arrangements between men and women that existed across Eastern Africa at this time.Footnote ⁸⁴

Reuss's diary makes no further mention of the work the women performed on his expedition. It does, however, describe work performed by some of the African men who participated in the expedition, especially the askari. In addition to their military escort duties, they assisted Reuss in tracking, shooting, and preparing game, both for consumption and as trophies. Askari also supervised laborers assigned to clear pathways through dense brush, and they were ordered to requisition food from local sources.Footnote ⁸⁵ Reuss's depiction of expedition life is decidedly masculine and military, full of adventure, discovery, and hard work on the part of all of the African members of the expedition. His diary also describes the expedition's members being linked through bonds of comradeship and lively sociability, which played out every night around the campfire, as they brought their workday to a close and prepared for the next day's exertions.

European explorers, geographers, cartographers, and scientists traveled with even larger contingents of soldiers and porters. Askari responsibilities for provisioning, protecting, and disciplining caravan or column members increased according to the expedition's size. In 1893–1894, Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen undertook a long geographic expedition from the East African coast to the mouth of the Congo in West-Central Africa, accompanied by 620 people.Footnote ⁸⁶ Most of these were porters, and some thirty soldiers provided security for the expedition. The three Europeans on the expedition each brought along “personal companions” to carry their weapons and care for their donkeys, as well as servants to take care of their “trunks, tents, and field beds” and cooks to prepare their meals.Footnote ⁸⁷ The porters and the askari all brought “their women” and askariboys along with them. Götzen found this arrangement to be quite effective, because once the caravan arrived at an overnight camp site after a long day's march, the askaris' “real work” began—“pitching tents, walking patrols, standing watch, foraging, drilling, and so on.”Footnote ⁸⁸ To Götzen and others who traveled on such expeditions, it was quite obvious that an askari “would undertake all this work with far more joy if he knows that in the meantime someone is cooking his food and preparing his camp.”Footnote ⁸⁹ A number of German participants in these kinds of expeditions pointed out that askari were loath to go anywhere without their women. German travelers therefore made concessions to accommodate askari and their women in their demands to travel together. These arrangements were not simply about the askaris' various needs being taken care of by their family members. Rather, askari needed their families along on the expeditions in order to demonstrate their status within the gender sensibilities of the campaign communities and beyond.

As in the boma labor environment, askaris' positions within the campaign communities bolstered their status as men of consequence vis-à-vis others in those same communities. Senior askari kept the other askari in good marching order, and the rank-and-file soldiers in turn kept the porters moving at the pace warranted by the day's travel goals. Senior askari on the expeditions were also authority figures charged with administering corporal punishment against porters and other caravan members when they underperformed, stole from the loads they carried, or deserted from the caravans.Footnote ⁹⁰ Desertions, including by askari themselves, met with humiliating and harsh punishment, with captured deserters being flogged, placed in chains, or assigned to hard labor.Footnote ⁹¹ Such disciplinary actions were supposed to discourage others who might be contemplating desertion or theft from acting on their impulses. Nonetheless, porter and askari desertions recurred throughout the colonial period, supporting the argument that laborers expected certain levels of care and treatment to be upheld by the European caravan sponsors.

At the same time, however, expeditionary contexts were notoriously unpredictable, with their success contingent on many variables falling into place. This unpredictability, shaped to a great extent by the whims of German officials, also shaped the campaign communities' labor frameworks. For example, Götzen decided to lend out his askari to assist Catholic missionaries with a road-building project in return for hospitality extended to him during the expedition.Footnote ⁹² In another instance, in the midst of the Maji Maji War, an askari unit was forced to build its own homes at a new station because colonial authorities refused to allocate prisoner-laborers to complete the work—a situation that the askaris' commander found irritating.Footnote ⁹³ In such cases, the askari performed the labor demanded of them because they understood it to be part of the mutual obligation that contributed to shaping relationships with their officer-patrons. If they refused to work, they risked being sentenced to serve on chain-gangs themselves—a clear demotion in status.

The largest and most elaborate expeditionary formations were those built around the “flying columns” that conducted “punitive expeditions” against Africans who opposed German encroachment. Such campaigns, categorized at the time as “small wars,” employed extreme violence to eradicate armed opposition and communicate Schutztruppe claims to authority across German East Africa.Footnote ⁹⁴ Like the other kinds of expeditions already described, the flying columns also integrated large numbers of porters, servants, dependents, and often prisoners. Between 1890 and 1900, the Schutztruppe engaged in over sixty of these kinds of actions.Footnote ⁹⁵ During the Maji Maji War of 1905–1907, they used these same basic formations and tactics to defeat the most geographically widespread anticolonial rebellion since the foundation of formal German colonial rule in 1889–1890. In late 1905, three separate reinforced Schutztruppe columns advanced from the coast along different routes to the sites of the rebellion.Footnote ⁹⁶ Once the columns began to gain the upper hand in military confrontations with the rebels, any men captured by the askari were either executed as “ringleaders” or sentenced to labor on chain gangs. Here again, we see that colonial military, labor, and disciplinary imperatives reinforced each other and contributed to state-building processes. And in a familiar pattern, askari benefited from the devastation they caused during the war, since individuals who were made kinless or homeless by the Schutztruppe's scorched-earth tactics made easy targets for incorporation into colonial households that could provide them with food, shelter, and the possibility of integration into new kinship lineages and structures.Footnote ⁹⁷Askari and others of their standing (for example, local elites and rulers, or other colonial employees) thus found new domestic labor sources through the violent disruptions of war.

During the East African campaign of the First World War, the army continued to maneuver in much the same way it had throughout the colonial period, despite growing from about 2,000 in 1914 to around 14,000 in 1916.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Schutztruppe, under the leadership of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, executed a widely admired campaign of mobility and evasion against the numerically superior and better equipped Allied armies. As in the prewar period, the askaris' dependents traveled with them, with some askari opportunistically adding new members to their households while on campaign.Footnote ⁹⁹ Their ability to gain new household members during the East African campaign was facilitated by the dire conditions of privation many residents of the southern half of German East Africa experienced as both the Schutztruppe and the Allied armies marched across their lands. Forcible conscription of young men beginning in late 1916 also added new askariboys to soldiers' households. Famine conditions coupled with the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic led to demographic disaster in the southern highland region, echoing the devastation caused during and after the Maji Maji War a decade earlier. Askari continued trying to maintain themselves as respectable men during the campaign by their old methods of acting as babas to dependents in need of security and food. Yet it became increasingly clear that Schutztruppe officers could no longer uphold their responsibilities as patrons to their troops, and some askari began looking to serve others who might better be able to maintain them in their status as respectable men.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For the first time in its history, the Schutztruppe began experiencing large numbers of askari desertions. Some of those who deserted transferred their allegiance to the British, believing that these other Europeans would not make them act as porters as their German officer's had forced them to do, which they felt was beneath them. In looking to the British as their next patrons, they hoped to better their circumstances in the rapidly changing political and economic context of wartime East Africa. At the same time, other askari feared that the British would “put them in chains and make them carry rocks” if they became prisoners of war.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Either way, askari measured their status and future prospects partly through the labor they performed, as well as by measuring their status against other laborers, such as the porters, whom askari had always considered beneath them despite their constant proximity to each other in the campaign communities.Footnote ¹⁰²

This article has suggested some of the ways that colonial militaries, labor regimes, and disciplinary practices shaped the formation of new households and communities that simultaneously served the interests of askari and the German colonial state. Using the askari as a vantage point from which to analyze the communities and labor regimes that surrounded them, I have argued for viewing colonialism as a set of localized but mobile practices that tied the colonial state to its agents and laborers through household-level social relations and interactions.Footnote ¹⁰³ These practices helped the colonizers control their budgets, which in turn helped them keep the Reichstag out of their way as they went about the everyday business of colonial rule. Yet in other ways, this military-labor-punishment complex was quite expensive in both concrete and symbolic ways. For one thing, askari viewed their positions in colonial and local East African status hierarchies as being dependent on their ability to manage labor both for the state and for their own households. Their documented arbitrariness and brutality in rounding up people to work as “tribute-workers” or “tax-laborers” or to forcibly integrate them into their household economies were a prime motivator for East Africans who took up arms against the Germans during Maji Maji. Despite colonial officials' best efforts to deflect metropolitan attention from the day-to-day affairs of colonial life, Maji Maji held up for all to see the flaws and abusiveness of German labor practices. The German Empire sent reinforcements to East Africa to help defeat the rebellion at the same time that it was also pouring money and soldiers into a war being fought in German Southwest Africa against the Herero and Nama peoples. The damage the Schutztruppe caused to the southern highlands during their scorched-earth campaign, which included mass expropriations of livestock and food stores, impoverished the region for many years to come. German complaints of plantation and railway “labor shortages” after Maji Maji therefore must be understood partly as a failed colonial effort to entice people to work for wages, but perhaps more importantly as East African expressions of fear and outrage over the systematic abuses of the military-labor regime.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Askari household members also paid high costs for their relative status and privilege in colonial culture. They provided their labor to the state and to the askari for very low or no wages. Their babas “paid” them by providing food, clothing, and shelter. Yet for some household members and dependents, these benefits were not enough to continue enduring the domestic labor demands imposed by askari householders, and some of them ran away to find other opportunities. In addition, some askari physically abused their household members. While it is undoubtedly the case that such violence occurred in households across East Africa, the askaris' tight connections to the colonial state and the privileges they received because of them made it difficult for household members to extricate themselves from the boma communities if they desired to. The colonial state in German East Africa could not pursue and certainly could not locate every runaway boy or other dependent. But the askari had the state-sanctioned authority, the means, and the skills to search for people—in fact, it was part of their everyday work when they were not at war.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ We will never know the extent to which askari dependents decided to seek out other socioeconomic possibilities under colonial rule, but perhaps that is not the most important point to be made here. Rather, merely by recognizing the extent to which the German East African labor regime reached into its soldiers' households, we can also recognize how colonial cultures and campaign communities came to exist. The bomas—and their expeditionary variants, the camps—became socioeconomic centers through a combination of East Africans' desires and willingness to participate in the new colonial economies, and the colonial state's ability to apply coercive and violent methods, via the askari, in their seemingly endless quest for laborers.