Some of East Africa’s First World War trenches still survive – but the memories of those who fought in them are fading fast, as Hamilton Wende discovered while touring Kenya’s historic battlegrounds.
 We were surrounded by the deceptive softness of an African dawn. Birdcalls rang out from the bush around us. The pale grey light turned slowly to violet, while the first rays of the sun stained the horizon pink. Our Land Rover nosed its way down the bumpy dirt track. A single giraffe looked at us for a moment and then disappeared into the acacia thorn. We were driving on the dusty, rutted main road from just outside the western boundary of Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, close to northern Tanzania. Kilimanjaro loomed above us, rain clouds hanging over its distant peak.
It was hard to believe that this beautiful, isolated part of Africa was the scene of desperate battles in the First World War. I had come here on a personal journey to search for the memories of that war. In Europe, people come from all over to pay homage at the long rows of graves.
But not many know that in Africa, hundreds of thousands of men fought each other in a war between the old British and German empires. Some of the most brutal fighting took place here on the savannahs – and I hoped that a few distant memories might linger.
I was particularly fascinated by the battle of Salaita Hill. On 12 February 1916 it was the scene of a major defeat of British and South African forces by black German askaris. Not since Kitchener’s destruction of the Mahdi’s warriors at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 had an almost entirely black army faced such large, organised battalions. At Salaita, about 20km east of Taveta on the border of Kenya and Tanzania, the white South Africans and their British generals were confident of an easy victory. A few hours later, they were fleeing in terror from the askaris. I was researching a novel about this battle and I wanted to see the landscape for myself, to help me understand the fear and strange exultation of battle felt by men on both sides.
For a while the road ran alongside the old railway line, built in 1916 to bring supplies up to the front lines from Mombasa and Nairobi. The tiny station buildings were still the corrugated iron structures of the colonial era. Frangipani and red flame trees grew in the unkempt gardens alongside the tracks. At one station called Maktau the stationmaster showed us a cemetery where Indian soldiers were buried. Bright impala lilies grew among the dust and the white stones, but the memories had faded. I asked the stationmaster about the battle of Salaita Hill, but he hadn’t heard anything about it. “There is a settlement of Maasai there now,” he said.
We drove off, feeling discouraged. There seemed very little left, either in memory or geography, of the war and of the lives of the men who had died in it.
A little way down the road we came across a low bungalow. A man was selling live chickens. He came out to greet us leaving his wife and child in the shadow of the building. He shook his head when I asked him about Salaita. “There is a game park near there,” he said, trying to be helpful.
We drove on. I had done so much research that I knew many of the dead by name. I felt a certain sadness that they seemed to have been forgotten so completely, even by the people who now lived on the ground they had suffered and died on.
Finally, we drove through a dip and came up a rise.
“There it is,” Tim said. A low hill stood out on the near horizon. I looked at an old photograph of Salaita. The topography matched exactly. At the side of the road we met two young Maasai men, Elijah and Laseri Saruni. They looked at the map Tim showed them. “You’re at the right place,” Elijah said, “Salaita Hill. The Germans and British were fighting in the First World War.” He gestured with his polished walking stick across the dry red plain. “Many thousand soldiers, all around here.”
At last we had found some memory of the past. Our excitement grew as we parked the Land Rover under a tree. “If you go up to the top, you can see some stones,” Elijah told us. As we walked across the dusty red soil, the land began to reveal its memories in a way that we could never have expected. On the slopes of the hill were the remains of the defensive positions that the German and their askaris had built. Two young herdboys sat together on one of them, watching their goats graze on the long grass. At the summit we could see for miles. It was clear why Salaita Hill was such an important battle – this position commanded the plains that lay beneath Kilimanjaro. At the base of the hill we found the remains of trenches that had been dug by the Germans to fight off the advance of the Allied troops. Elijah and Laseri showed us the still-living baobab trees that the Germans had hollowed out to hide in and snipe at the backs of the advancing Allies as they passed beyond the trees.
As it once stood on the border between two empires, long since vanished, today Salaita Hill stands at the frontier between memory and imagination. It was hard to think that we were occupying a spot where 138 South African soldiers, most of them teenagers with less than two months’ training, had been killed or wounded in an attempt to gain just one strategic position. More South African lives were squandered here in just a few hours than had been lost in the entire campaign to capture German South West Africa.
On the morning of the attack, the British generals Tighe and Malleson gave the order to advance against the heavily-fortified hill, and had a champagne breakfast behind the lines while their troops pressed forward into a hail of German bullets. The tragedy was compounded by poor reconnaissance and the white South African soldiers’ disregard for the fighting abilities of the askaris. The survivors were saved by the 130th Baluchis, a seasoned regiment of the Indian army who held off a German bayonet charge as the South Africans fled.
By the standards of the Somme, the scale of the killing was small. But the significance of Salaita Hill stands as a deeper, little-known witness to history. The British Empire might have gone on to win the war, but the myth of white invincibility had been shattered forever; the heroes of that battle were the legendary German commander Von Lettow Vorbeck and his highly-trained black African askaris.
Von Lettow Vorbeck himself was fèted by huge crowds on his return to Berlin in 1918, but was reduced to near starvation in Hitler’s Germany for refusing to cooperate with the Nazis. As for the ordinary soldiers, the bones many of them, black and white, still lie under the red soil where their only real epitaph is the Swahili saying: ‘If you fight for your country, even if you die, your sons will remember your name.’ A few people like Elijah and Laseri might know something of their fate, but the memories have dimmed with time. But that is the way of Empires and of war. Heroes are replaced – and history fades. |
