Historia ya Sajenti Mbavu Moya katika Vita ya Kwanza ya Dunia (WWI)

The Battle for Lake Tanganyika World War I

Mimi, Toutou and Fifi - The Utterly Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika I THE GREAT WAR Special​


The Battle for Lake Tanganyika in German East Africa was one of the most bizarre battles of World War 1. It only really started once the Royal Navy had carried two boats through the jungle and the mountains from Capetown. Their names: Mimi and Toutou. Their commander: Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, probably the weirdest high ranking officer in the entire war.
Source : The Great war
 

German East Africa after the First World War​

The peoples of Germany's African colonies recovered from the conflict against all the odds.
Quentin Holbert | Published in History Today Volume 68 Issue 1 January 2018
GettyImages-613490850.jpg
Rebuilding: German colonial soldiers on the Tanganyika Railway at Dar es Salaam, early 20th century.

The end of the First World War did not put a stop to the suffering of civilian populations caught up in the conflict.

The plight of Germans, Russians, Austro-Hungarians and Italians during the 1920s are well documented. Among the major theatres of war, the least discussed among historians is German East Africa (what is now Burundi, Rwanda and mainland Tanzania).

To understand the challenges faced in the region following the war, we must first look at the carnage experienced during it by indigenous peoples.

The German census in 1911 set the approximate native population of German East Africa at 7.5 million; 1913-14 estimates varied between 7.7 and 7.8 million. By 1921, the British census listed the native population for the same area at approximately 4.1 million. There are many reasons for this drastic drop.

While the number of combat dead on both sides was relatively low – somewhere between 16,000 and 18,000 native soldiers were killed – the number of labourers and non-combatants who died is significantly higher.

The only reliable way to transport supplies across the colony was with porters hired locally. In 2001, the historian J.P. Cann estimated the losses among porters at between ‘100,000 to 120,000 on the German side and 250,000 on the Allied side’. That is out of approximately one million who were recruited and conscripted. These porters died of a combination of illnesses, exhaustion and malnutrition.
Disease was also a major factor in the civilian death toll, with anywhere from 10 to 20 per cent of the population killed between 1914 and 1918.

The worst single instance was the flu epidemic of 1918, which killed around 200,000 in German East Africa and more than 1.5 million across sub-Saharan Africa. As the historian Daniel Steinbach has noted, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilian dead were largely unrecorded and ‘unnoticed by the world’.
Source : German East Africa after the First World War | History Today


The flu epidemic of 1918

134 Philadelphians died in one day, panic took hold and city health officials turned to Jefferson students for help.
sign.jpeg
Sign posted at Philadelphia’s Naval Aircraft Factory on Oct. 19, 1918. (Courtesy of U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command.)


A Philadelphia patient is escorted by police. (Courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, Philadelphia.)
A Philadelphia patient is escorted by police. (Courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, Philadelphia.)

In 1918—an era without anti-flu drugs, antibiotics and mechanical ventilators—Philadelphia led the country in deaths. It also gave the world a clear example of the wrong way to handle a pandemic.

READ MORE : Philadelphia 1918: The Flu Pandemic Hits Home
 
TABORA

Belgian Congo and the East African campaign (1916)​



The Battle of Tabora was a military action which occurred around the town of Tabora in the north-west of German East Africa (Tanzania) during World War I.

The engagement was part of the East Africa Campaign and was the culmination of the Tabora Offensive in which a Belgian force from the Belgian Congo crossed the border and captured the settlement of Kigoma and Tabora, pushing the German colonial army back. The victory not only left much of the Ruanda-Urundi territory under Belgian military occupation but gave the Allies control of the important Tanganjikabahn railway.
Source : Belgian Congo
 
bagamoyo said:
Simulizi za Mzee Ahmad Ibrahim Bakundukize : Vuguvugu la kisiasa 1950 - 1960 nchi za Maziwa Mkuu za Tanganyika, Burundi, Ruanda na Congo Zaire



Waswahili wa nchi hizi 4 wamefanya makubwa bila kujali mipaka ya nchi zao, waliunganishwa na lugha ya kiSwahili na u-mjini wao kuwa popote ni kambi hivyo palipo na "waswahili" yaani panapoongewa lugha ya kiSwahili ni nyumbani na Panafaa kuongoza harakati.

Source : Mashariki TV
Click to expand...


13 October 2021
SIKU YA KUMBUKUMBU YA PRINCE LOUIS RWAGASORE

Mzee Ahmad Ibrahim Bakundukize asimulia mazingira ya Kifo cha mwanasiasa Prince Louis Rwagasore tarehe 13 October 1961.

Julius Nyerere aliwaasa waRundi kuondokana na ukabila ili wafaidi uhuru wa nchi ya Burundi vizuri.


Source : Mashariki



PRINCE LOUIS RWAGASORE (1932-1961)​

POSTED ONJANUARY 22, 2014BY CONTRIBUTED BY: SECONDE NIMENYA

Posthumous stamp of Prince Louis Rwagasore, December 15, 1963
Public Domain Image

Prince Louis Rwagasore was King Mwambutsa IV’s oldest son, and an important political figure in the history of Burundi, which was then a colony of Belgium.

Prince Rwagasore, who was born on January 10, 1932, was the heir apparent of the throne of the Burundi Kingdom, which had existed since the 16th Century. Rwagasore was born in the province of Muramvya, the political center of the Burundi Kingdom, the place where all Burundian kings and their families resided.

Rwagasore’s father, King Mwambutsa IV, was the last king of Burundi, and governed from December 16, 1915 to July 8, 1966.
Prince Rwagasore was educated at the Groupe Scolaire d’Astrida, an elite secondary school in Rwanda that was established in 1929 by Les Frères de la Charité (Brothers of Charity), a Belgian religious institute, to educate Burundians and Rwandans to assist the Belgian colonial administration.

In 1952, 20-year-old Prince Rwagasore briefly attended universities in Antwerp and Louvain in Belgium, but returned to Burundi to lead an evolving anti-colonial movement.

In 1956, Rwagasore urged Belgian Vice-Governor General Jean Paul Harroy to install a “Murundi” constitution in preparation for eventual Burundi independence.

One year later he founded a series of cooperatives to encourage economic independence. Belgian authorities, however, recognized these cooperatives as a threat to their colonial power and banned them in 1958.

In response, Rwagasore founded the Union for National Progress (UPRONA) as Burundi’s first indigenous political party and became its leader. At the first UPRONA Party Congress in March 1960, Rwagasore demanded complete independence for Burundi and called on the local population to boycott Belgian stores and refuse to pay taxes. His calls for civil disobedience led his being placed under house arrest.

Rwagasore’s actions indicate that he envisioned a post-colonial Burundi and promoted nationalism and decolonization which directly challenged Belgian colonial authority.

Rwagasore, a Tutsi, promoted the reduction of ethnic rivalry by marrying a Hutu woman. He urged replacing the traditional centralized monarchy with a constitutional monarchy. His ideas were popular, and—when Belgium reluctantly granted Burundi independence in 1962 in the wake of their disastrous experience in the neighboring Congo—Rwagasore had prepared his followers for a peaceful transition to independence.

During Burundi’s first pre-independence election in 1961, UPRONA won 80 percent of the vote, and Rwagasore was positioned to become the first political leader of independent Burundi.

Rwagasore’s nation-building efforts were despised by the Belgians who were already angry over his promotion of Burundi’s independence.

On October 13, 1961, as the Prince was having dinner at the Hotel Tanganyika in Bujumbura, the capital city, he was assassinated by a Greek mercenary. He was 29 years old. Most historians believe that his death was the result of a conspiracy between the Belgians and the pro-Belgian Christian Democratic Party, one of Rwagasore’s opposing parties.
Rwagasore repudiated the life of a traditional monarch in order to lead his nation’s independence movement. His success ultimately cost him his life. Yet he left a powerful legacy of freedom of Burundi, even though he did not live to see the day of its independence.

Source : Prince Louis Rwagasore (1932-1961) •
 
Masisi DR Congo
Milima ya Mitumba iliyovutia wakoloni na wazawa pia



Source : Perfect Afrika
 
Joseph Conrad mwandishi maarufu wa kitabu: Heart of Darkness kuhusu yaliyoendelea katika the Congo Free State iliyokuwa chini ya King Leopold II.

Critic Reading. with Dr. Ato Quayson, professor of English at Stanford University.


View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qgYZEZvtQls


More info following the Heart of Darkness book

Report of the British Consul, Roger Casement, on the Administration of the Congo Free State

The colonial regime of the Belgian King Leopold II--the Congo Free State-- became one of the more infamous international scandals of the turn of the century.

Leopold had acquired the vast Congo region through considerable investment of his own fortune in setting up his administration there and by cajoling the great powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 to award his International Congo Association title to what was to become the Congo Free State.

By the mid-1890s the Congo Basin and its products became a source of great wealth to Leopold who used his riches to beautify his Belgian capital Brussels while using his agents in Africa to establish a brutal exploitative regime for the extraction of rubber in the interior forest regions of the Free State

Leopold's ability to administer the Congo government coupled with his gift for self-promotion and dissimulation, kept knowledge of what was taking place there to a minimum.

Inevitably the truth leaked out as it became known through missionary reports and the like that the natives were being willfully exploited and brutally treated in the interests of amassing revenue for the King and his agents.

Foremost in the campaign to expose the regime--based on forced labor and various forms of terror--was E.D. Morel whose ceaseless pursuit of Leopold's regime resulted in questions being raised in the British House of Commons, for Britain, after all, had been a signatory to the Berlin Act which bound the Congo Government "to bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes and to care for their moral and material welfare."

The Report (below) of the British consul sent to investigate the accumulating reports of torture, murder and virtual enslavement was published to the world in 1904 and from that point on the pressure for reform mounted until, finally, Leopold was forced to yield up his private African preserve to the Belgian government which formally took over the 'Belgian Congo' by an act of annexation in August 1908.

I have the honor to submit my Report on my recent journey on the Upper Congo.

. . . the region visited was one of the most central in the Congo State . . Moreover, I was enabled, by visiting this district, to contrast its present state with the condition in which I had known it some sixteen years ago . . and I was thus able to institute a comparison between a sate of affairs I had myself seen when the natives loved their own savage lives in anarchic and disorderly communities, uncontrolled by Europeans, and that created by more than a decade of very energetic European intervention . . by Belgian officials in introducing their methods of rule over one of the most savage regions of Africa.

. . . a fleet of steamers . . navigate the main river and its principal affluents at fixed intervals. Regular means of communication are thus afforded to some of the most inaccessible parts of Central Africa.

A railway, excellently constructed in view of the difficulties to be encountered, now connects the ocean ports with Stanley Pool, over a tract of difficult country, which formerly offered to the weary traveler on foot many obstacles to be overcome and many days of great bodily fatigue. . . The cataract region, through which the railway passes . . . is . . the home, or birthplace of the sleeping sickness--a terrible disease, which is, all too rapidly, eating its way into the heart of Africa . . . The population of the Lower Congo has been gradually reduced by the unchecked ravages of this, as yet undiagnosed and incurable disease, and as one cause of the seemingly wholesale diminution of human life which I everywhere observed in the regions revisited, a prominent place must be assigned to this malady . . . . Communities I had formerly known as large and flourishing centers of population are to-day entirely gone . . .

On the whole the Government workmen (Congolese natives) . . struck me as being well cared for . . The chief difficulty in dealing with so large a staff [3,000 in number] arises from the want of a sufficiency of food supply in the surrounding country. . . . The natives of the districts are forced to provide a fixed quantity each week . . which is levied by requisitions on all the surrounding villages . . . This, however necessary, is not a welcome task to the native suppliers who complain that their numbers are yearly decreasing, while the demands made upon them remain fixed, or tend even to increase. . . . The (official in charge)is forced to exercise continuous pressure on the local population, and within recent times that pressure has not always taken the form of mere requisition. Armed expeditions have been necessary and a more forcible method of levying supplies [e.g., goats, fowl, etc.] adopted than the law either contemplated or justifies. The result of an expedition, which took place towards the end of 1900, was that in fourteen small villages traversed seventeen persons disappeared. Sixteen of these whose names were given to me were killed by the soldiers, and their bodies recovered by their friends . . Ten persons were tied up and taken away as prisoners, but were released on payment of sixteen goats by their friends . . .

A hospital for Europeans and an establishment designed as a native hospital are in charge of a European doctor. . . When I visited the three mud huts which serve (as the native hospital), all of them dilapidated . . I found seventeen sleeping sickness patients, male and female, lying about in the utmost dirt. The structures I had visited . . had endured for many years as the only form of hospital accommodation for the numerous native staff of the district.

. . . The people have not easily accommodated themselves to the altered condition of life brought about by European government in their midst. Where formerly they were accustomed to take long voyages down to Stanley Pool to sell slaves, ivory, dried fish, or other local products . . they find themselves today debarred from all such activity . . . The open selling of slaves and the canoe convoys, which navigated the Upper Congo (River), have everywhere disappeared. . . . (but) much that was not reprehensible in native life has disappeared along with it. The trade in ivory has today entirely passed from the hands of the natives of the Upper Congo . .

Complaints as to the manner of exacting service are . . frequent . . . If the local official has to go on a sudden journey men are summoned on the instant to paddle his canoe, and a refusal entails imprisonment or a beating. If the Government plantation or the kitchen garden require weeding, a soldier will be sent to call in the women from some of the neighboring towns. . .; to the women suddenly forced to leave their household tasks and to tramp off, hoe in hand, baby on back, with possibly a hungry and angry husband at home, the task is not a welcome one.

I visited two large villages in the interior . . wherein I found that fully half the population now consisted of refugees . . I saw and questioned several groups of these people . . . They went on to declare, when asked why they had fled (their district), that they had endured such ill-treatment at the hands of the government soldiers in their own (district) that life had become intolerable; that nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber or to die from starvation or exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them. . . . I subsequently found other (members of the tribe) who confirmed the truth of the statements made to me.

. . . on the 25th of July (1903) we reached Lukolela, where I spent two days. This district had, when I visited it in 1887, numbered fully 5,000 people; today the population is given, after a careful enumeration, at less than 600. The reasons given me for their decline in numbers were similar to those furnished elsewhere, namely, sleeping-sickness, general ill-health, insufficiency of food, and the methods employed to obtain labor from them by local officials and the exactions levied on them.

At other villages which I visited, I found the tax to consist of baskets, which the inhabitants had to make and deliver weekly as well as, always, a certain amount of foodstuffs. (The natives) were frequently flogged for delay or inability to complete the tally of these baskets, or the weekly supply of food. Several men, including a Chief of one town, showed broad weals across their buttocks, which were evidently recent. One, a lad of 15 o so, removing his cloth, showed several scars across his thighs, which he and others around him said had formed part of a weekly payment for a recent shortage in their supply of food.

. . . A careful investigation of the conditions of native life around (Lake Mantumba) confirmed the truth of the statements made to me--that the great decrease in population, the dirty and ill-kept towns, and the complete absence of goats, sheep, or fowls--once very plentiful in this country--were to be attributed above all else to the continued effort made during many years to compel the natives to work india-rubber. Large bodies of native troops had formerly been quartered in the district, and the punitive measures undertaken to his end had endured for a considerable period. During the course of these operations there had been much loss of life, accompanied, I fear, by a somewhat general mutilation of the dead, as proof that the soldiers had done their duty.

. . . Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the lake district. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. . . . I both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.

[A sentry in the employ of one of the concessionary private companies] said he had caught and was detaining as prisoners (eleven women) to compel their husbands to bring in the right amount of rubber required of them on the next market day. . . . When I asked what would become of these women if their husbands failed to bring in the right quantity of rubber . . , he said at once that then they would be kept there until their husbands had redeemed them.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Signed) R. Casement.

The full Report runs for forty pages of the Parliamentary Papers to which is appended another twenty pages of individual statements gathered by the Consul, including several detailing the grim tales of killings, mutilation, kidnapping and cruel beatings of men, women and children by soldiers of Bula Matadi (i.e., the name used by the natives for the Congo Administration of King Leopold). Copies of the Report and enclosures were transmitted by the British government to the Belgian government as well as to governments (Germany, France, Russia, et al.) who were signatories to the Berlin Act in 1885. The Congo administration was thus forced to initiate an investigation into the atrocities detailed in the Report which led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for cold-blooded killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national who was given five years' penal servitude for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese natives.

[Ref.: British Parliamentary Papers, 1904, LXII, Cd. 1933]
Source : Report of the British Consul
 
Hizi hostoria ni nyerere ndio alizificha ili zisimfunike na aonekane yeye kwenye historia ya nchi..
Halafu akawafunika kina Mkawa na majina mafupi tu, yasiyoweza kutafitiwa....
Kama hizi leo tunaona kwenye youtube ni maana zilikuwepo, sasa jiulize kwa nini alikataa nchi isiwe na kituo cha television, lakini Karume kwa ununda akaweka yake Zanzibar.......
 
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