Academic literature on the topic 'World War 1914-1918 – Campaigns – East Africa'

Several scholars of the First World War in Southern Africa have briefly looked at the composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment (RNR), which was formed in Southern Rhodesia in 1916 and fought in the German East Africa campaign until the armistice in November 1918. According to Peter McLaughlin, who has written the most about Zimbabwe and the Great War, “[b]y 1918 seventy-five per cent of the 2360 who passed through the ranks of the regiment were ‘aliens;’ over 1000 came from Nyasaland. The Rhodesia Native Regiment had thus lost its essentially ‘Rhodesian’ character.” This would seem to suggest that because the RNR had many soldiers who originated from outside Zimbabwe, this regiment was somehow less significant to Zimbabwe's World War I history. While McLaughlin admits that “the evidence on the precise composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment is not available”, he claims that “approximately 1800 aliens served in the unit.”In a recent book on Malawi and the First World War, Melvin Page agrees with McLaughlin's estimate that “probably more than 1000 Malawians joined the Rhodesian Native Regiment.” However, Page freely admits that the evidence on which this approximation is based is far from conclusive. By looking at the available evidence, particularly a previously unutilized regimental nominal roll in the Zimbabwe National Archives, it is possible to gain a clearer picture of the composition of the only African unit from Zimbabwe to have fought in the First World War. This analysis will not only deal with the nationality of the soldiers, which is what the two previous writers focused on, but also their ethnic/regional origin and pre-enlistment occupations.

Turbulent states, structural changes and systemic crises of the world economy have been one of the decisive factors influencing the activity of large integration associations in all centuries. A particularly clear example is the integration processes in the Eurasian space. «The Great Silk Road» – a huge branched system of caravan routes. The Great Silk Road was a kind of connecting link between countries, civilization and socio-economic systems. The path «From the Varangians to the Greeks functioned along the Volga route. The end of the 17th and the first quarter of the 18th centuries was the period of Peter's reforms. Peter I regarded foreign trade as an important means of integrating Russia into Western European culture. Major bans related to the outside world were imposed on the Russian economy in the early 19th century. Anglo-German rivalry and antagonism played a decisive role in the complex system of imperialist contradictions that led to the First World War in 1914–1918. The Second World War almost six times exceeded the First in terms of the total number of victims: 50 million people. The consequence of the Second World War was the formation of the world socialist system, the disintegration of the colonial system and the beginning of the formation and development of major integration projects in Europe, Latin America, East Asia and Africa. Since January 2015, the Eurasian Economic Union functions. The possibilities of cooperation between the EAEU and other integration associations are widely discussed. The interface with the project of the Economic belt of the Silk Road Road is of particular interest.

Jozef Zwierzycki was a Polish-German geologist with a very eventful life. This included a long and remarkably productive career with the Dienst van het Mijnwezen (Bureau of Mines/ Geological Survey of the Netherlands Indies) from 1914-1938, first as a field geologist and eventually as Head of the Geological Survey Department. This was followed by an eventful late career back in Poland during and after World War II.Zwierzycki left a legacy of about 50 scientific publications and a series of maps on the geology of the Netherlands Indies. In addition to his publications, he also authored many unpublished reports on surveys on gold, tin, petroleum and coal deposits in various parts of Indonesia.Jozef Zwierzycki was born on 12 March 1888 in Krobi (Kroben), which is now in western Poland, but until 1918 was under Prussian (German) control. He went to elementary school in Krobi and completed high school in Gnesen. From 1908 he studied natural sciences and geology in Leipzig, Munich and Berlin. He obtained a doctorate in geology in October 1913 from the Alexander von Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis on ammonites from the 1911-1913 Tendaguru Expedition to Tanganyika, East Africa. This was followed by study at the Bergakademie (Mining Academy) of Berlin, where he graduated as a mining engineer in early 1914.

SummaryWhen sleeping sickness was discovered to be epidemic in the Congo Free State in 1904, the administration responded by attempting to implement public health measures which had evolved in Europe in relation to plague and cholera epidemics. These measures were to identify and isolate victims and suspected victims of the disease and to map out the infected and uninfected zones. This article describes the early sleeping-sickness campaign of the Belgian authorities in the Uele District of Province Orientale between 1904 and 1914, focusing on the formation of isolation camps or lazarets. Uele district had been identified as a potentially rich and uninfected zone to be protected from contamination by the establishment of acordon sanitaire. Public health policy and practice during this period provides an example of attempted ‘social engineering’ on the part of a colonial authority. While sleeping sickness provided the major impetus for the gradual development of the colonial medical service by the 1920s, the early period between 1903 and World War I was particularly onerous for the African populations in the north-east. The public health policy was perceived by many Africans as one more element in the on-going conquest and exploitation of the region. Examples are provided to demonstrate the ways in which numerous sleeping-sickness regulations affected African societies in Uele.

While the First World War was, from the Terik point of view, an unpopular and painful event, it inaugurated a deeper interaction between the British colonial government and the Terik. Terik memories of the war are complicated and ambivalent. Informants recall the war not only as a contest between the British and the Germans, but also as a time of widespread famine and forced recruitment. Driven by British anti-German propaganda, political anxieties and forced recruitment, Terik carriers and askari endured disease, suffering and death in the battlefields of East Africa between 1914 and 1918. These tragedies are deeply seared into Terik memories, but so are those of their bravery, heroism and being part of the victorious side. While they brought some economic and social benefits to the veterans, they also deepened British colonial cooptation of the Gapjepkoi ruling elite as well as its unpopularity among the Terik.

Seldom does a newly published book both enlarge our understanding of its subject and enhance our appreciation of its principal primary sources. In Lawrence of Arabia’s War, Neil Faulkner admirably achieves both objectives. In the first instance, he thoroughly and critically discusses British foreign policy and military operations in the Middle East and North Africa from 1914 through 1922, with emphasis upon British relations with the Arabs, primarily the desert-dwelling Hashemite sherifs as opposed to the landlords and officials who dominated millions of Arab small farmers and city dwellers. Whenever appropriate, he carefully examines relations between the British and their French, Italian, and Russian allies. In the second instance, Faulkner clearly illuminates the political and military context of T. E. Lawrence’s partially autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom, long widely admired as one of the finest literary masterpieces of the Great War and as a somewhat impressionistic portrait of the leaders of the Arab rebellion. In doing so, Faulkner further demonstrates Lawrence’s memoir to be an informed evaluation of British strategy and of the actions of Arab and Bedouin chieftains in their relationships with the British and with one another. Furthermore, Faulkner shows how and why Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the few World War I memoirs that facilitate one’s comprehension of the military operations by which Arab forces during 1917 and 1918 interdicted Ottoman supply lines and effectively supported the right flank of British offensives into Gaza and Palestine.

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community. In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood hypothesises that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead” (156). She asks an attendant question: “why should it be writing, over and above any other art or medium,” that functions this way? It is not only that writing acquires the appearance of permanence, by surviving “its own performance,” but also that some arts are transient, like dance, while others, like painting and sculpture and music, do “not survive as voice.” For Atwood, writing is a “score for voice,” and what the voice does mostly is tell stories, whether in prose or poetry: “Something unfurls, something reveals itself” (158). Writing, by this view, conjures, materialises or embodies the absent or dead, or is at least laden with this potential. Of course, as Katherine Sutherland observes, “representation is always the purview of the living, even when the order it constructs contains the dead” (202). She argues that all writing about death “might be regarded as epitaph or memorial; such writing is likely to contain the signs of ritual but also of ambiguity and forgetting” (204). Arguably writing can be regarded as participation in a ritual that “affirms membership of the collectivity, and through symbolic manipulation places the life of an individual within a much broader, sometimes cosmic, interpretive framework” (Seale 29), which may assist healing in relation to loss, even if some non-therapeutic purposes, such as restoration of social and political order, also lie behind both rites and writing. In a critical orthodoxy dating back to the 1920s, it has become accepted wisdom that the Australian literary response to the war was essentially nationalistic, “big-noting” ephemera, and thus of little worth (see Gerster and Caesar, for example). Consequently, as Bruce Clunies Ross points out, most Australian literary output of the period has “dropped into oblivion.” In his view, neglect of writings by First World War combatants is not due to its quality, “for this is not the only, or even the essential, condition” for consideration; rather, it is attributable to a “disjunction between the ideals enshrined in the Anzac legend and the experiences recorded or depicted” (170). The silence, we argue, also encompasses literary responses by non-combatants, many of whom were women, though limited space precludes consideration here of their particular contributions.Although poetry and fiction by those of middling or little literary reputation is not normally subject to critical scrutiny, it is patently not the case that there is no body of literature from the war period worthy of scholarly consideration, or that most works are merely patriotic, jingoistic, sentimental and in service of recruitment, even though these elements are certainly present. Our different proposition is that the “lost literatures” deserve attention for various reasons, including the ways they embody conflicting aims and emotions, as well as overt negotiations with the dead, during a period of unprecedented anguish. This is borne out by our substantial collection of creative writing provoked by the war, much of which was published by newspapers, magazines and journals. As Joy Damousi points out in The Labour of Loss, newspapers were the primary form of communication during the war, and never before or since have they dominated to such a degree; readers formed collective support groups through shared reading and actual or anticipated mourning, and some women commiserated with each other in person and in letters after reading casualty lists and death notices (21). The war produced the largest body count in the history of humanity to that time, including 60,000 Australians: none was returned to Australia for burial. They were placed in makeshift graves close to where they died, where possible marked by wooden crosses. At the end of the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) was charged with the responsibility of exhuming and reinterring bodily remains in immaculately curated cemeteries across Europe, at Gallipoli and in the Middle East, as if the peace demanded it. As many as one third of the customary headstones were inscribed with “known unto God,” the euphemism for bodies that could not be identified. The CWGC received numerous requests from families for the crosses, which might embody their loved one and link his sacrificial death with resurrection and immortality. For allegedly logistical reasons, however, all crosses were destroyed on site. Benedict Anderson suggested the importance to nationalism of the print media, which enables private reading of ephemera to generate a sense of communion with thousands or millions of anonymous people understood to be doing likewise. Furthermore, Judith Herman demonstrates in Trauma and Recovery that sharing traumatic experience with others is a “precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world” (70). Need of community and restitution extends to the dead. The practices of burying the dead together and of returning the dead to their homeland when they die abroad speak to this need, for “in establishing a society of the dead, the society of the living regularly recreates itself” (Hertz qtd. in Searle 66). For Australians, the society of the dead existed elsewhere, in unfamiliar terrain, accentuating the absence inherent in all death. The society of the dead and missing—and thus of the living and wounded—was created and recreated throughout the war via available means, including literature. Writers of war-related poems and fiction helped create and sustain imagined communities. Dominant use of conventional, sometimes archaic, literary forms, devices, language and imagery indicates desire for broadly accessible and purposeful communication; much writing invokes shared grief, resolve, gratitude, and sympathy. Yet, in many stories and poems, there is also ambivalence in relation to sacrifice and the community of the dead.Speaking in the voice of the other is a fundamental task of the creative writer, and the ultimate other, the dead, gaze upon and speak to or about the living in a number of poems. For example, they might vocalise displeasure and plead for reinforcements, as, for example, in Ella M’Fadyen’s poem “The Wardens,” published in the Sydney Mail in 1918, which includes the lines: “Can’t you hear them calling in the night-time’s lonely spaces […] Can’t you see them passing […] Those that strove full strongly, and have laid their lives away?” The speaker hears and conveys the pleading of those who have given their breath in order to make explicit the reader’s responsibility to both the dead and the Allied cause: “‘Thus and thus we battled, we were faithful in endeavour;/Still it lies unfinished—will ye make the deed in vain?’” M’Fadyen focusses on soldierly sacrifice and “drafts that never came,” whereas a poem entitled “Your Country’s Call,” published in the same paper in 1915 by “An Australian Mother, Shirley, Queensland,” refers to maternal sacrifice and the joys and difficulties of birthing and raising her son only to find the country’s claims on him outweigh her own. She grapples with patriotism and resistance: “he must go/forth./Where? Why? Don’t think. Just smother/up the pain./Give him up quickly, for his country’s gain.” The War Precautions Act of October 1914 made it “illegal to publish any material likely to discourage recruiting or undermine the Allied effort” (Damousi 21), which undoubtedly meant that, to achieve publication, critical, depressing or negative views would need to be repressed or cast as inducement to enlist, though evidently many writers also sought to convince themselves as well as others that the cause was noble and the cost redeemable. “Your Country’s Call” concludes uncertainly, “Give him up proudly./You have done your share./There may be recompense—somewhere.”Sociologist Clive Seal argues that “social and cultural life involves turning away from the inevitability of death, which is contained in the fact of our embodiment, and towards life” (1). He contends that “grief for embodiment” is pervasive and perpetual and “extends beyond the obvious manifestations of loss by the dying and bereaved, to incorporate the rituals of everyday interaction” (200), and he goes so far as to suggest that if we recognise that our bodies “give to us both our lives and our deaths” then we can understand that “social and cultural life can, in the last analysis, be understood as a human construction in the face of death” (210). To deal with the grief that comes with “realisation of embodiment,” Searle finds that we engage in various “resurrective practices designed to transform an orientation towards death into one that points towards life” (8). He includes narrative reconstruction as well as funeral lament and everyday conversation as rituals associated with maintenance of the social bond, which is “the most crucial human motive” (Scheff qtd. in Searle 30). Although Seale does not discuss the acts of writing or of reading specifically, his argument can be extended, we believe, to include both as important resurrective practices that contain desire for self-repair and reorientation as well as for inclusion in and creation of an empathic moral community, though this does not imply that such desires can ever be satisfied. In “Reading,” Virginia Woolf reminds that “somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down is the form of a human being” (28-29), but her very reminder assumes that this knowledge of embodiment tends to be forgotten or repressed. Writing, by its aura of permanence and resurrective potential, points towards life and connection, even as it signifies absence and disconnection. Christian Riegel explains that the “literary work of mourning,” whether poetry, fiction or nonfiction, often has both a psychic and social function, “partaking of the processes of mourning while simultaneously being a product for public reception.” Such a text is indicative of ways that societies shape and control responses to death, making it “an inherently socio-historical construct” (xviii). Jacques Derrida’s passionate and uneasy enactment of this labour in The Work of Mourning suggests that writing often responds to the death of a known person or their oeuvre, where each death changes and reduces the world, so that the world as one knew it “sinks into an abyss” (115). Of course, writing also wrestles with anonymous, large-scale loss which is similarly capable of shattering our sense of “ontological security” (Riegel xx). Sandra Gilbert proposes that some traumatic events cause “death’s door” to swing “so publicly and dramatically open that we can’t look away” (xxii). Derrida’s work of mourning entails imaginative revival of those he has lost and is a struggle with representation and fidelity, whereas critical silence in respect of the body of literature of the First World War might imply repeated turning from “grief for embodiment” towards myths of immortality and indebtedness. Commemorating the war dead might be regarded as a resurrective practice that forges and fortifies communities of the living, while addressing the imagined demands of those who die for their nation.Riegel observes that in its multiplicity of motivations and functions, the literary work of mourning is always “an attempt to make present that which is irrefutably lost, and within that paradoxical tension lies a central tenet of all writerly endeavour that deals with the representation of death” (xix). The literary work of mourning must remain incomplete: it is “always a limiting attempt at revival and at representation,” because words inevitably “fail to replace a lost one.” Even so, they can assist in the attempt to “work through and understand” loss (xix). But the reader or mourner is caught in a strange situation, for he or she inevitably scrutinises words not the body, a corpus not a corpse, and while this is a form of evasion it is also the only possibility open to us. Even so, Derrida might say that it is “as if, by reading, by observing the signs on the drawn sheet of paper, [readers are] trying to forget, repress, deny, or conjure away death—and the anxiety before death.” But he also concedes (after Sarah Kofman), that this process might involve “a cunning affirmation of life, its irrepressible movement to survive, to live on” (176), which supports Seale’s contention in relation to resurrective practices generally. Atwood points out that the dead have always made demands on the living, but, because there is a risk in negotiating with the dead, there needs to be good reason or reward for doing so. Our reading of war literature written by noncombatants suggests that in many instances writers seek to appease the unsettled dead whose death was meant to mean something for the future: the living owe the dead a debt that can only be paid by changing the way they live. The living, in other words, must not only remember the fallen, but also heed them by their conduct. It becomes the poet’s task to remind people of this, that is, to turn them from death towards life.Arthur H Adams’s 1918 poem “When the Anzac Dead Came Home,” published in the Bulletin, is based on this premise: the souls of the dead— the “failed” and “fallen”—drift uncertainly over their homeland, observing the world to which they cannot return, with its “cheerful throng,” “fair women swathed in fripperies,” and “sweet girls” that cling “round windows like bees on honeycomb.” One soul recognises a soldier, Steve, from his former battalion, a mate who kept his life but lost his arm and, after hovering for a while, again “wafts far”; his homecoming creates a “strange” stabbing pain, an ache in his pal’s “old scar.” In this uncanny scene, irreconcilable and traumatic knowledge expresses itself somatically. The poet conveys the viewpoint of the dead Anzac rather than the returned one. The living soldier, whose body is a site of partial loss, does not explicitly conjure or mourn his dead friend but, rather, is a living extension of his loss. In fact, the empathic connection construed by the poet is not figured as spectral orchestration or as mindful on the part of man or community; rather, it occurs despite bodily death or everyday living and forgetting; it persists as hysterical pain or embodied knowledge. Freud and Breuer’s influential Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, raised the issue of mind/body relations, given its theory that the hysteric’s body expresses psychic trauma that she or he may not recollect: repressed “memories of aetiological significance” result in “morbid symptoms” (56). They posited that experience leaves traces which, like disinterred archaeological artefacts, inform on the past (57). However, such a theory depends on what Rousseau and Porter refer to as an “almost mystical collaboration between mind and body” (vii), wherein painful or perverse or unspeakable “reminiscences” are converted into symptoms, or “mnemic symbols,” which is to envisage the body as penetrable text. But how can memory return unbidden and in such effective disguise that the conscious mind does not recognise it as memory? How can the body express pain without one remembering or acknowledging its origin? Do these kinds of questions suggest that the Cartesian mind/body split has continued valency despite the challenge that hysteria itself presents to such a theory? Is it possible, rather, that the body itself remembers—and not just its own replete form, as suggested by those who feel the presence of a limb after its removal—but the suffering body of “the other”? In Adam’s poem, as in M’Fadyen’s, intersubjective knowledge subsists between embodied and disembodied subjects, creating an imagined community of sensation.Adams’s poem envisions mourning as embodied knowledge that allows one man to experience another’s pain—or soul—as both “old” and “strange” in the midst of living. He suggests that the dead gaze at us even as they are present “in us” (Derrida). Derrida reminds that ghosts occupy an ambiguous space, “neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (41). Human mutability, the possibility of exchanging places in a kind of Socratic cycle of life and death, is posited by Adams, whose next stanzas depict the souls of the war dead reclaiming Australia and displacing the thankless living: blown to land, they murmur to each other, “’Tis we who are the living: this continent is dead.” A significant imputation is that the dead must be reckoned with, deserve better, and will not rest unless the living pay their moral dues. The disillusioned tone and intent of this 1918 poem contrasts with a poem Adams published in the Bulletin in 1915 entitled “The Trojan War,” which suggests even “Great Agamemnon” would “lift his hand” to honour “plain Private Bill,” the heroic, fallen Anzac who ventured forth to save “Some Mother-Helen sad at home. Some obscure Helen on a farm.” The act of war is envisaged as an act of birthing the nation, anticipating the Anzac legend, but simultaneously as its epitaph: “Upon the ancient Dardanelles New peoples write—in blood—their name.” Such a poem arguably invokes, though in ambiguous form, what Derrida (after Lyotard) refers to as the “beautiful death,” which is an attempt to lift death up, make it meaningful, and thereby foreclose or limit mourning, so that what threatens disorder and despair might instead reassure and restore “the body politic,” providing “explicit models of virtue” (Nass 82-83) that guarantee its defence and survival. Adams’ later poem, in constructing Steve as “a living fellow-ghost” of the dead Anzac, casts stern judgement on the society that fails to notice what has been lost even as it profits by it. Ideological and propagandist language is also denounced: “Big word-warriors still played the Party game;/They nobly planned campaigns of words, and deemed/their speeches deeds,/And fought fierce offensives for strange old creeds.” This complaint recalls Ezra Pound’s lines in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about the dead who “walked eye-deep in hell/believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving/came home, home to a lie/home to many deceits,/home to old lies and new infamy;/usury age-old and age-thick/and liars in public places,” and it would seem that this is the kind of disillusion and bitterness that Clunies Ross considers to be “incompatible with the Anzac tradition” (178) and thus ignored. The Anzac tradition, though quieted for a time, possibly due to the 1930s Depression, Second World War, Vietnam War and other disabling events has, since the 1980s, been greatly revived, with Anzac Day commemorations in Australia and at Gallipoli growing exponentially, possibly making maintenance of this sacrificial national mythology, or beautiful death, among Australia’s most capacious and costly creative industries. As we approach the centenary of the war and of Gallipoli, this industry will only increase.Elaine Scarry proposes that the imagination invents mechanisms for “transforming the condition of absence into presence” (163). It does not escape us that in turning towards lost literatures we are ourselves engaging in a form of resurrective practice and that this paper, like other forms of social and cultural practice, might be understood as one more human construction motivated by grief for embodiment.Note: An archive and annotated bibliography of the “Lost Literatures of the First World War,” which comprises over 2,000 items, is expected to be published online in 2015.References Adams, Arthur H. “When the Anzac Dead Came Home.” Bulletin 21 Mar. 1918.---. “The Trojan War.” Bulletin 20 May 1915.An Australian Mother. “Your Country’s Call.” Sydney Mail 19 May 1915.Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Random House, 2002.Caesar, Adrian. “National Myths of Manhood: Anzac and Others.” The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Eds. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998. 147-168.Clunies Ross, Bruce. “Silent Heroes.” War: Australia’s Creative Response. Eds. Anna Rutherford and James Wieland. West Yorkshire: Dangaroo Press, 1997. 169-181.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. Pelican Freud Library. Vol. 3. Trans. and eds. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, and Angela Richards. London: Penguin, 1988.Gerster, Robin. Big Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. M’Fayden, Ella. “The Wardens.” Sydney Mail 17 Apr. 1918.Naas, Michael. “History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event.” Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 76-96.Pound, Ezra. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” iv. 1920. 19 June 2012. ‹http://www.archive.org/stream/hughselwynmauber00pounrich/hughselwynmauber00pounrich_djvu.txt›.Riegal, Christian, ed. Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Rousseau, G.S., and Roy Porter. “Introduction: The Destinies of Hysteria.” Hysteria beyond Freud. Ed. Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.Seale, Clive. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Sutherland, Katherine. “Land of Their Graves: Maternity, Mourning and Nation in Janet Frame, Sara Suleri, and Arundhati Roy.” Riegel 201-16.Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays Volume 2. London: Hogarth, 1966. 28-29.

This dissertation studies the First World War South African campaign in German South West Africa from 1914 until 1915. The campaign was characterised by the high mobility of the Union’s mounted soldiers which enabled swift advances and rapid envelopments. The German forces applied a defensive strategy relying on the lack of water and remoteness of the terrain to deter and prolong the Union’s invasion. The German force also relied on internal lines of communication to concentrate its forces on the Union’s advancing columns. The Union Defence Forces’s numbered approximately 50 000 compared to the German force of about 7 000. The campaign culminated on 9 July 1915 with the surrender of almost the entire German fighting force intact. This study analyses whether the victory can be attributed to the Union Defence Forces’s numerical superiority or the operational strategy and tactics which were applied during the campaign. It is argued that this operational strategy is congruent with the modern theory of manoeuvre warfare and that the campaign is therefore a textbook example of manoeuvre warfare theory
History
M.A. (History)

In 1914 at the Battle of Tanga, the Indian troops performed badly because of inadequate training and hardware. After Tanga, mainly dispersed small actions rather than decisive great battles characterized the campaign in East Africa. Sporadic small-unit actions resulted in mostly battalion-size engagements, rather than mass infantry armies colliding with each other within a confined space as in France. Bush fighting required skirmishing, sniping, ambush, reconnaissance patrol, and so on—tactical forms in which the Indian infantry, who were veterans of North-West Frontier fighting, were well acquainted. However, ‘raw’ sepoys required some time to adopt this specialized form of combat technique. From mid-1917 onwards, material superiority and adoption of proper techniques of bush warfare by the British and Indian troops enabled them to keep the Germans on the run.

Chapter 7 examines France’s North African empire during the years of the First World War, noting how trans-imperial movements fueled by the war destabilized and outwardly challenged notions of a bounded “French North Africa.” As recent histories of the First World War have shown, the conflict was characterized by the intensification of imperial struggles after 1914 as the Entente and Central Powers struggled for global dominance. With Germany fomenting anti-colonial revolutionary movements across Africa and the Middle East as part of its war strategy and the Ottoman Empire declaring a global jihad, both France and Britain faced the prospect of colonial revolts in their Muslim empires. In this context, expressions of solidarity among North African Muslims evident on the eve of the war were radicalized, especially as German agents offered material assistance to Muslim activists. Algerian and Tunisian dissidents took to the press and set up revolutionary committees in Switzerland, Istanbul, and Berlin. They espoused notions of Wilsonian self-determination and spoke in the name of an Algerian-Tunisian Muslim community demanding postwar independence. Pan-Islamism and North African Muslim unity came together in this anti-colonial campaign, demonstrating the extent to which opposition assumed both an intra-imperial and trans-imperial dimension as the war progressed. By examining newspapers and magazines published in French, German, and English, this chapter follows North African activists who used the aid offered by Germany and the Ottoman Empire to pursue their own anti-colonial platforms.