German East Africa - Christian Missionaries
In the pre-Maji Maji period and later many of the representatives of European culture were not soldiers, settlers, or administrators but missionaries. In some respects they were to have the longest range effects, on the religion of many Africans obviously, but also as the early (and, indeed, later) purveyors of education, as important contributors to the diffusion of Swahili, spoken and written, and as the sources of training in many practical skills.
From 1887 on other missionaries arrived to supplement the work of the UMCA (Anglican) and the Roman Catholic Holy Ghost Fathers and White Fathers. The Evangelical Missionary Society for German East Africa established missions at Dar es Salaam and Tanga and in Shambaa and Zaramo country in the hinterland. The Evangelical Missionary Society of Berlin and the Moravian% worked in the Southern Highlands, and the Leipzig Lutheran Mission began work among the Chaga in 1893.
The Holy Ghost Fathers expanded their activity, establishing stations among the Chaga and elsewhere in the eastern mainland. In general the missions of different denominations avoided direct competition. Among the Chaga where both Lutherans and Roman Catholics were present, the mission posts of each denomination were established in different chiefdoms.
In response in part to the Maji Maji Rebellion and to the new policy emanating from Germany, education was increasingly stressed after 1907, and missionary enterprise was crucial to its development. The government itself was directly involved only to a limited extent: the inadequate statistics of the period show a little more than 6,000 students in government schools in 1914 but well over 150,000 in mission schools.
Some missions attempted to use local languages for their religious and educational activities, but most made early use of Swahili, and a few engaged in systematic research into that language as did missionaries stationed in Zanzibar and Kenya. Between the precolonial introduction into the interior of rudimentary Swahili by the coastal traders and the widespread use of Swahili by missionaries and administrators, mainland Tanzania got an early start on the lingua franca that was to become the national language, although it was to be a long time before the language was almost universally understood.
It is very difficult to generalize about the religious impact of the Christian missions. That impact varied with the nature of the religious and social systems of the peoples the missions encountered, the particular emphasis of each denomination, and often enough the personal peculiarities and the particular situations of missionaries and the African political leaders in each mission area.
The early missionaries often had their first contacts with freed slaves dependent on them for protection and sustenance. Later as the missions moved into other communities, missionaries were sought out by chiefs who saw tinem as closely linked to, if not agents of, the colonial power and therefore as potential allies in the ongoing process of holstering or aggrandiring their own power and status.
In addition must Africans understood missionaries not simply or solely as religious figures but as sources of knowledge and help in educational, medical, agricultural, and other practical matters. Further some missions initially approached the indigenous peoples as if they lacked religion or anything resembling it. These and others learned, after a time, that each group had a somewhat complex set of beliefs and rituals. Missions evaluated these sets in various ways: some saw indigenous beliefs and rituals as something to he wholly replaced by Christian dogma and practice. Others sought parallels between local notions and Christian ones in an effort to make adjustments in their teachings that would further the missionary enterprise.
In the German period as later, men and women became Christians and remained Christians (or became so-called backsliders) for a variety of reasons, and the intensity of their Christianity and extent to which adherence to Christianity excluded continuing participation in aspects of the indigenous system also varied. For some adherence to Christianity was a way to retain power and status. For others, lacking such power and status in the indigenous community, it was a way, not necessarily consciously sought, of seeking status in a different kind of community.
For those who saw education as significant, missions provided access to it. Often women found it easier than men to become and remain adherents of Christianity. Some missions. at least, would accept and retain a woman who was or became one of several wives of a polygynist, but they would not accept a man who was married to several women or who married a second woman after having converted.
In almost every group in which missions operated there were a few persons for whom the message transmitted by a Christian mission was a response to a deeply felt need, but even those who became Christians out of a mixture of motives and with lesser degrees of intensity and clarity about what they were doing were, nevertheless, the fathers and mothers of the next generations who were to become Christians of one kind or another almost automatically. Only later were Christian Africans to raise the question of whether what they had been taught and come to believe was Christianity pure and simple or only one version of European culture from which the essentially Christian must be detached.
The German presence in East Africa came to an end as a result of the Great War. The British blockade of the German area began in August 1914. In March 1916 the British forces took the offensive, driving from Kenya into the German-held area along the Kilimanjaro front. By September 1916 the British forces, larger than the Gerrnan, controlled the great bulk of the territory and population. German-led troops continued sporadic resistance, harassing the British whenever they could, but by November 1917 they had been pushed into the Portuguese-held territory of Mozambique, and the British controlled all of what was to become Tanganyika.
German colonial domination of the mainland ended in 1919, when control of most of the territory passed to the British through a League of Nations mandate.
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