Places in the Sun - a Mittelafrika timeline

[Reydan]

Author's Note - This Timeline is inspired by the Kaiserreich Mod, and events c.1916-1936 will follow, roughly, the premise of that Mod's setting.


Chapter One - Legacy of the Weltkrieg 1919-1925

“What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?”
A question posed to anthropologist Karl Weule during the sea voyage from Germany to German East Africa 1906.
((Reference Andrew Zimmerman, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48, 2, Apr 2006)

Dar es Salaam, the colonial capital of German Africa, from the air c.1930

​

If Germany was bloodied but triumphant at the end of the Weltkrieg, her African colonies were barely registering a pulse. The triumphal procession, featuring Paul von Lettow Vorbeck and his victorious Askaris who had survived seven years of mobile warfare in East Africa dodging British and colonial forces, was so far removed from realities on the ground in post-war Africa as to be a near fantasy. Indeed the passing over of East African Governor Heinrich Schnee, who had repeatedly clashed with the general, in favour of Theodor Seitz, is telling. Seitz, Governor of German South West Africa, had to be released from a South African prison camp to take up his position once more.

The post-war challenge faced by colonial administrators was vast. Seitz, appointed by Berlin to assume overall control over African holdings, was staggered by the task. The peace treaties of the post-war years saw enormous areas of land brought under nominal German control. In taking over just the Belgian portion of the Congo, for example, German officials found themselves suddenly administering an area almost five times the size of Spain. As chaos gripped post-war France the transfer of colonies was jagged and uncertain. Dahomey and the Ivory Coast in the West were relatively easily secured by marine landing, but bringing most of French Equatorial Africa under control was more haphazard. Ultimately German colonial authorities failed to secure the northernmost part of the area they had been promised, Chad, from the new anti-socialist regime in Algiers. By then, though, there was only token protest from Dar es Salaam. Far greater challenges lay ahead.

The war had ruined German possessions. Never the most directly invested colonial regime, what infrastructure there was had been damaged by the war. Railways broken up, schools burned, and skilled personnel dead or scattered to the winds. Africa saw little of the reparation money that Berlin jealously husbanded for European causes, and much of the the early post-war experience of what emerged officially as "Mittelafrika" in 1923 was to be dominated by under-funding, under-development, and what von Lettow Vorbeck ruefully called "a sort of second-rate settler who only came to Africa because he couldn't make it back home".

It was to set a worrying pace for the decades to come.

 

[markus meecham]

i am simple man, i see reydan, i watch thread.

 

[Catspoke]

This should be interesting. The Germans weren't the best colonialists OTL, but at least they invested something in their colonies and paid decent. I can't imagine them doing well in a low budget situation and with large areas to develop (and Central Africa pretty crap areas for Euros to immigrate too). Combined with a German tendency to put down revolts in the most brutal way it could get ugly early.

Perhaps Vorbeck's legacy will create this culture to treat people better. Well see.

Maybe as a bonus we will get an airship service Berlin to Togo or something

 

[St. Just]

Did the Brits take Sudwestafrika (that would make sense)? Looking forward to more!

 

[Reydan]

Princess Victoria Louise, the Kaiser's daughter, tours Togoland in 1924 as part of
an initiative to boost German migration and investment in western Mittelafrika. ​

The biggest problem faced by Colonial authorities in Mittelafrika during the first decade was the lack of skilled personnel. In part it was a legacy of the Weltkrieg, but also a wider problem of assuming the mantle of colonial government from differing regimes. In the 1910s the Belgian Congo had been ruled from Brussels. Neither African nor European settler subjects had been given a say in running the vast area of land. French regions had a greater tradition of local administration, but almost all of these had migrated north to Algiers and the new Republican Regime there. All of this had to change.

The immediate post-war context was vital. With nearly 12 million having served in the German armed forces during wartime, the rapid demobilisation saw some struggle to return to the workforce. Germany had cannibalised its economy during the war, beset by Allied blockade and the need to sell-off assets rapidly to realise international loans, and the post-war years were lean. Yet with new client states in the East, new territories overseas, and, initially, intervention in Russia and occupation in Belgium, Mittelafrika hardly received the cream of migrants.

From the start emigration to the new colonies was military-heavy. These were professional soldiers now out-of-work in a downsizing army or young men whose education had been disrupted by service and now had few skills other than those they had learned at the front. It made, one long-term Doctor in Dar-es-Salam noted in a letter home, services take on a distinctive flavour:

"The local post office, for example, is well run. A model of Prussian efficiency with gleaming brass and mahogany and neatly uniformed native runners. But any questions other than the immediate are met with confusion. I asked, yesterday, when the new telegraph line might be laid to Kalemie [in the former Belgian Congo], I was met by the glassy, almost-offended, incomprehension of a former Lieutenant in the Brandenburg Regiment."

Seitz, and his successors, slowly built a form of authority that rested on German personnel around their huge territory, but this had from the start a clear military style that would influence the future of Mittelafrika to come.

Just as they began to establish their authority the events of 1925-1926 would dramatically recast German power and influence in Africa.

 

[Reydan]

Southern Rhodesia Postage Stamp from 1928 featuring the image of George V.
​

The British Revolution of 1925 came like a bolt of lightening from a clear blue sky. If it was shocking for Britain, as thousands fled the rapid overthrow of the old order, or Europe, where Paris rejoiced and Berlin fretted, it was magnified by ten thousand volts for Mittelafrika.

The collapse did not come at once. Britain's African holdings watched nervously, little affected by revolutionary jitters of their own, and waited for the expected return to normality. If it hadn't been for the tensions simmering over among the Igbo tribes of West Africa perhaps Ottawa would have reasserted control without Dar-es-Salaam interfering.

As it was, the peaceful(ish) protests among the Igbo tribes, often led by women, against a Government taxation census underway in early 1926 was used by Germany as an excuse to send in troops to "restore order". Luckily for Berlin, the proximity of Togoland to the British holdings in the area allowed for a rapid deployment of troops.

An excuse found, other incursions quickly followed. Kenya, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and the remainder of British West Africa were quickly put under control by a German colonial authority staffed heavily by military and ex-military men. The first solution, indeed the only solution, non-military administrators found to their anxiety, seemed to be force. The slow trickle of British settlers returning to either Britain or the Dominions became a flood - Australia, Canada, and, most importantly, South Africa saw an influx of British ex-patriots from the rest of Africa and a subsequent brain-drain landed in the laps of the new German regime.

The exception was the newly defined Southern Rhodesia. On the rail-lines from South Africa, and with a swelling number of white settlers before the disturbances, Southern Rhodesia quickly asserted a quasi-independence and swore direct allegiance to Ottawa and the King before George V had even really landed in Canada. One tentative German incursion was rebuffed, almost leading to violence, by the paramilitary Legion of Frontiersmen and the Rhodesian borderlands became a region of tension for the regime in Dar-es-Salaam for years to come.

By 1928 German control, despite protests from Canada, had been established. Posession, as always, proved the significant factor in negotiations, and the Germans were just too entrenched. Yet their forceful takeover had significant consequences. Yet again the bold move had incorporated vast native populations and resources that further stretched the paper-thin control and investment of the German authorities. And although many British settlers had left, those that remained added their voices to the resentful murmur of former French and Belgian settlers now caught in an awkward "Second Class" status between the German colonists at the top and the native populations at the bottom.

 

[AussieHawker]

This is lacking a fair amount of context. How did the Great War end? France is right wing authoritarian and now Britain communist? What happened to the rest of the borders and warring nations?

 

[Reydan]

This is lacking a fair amount of context. How did the Great War end? France is right wing authoritarian and now Britain communist? What happened to the rest of the borders and warring nations?

Hi - this thread is based on the wider Kaiserreich alt-history, as discussed in the poll that led to this thread being created, so it relies on that overall history to gloss events in the wider world.

[edit] - I've added in an author's note at the beginning in case this is unclear for anyone else.

 

[Reydan]

Entrance to the China Pavilion at the Munich Empire Exhibition of 1929
​

If officials in Mittelafrika had hoped that the acquiring of former British territories would help them, they were cruelly mistaken. Berlin continued an ambivalent attitude to Africa - one of vague interest easily distracted. Prolonged German involvement in China, in the late 1920s, sucked away potential funds and attention from Mittelafrika, and it was only towards the end of the decade that fortunes began to pick up again.

The Empire Exhibition, held in Munich in the wet summer of 1929, exemplified the malaise that was affecting Mittelafrika in Berlin's mind. Desperate for investment and migration Mittelafrika went all out, constructing six pavilions including a full size Gold Coast traditional fort, a Rwanda village with imported 'villagers', and one of the conical towers from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe [now housed in the Berlin Museum and a source of much controversy]. Yet they found themselves one of many - the huge China Pavilion, funded by the well-resourced AoG Board, squatted across from their main enclosure and news of the successful conclusion to the China Campaign drew throngs of visitors.

Still, the late 1920s were a time of quiet yet significant change in Mittelafrika. A trickle of money did slowly increase from Berlin, and how it was spent is telling:

• Towns and cities in Mittelafrika were expanded and organised. Natives and White Settlers, especially in former British and French regions, had traditionally been semi-mixed in where they lived but now dedicated Western compounds were the order of the day. From 1922 to 1932, though, Mittelafrika's urban population may have more than doubled from 6 percent to around 14 percent - a major increase despite a still largely rural population overall.
  
• Schools and technical colleges were expanded. While many white settlers sent their children back to Germany for boarding school education, poorer settlers were encouraged to enroll their children in local schools. As in many colonies around the world native children were taught in separate schools, often run by the church, but here too the state took more of a leading role in education.
• Funding for military bases, and associated industries, steadily grew. This was the easiest form of funding to extract from Berlin, and the expansion of the oil industry in West Africa, for example, was directly linked to the new naval ports being built along the coastlines of German Africa.

Finally, the end of the 1920s saw the steady, yet unexpected, rise in prominence of a man destined to shape the future of Mittelafrika to come. Hermann Goering. Goering, who will be dealt with in detail in the next chapter, was symptomatic of the developing state-military complex that had come to assume control in Mittelafrika.

 

[Word Bearer]

Kaiserriech timelines should be in timeline Fandom, not here.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

Kaiserriech timelines should be in timeline Fandom, not here.

It is inspired by the timeline but is not the timeline, as the OP states. Moving it to fandom would be like me writing a timeline about the dread and decay of the 1970s never improving and actually getting worse, mentioning that I like Escape From New York and Robocop and having the timeline moved to Fandom.

 

[Roon]

Already a month and still no updates?

 

[Reydan]

Hermann Goering c.1930.
​

In the 1920s Hermann Goering was a lost soul. An aviation hero of the Weltkrieg, a member of the administrative class of the German Empire through his father, and generally a young, ambitious, educated man on the up, his course should have been stellar following the end of hostilities. Yet in the lean times post-war Goering was adrift. The Military cut-backs, the perilous state of post-war economy, and a sudden lack of purpose all played into Goering's insecurities. He moved from temporary position to unemployment to low-grade role, bouncing between private business, the military, and Government.

Only a chance meeting at the 1929 Empire Exhibition with an associate of his father offered a chance at change. Heinrich Goering had been a controversial administrator in South West Africa in the final decades of the c19th and had attracted admiration and revulsion for putting down the Herero and Namaqua uprisings. Despite dying in 1913, he was well remembered in Mittelafrika and former colleagues offered his son a position leading the military garrisons of the newly organised West Coast regions.

Out in Africa, amid German settler communities and with open land to roam, Goering thrived. Using his wife's contacts and money, 1931 saw him branch out into being a founding member of a new Mittelafrikan Airlines which proved an instant success in short-haul passenger transport. Goering's particular innovation, though, was the suggestion that freight planes be used to parachute supplies (medical particularly) to more remote out-stations, thus saving on the need for costly rail or road building projects.

In the militarised society emerging in Mittelafrika Goering went far - a keen socialite, charming and rousing, he was well liked by the small yet significant body of influence-wielders in German colonial society but also by the military-administration. He bounced up the ladder in leaps, receiving a number of commands that, like so much in Mittelafrika, blurred the lines between military and government role and responsibility. Yet it was his performance in the Yoruba Uprising, which broke out in 1931 as the first major challenge to colonial rule in Mittelafrika, was as defining for Goering as it was for the colony as a whole.

 

[Roon]

Hopefully with Goering never got injured (thus became a drug addict and fat), he will be able to shape Mittelafrika for better and more prosperous future.

 

[Reydan]

Hopefully with Goering never got injured (thus became a drug addict and fat), he will be able to shape Mittelafrika for better and more prosperous future.

I don't want to spoil anything, but if you think colonialism will work out a-ok in this timeline, you might want to read some of the other stuff I've written on this site...

 

[markus meecham]

Yet it was his performance in the Yoruba Uprising,

This is not nice.

but if you think colonialism will work out a-ok in this timeline,

Eagerly awaiting for everything to go up in flames.

 

[Alex1guy]

This pretty entertaining

 

[SomeFollowTheStars]

I love this so far. kaiserreich is one of my favorite timeline. My headcanon for MittleAfrika is a German government in exile that struggles to maintain control over evermore corporatocratic companies. The whole thing eventually goes up in flames during the late 90s.

 

[Bookmark1995]

I imagine colonial policy will not be much fun for Africans. I imagine the same exploitative labor practices Africans endured have continued.