Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa by Michelle R. Moyd (review)

In her first book, Michelle R. Moyd writes about the askari, the African soldiers serving in the German East African colonial army between 1890 and 1918. On the surface, the book is a military history, detailing the exploits of the askari as soldiers throughout the colonial conquest and World War I. But Violent Intermediaries does much more than discuss battles and campaigns. Overcoming methodological challenges posed by translation, memory, and frankly a scarcity of documents disclosing askari voices, Moyd sought to understand these soldiers on their own terms. As a result she explores the everyday life of the askari, from within their households to their official and unofficial roles within colonial society, and she recovers a past widely misunderstood due to German praise and Tanzanian denunciation for their loyalty to the Schutztruppe (the official name of the German colonial army).

Drawing from archival sources from Tanzania, Germany, and Great Britain, Moyd presents a more nuanced depiction of the askari, arguing that as soldiers and colonial intermediaries they helped build the colonial state while simultaneously carving out new paths to local respectability (becoming “big men”). The askari, she contends, attained a unique position in colonial society, one that blurred the lines between the colonizer and the colonized. Beginning in chapter one, Moyd explains how European expansion in late-nineteenth-century East Africa produced new pathways toward local respectability. The Nyamwezi, for example, who would come to dominate the ranks of the Schutztruppe, traditionally viewed work as a porter or guard on long-distance caravans as a rite of passage to manhood. Once they encountered the Germans, however, service in the Schutztruppe presented them an opportunity to elicit the same masculine traits while obtaining a powerful new ally. Moyd also begins untangling the dual-nature of the Schutztruppe by demonstrating how Nyamwezi song and dance created camaraderie amongst the troops that German tutelage alone had been unable to achieve.

In chapter two she describes the training process that transformed recruits from vastly different regions — the Egyptian Sudan all the way to the central steppe and Great Lakes region of German East Africa and Belgian Congo — into Schutztruppe askari. As she explains, the training process was comprised of a back and forth exchange between German officers and ncos (who sought to instill an esprit de corps through discipline) and African soldiers (who wanted to draw from their own combat experiences). In chapter three, Moyd describes how these competing visions of German and African martial traditions were meted out to form a singular way of war during the colonial conquest of German East Africa (1890s), the Maji Maji rebellion (1905–7), and World War I (1914–18). While assessing the massive loss of life and destruction caused by what she accurately describes as a “ruthlessly effective colonial army,” (p. 115) she takes care to note that askari loyalty derived not from a natural affinity for the German Empire, but rather the expectation that service in the Schutztruppe would gain them local influence.

The remainder of the book examines the role of the askari within local communities near the mabomas (the colonial stations where askari were posted). In chapter four Moyd depicts the mabomas as centres of cultural exchange, arguing that by taking part in local economic and religious activities, the askari and their families exposed surrounding populations to colonial sensibilities that created important cultural ties between the colonial state and its subjects. As Moyd demonstrates, even after retiring from the Schutztruppe, askari veterans became patrons within communities near mabomas, using their relative wealth and status to promote the German colonial regime. Chapter four also focuses on women. Aside from serving as the constitutive “other” upon which askari masculinity was based, Moyd argues that they provided the necessary domestic labour that kept the Schutztruppe functioning.

In chapter five Moyd examines how the askari projected the authority of the colonial state through their constabulary positions...