The ‘traditional’ approach within the historical scholarship to the East African Campaign of the First World War has been to deride the events that occurred in the region as a ‘sideshow;’ a sideshow unworthy of greater study, for, the scholarship has concluded, these events had a negligible impact upon the main region of the War: Europe.
My doctoral research has focused upon seeing and knowing the region of East Africa during the First World War in a new way; not from the traditional European perspective, looking at Africa from a distance, but from an African perspective, looking out at the world in which it belonged. I have constructed my findings from analysing a large of amount of writings that were produced in the region.
This paper will give an examination of how pan-Islamism, brought about primarily by the Turkish call for jihad in 1914, merged with pan-Africanism in the East African region. The latter, unable to firmly establish itself on its own, used the former as a political tool. Consequently, the European colonisers were threatened in their Empires from an African source; an African source that they had believed was so racially inferior to be hardly worthy of study.
Furthermore, this paper will examine how the scholarship of the First World War has neglected to see and know Africa; for a war that continues, almost a century after its conclusion, to play such a large role in British cultural life, the scholarship predominantly excludes the ability of British citizens who are of African descent to access this part of Britain’s cultural past on a personal level.
By disturbing the traditional historical approach to seeing and knowing East Africa, I will show that not only were the events of the East African Campaign of the First World War by no means a sideshow, but the characterisation of them as a sideshow continues to exclude East Africans from the historical narrative; a narrative that belongs to East Africa as much it belongs to Europeans.