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Quoted By: >>17320918 >>17320946 >>17321901 >>17322683 >>17322919
>I became interested in German colonialism while writing The Last Imperialist, a biography of the British colonial governor Sir Alan Burns published in 2021. As a young administrator in West Africa, Burns was sent into combat against neighboring German colonies when the Great War began in 1914. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the African natives fighting for Germany were tenacious and loyal. Native support for the Germans was so vigorous that the young Burns was taken out of the field and sent to British Lagos to recruit more soldiers. All this seemed puzzling to me because, having read what passes for scholarship on German colonialism, I believed that Africans (as well as the Arabs, Chinese, and Samoans) hated the Germans. But if that were so, then why did these peoples rally behind their German governors during the war? In East Africa, the natives did not lay down arms until word came that the fighting had ended in Europe. In West Africa, they followed their colonial masters into exile in neighboring Spanish territory and petitioned world leaders to restore Berlin’s authority. Such stubborn facts are incomprehensible to the modern mind, trained as it is to think of European colonial rule as loathsome and unwelcome.
