African Queens and Ice-Cream Wars: Fictional and Filmic Versions of the East African Conflict of 1914–18

Abstract

It was widely believed that the climate in sub-Saharan Africa was too severe to permit the outbreak of hostilities between the European colonies of the east and west coasts there. How wrong this belief was! However, the conflict in East Africa has rarely been taken seriously, seeming to lack the scale of the confrontations in Europe. Indeed, accounts of the campaign in German and British East Africa have tended to take on a boy’s own patina of derring-do and adventure which belies the ravaging of a significant proportion of the continent. Two well-known work of fiction, C.S. Forester’s The African Queen (1937) and Wilbur Smith’s Shout at the Devil (1968) have perpetuated this impression, but William Boyd’s novel The Ice Cream War (1982) and the recent work of historians have challenged this view, suggesting that although the carnage was not on the scale of European military engagements, the damage was considerable. It was only not registered for 70 years because it mostly affected Africans, who were recognized as valuable but expendable assets. The guerilla war fought by the German Schutztruppen from 1914 to 1918 (still regarded as military heroism of the highest order) was only possible by “tip and run” tactics which despoiled a region for decades, and the British were scarcely less profligate with their imperial manpower. Post-colonial thinking must now fully re-analyse this conflict, study fictional projections of this campaign and weigh up its contribution to the making of the 20th century and the processes of decolonisation.