World War I in Africa: The Forgotten Conflict among the European Powers

World War I in Africa: the forgotten conflict among the European powers, by Anne Samson. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. x + 306pp. ISBN 9781780761190. £59.50.For many years the various First World War campaigns which took place in East, West and South-West Africa were indeed largely forgotten, but over the last decade or so there have been quite a number of scholarly books which have sought to shed new light on the subject. Of these, the most notable perhaps have been Ross Anderson's The Forgotten Front (Stroud: 2004), Hew Strachan's The First World War in Africa (Oxford: 2007) and Edward Paice's Tip and Run (London: 2007), and now Anne Samson, who herself has also previously written on the East African campaign, has added this well- researched and readable account to the list. What does it add to these earlier books? In very broad terms, it seems to me that there are two aspects of the war to which she gives new emphasis.The first of these is the campaign in German South-West Africa, which has traditionally received far less scholarly attention than the East African campaign, perhaps because it lasted a far shorter length of time, but also perhaps there are fewer available sources or eye-witness accounts to draw on. Here Samson has broken new ground by being the first, to my knowledge, to make use of the papers of mine-owner Sir George Farrar, who not only participated (and indeed lost his life) in the military campaign, but whose papers also provide considerable insight into the South African politics that lay behind it.This leads neatly on to the second point, which is that throughout the book, Samson seeks to understand the relationships between the politicians and the generals and to show how decisions of high policy, taken in London, or Brussels, Berlin or Lisbon (or indeed Pretoria) impacted on the ground. If you want to understand the strategic thinking of the great powers towards Africa and how their aims and objectives changed and developed as the war progressed, the chapters headed 'Behind the Scenes' and 'The War in London' are a good place to start; she also gives due weight to the 'imperial' ambitions of South African politicians, which had a notable impact on the course of the war, and mentions in passing that that even the Government of India had designs on German East. In fact the level of horse-trading that went on between the governments of the Allied powers was even greater than is commonly realised: how many people today realise that at one point Lloyd George favoured giving East Africa to the United States, or that when that idea failed to find favour the Belgian Congo (the colony of an allied country!) was proposed in its place?Of all the politicians and generals who appear in this book, it is clearly Smuts who fascinates Samson the most, and it is he, together with German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who takes centre stage throughout much of the book. Early on (p.4) she claims that the two men "became friends", but just few a pages later she admits that they met only once, ten years after the war in 1929, and although Smuts sent food parcels to Lettow- Vorbeck in 1945 he does not seem to have been responsible for inviting him to revisit Africa in 1953 (after Smuts' death), as is sometimes claimed. …