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The last of the guns of the Great War (later dubbed World War I) fell silent not on the bloody battlefields of Europe but in a remote corner of East Africa. It took a full day for news that the powers had signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, to reach that part of East Africa where African soldiers, under British and German officers, were locked in a deadly struggle for the possession of German East Africa. It was altogether fitting that this war, which had begun as a European balance-of power war but had rapidly become a world conflagration, came to a close outside of Europe. The East African campaigns were particularly lethal. Here, the German general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, with never more than 10,000 African soldiers, used hit-and-run guerrilla tactics to thwart the efforts of more than 300,000 British-led African soldiers. Thousands of African soldiers died in these East African battles, or from disease and inadequate medical attention, though they did so beyond the spotlight of international opinion. But while the African theater shared in the destruction of the Great War, the conflict and its aftermath fostered here, as well as elsewhere in the colonized world, universalistic notions of freedom and self-determination and a growing disillusionment with European rule.
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