Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · League Mandate

Tanganyika - September 1, 1939

Tanganyika in 1939 is a colony Britain holds on paper it does not fully own. It was German East Africa until the last war, the ground on which Lettow-Vorbeck fought his long guerrilla campaign, and it came to Britain not as a conquest to keep but as a League of Nations mandate to administer on trust - a distinction that in the 1930s is anything but academic. Nazi Germany has made the return of its former colonies a loud demand, and Tanganyika, with its lingering German settler community and its mandate status, is the exact sort of territory Berlin points to when it talks of colonial restitution. So the British administration in Dar es Salaam governs under a cloud: developing the territory while unsure whether it will keep it, running a mandate whose whole legal premise is that it is being held for the eventual benefit of its inhabitants rather than the profit of the Crown. The strategic identity is the provisional colony - a large, thinly-developed East African territory of real economic promise and unsettled political future, administered by a power that may be asked to hand it back.

Starting position

The starting board is a mandate territory of modest development and uncertain tenure. There is no colonial army of any weight - order rests on the police, the district administration working through indirect rule over many African societies, and the King's African Rifles battalions that Tanganyika contributes to the wider East African force. The economy is agricultural and export-facing: sisal above all, the crop that makes Tanganyika one of the world's great producers of the fibre, alongside cotton, coffee grown on Kilimanjaro's slopes, and the beginnings of the diamond and gold workings inland. The German settler and planter community that remained after 1918 still holds estates and, by the late 1930s, an unsettling number of open Nazi sympathies, which the coming war will resolve by internment. Strategically the territory is a link in British East Africa - bordering Kenya to the north, the Belgian Congo and the Rhodesias inland, and Portuguese Mozambique to the south, with Dar es Salaam and the central railway carrying its trade to the coast. Society is the familiar mandate pattern: a small European administrative and planter class, a larger Asian trading community, and an African majority governed through its chiefs and drawn into the cash economy as labour and growers. The pieces are the sisal economy, the railway, the KAR contribution and a German minority whose loyalties the war is about to test.

What turns the campaign

What Britain wants is to develop and hold Tanganyika without the mandate's terms or Germany's claim becoming a problem - to keep the sisal flowing, the territory quiet and the door on any colonial hand-back firmly, if quietly, shut. What the war forces is the conversion of a provisional colony into a committed part of the imperial war effort, and the closing of the question of its ownership by force of events. When war comes, the German settler community is interned and its estates sequestered, ending the internal element of Berlin's claim; Tanganyika's sisal becomes a controlled war commodity, its ports and railway feed the East African campaign against Italian East Africa, and its King's African Rifles battalions march north to Somaliland and Abyssinia and later east to Burma. The mandate's ambiguous status recedes as the practical fact of British possession is reinforced by the war and, afterward, converted into a United Nations trusteeship rather than surrendered. The campaign turns on how the administration handles the German minority and the labour and revenue demands of a war economy, and on whether the wartime mobilisation of African soldiers and growers begins to generate the political expectations that will, a generation later, carry Tanganyika to independence and the union that makes Tanzania. The colony held on trust in 1939 spends the war becoming, in fact, Britain's to keep - and then to leave.

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