Istwa Nou

The Maji Maji revolt spread across German East Africa with no planning and no central command. What held it together was religion. Priests scattered through the territory carried a common message, and the maji of the name was water sprinkled on the body that was said to turn German bullets aside. Belief of that kind united people across ethnic lines who had no other reason to act together, and the first attacks caught the Germans completely unprepared. Then colonial firepower told, the water was disproved in the most direct way available, and the movement started to come apart. Through 1906 German columns burned crops and villages, and the revolt was finished early in 1907. Twenty six thousand Africans were killed. Perhaps fifty thousand more died in the famine the burning produced. Afterwards the Germans spent money on development and mission schools, and farmers in the former rebel districts took up cotton willingly, which suggests the grievance had been the coercion rather than the crop. Tanganyikan nationalists half a century later took the revolt as their founding example.