1914 to 1918 · Africanspan
The First World War finishes the scramble for Africa
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The European war arrived while most colonial administrations in Africa were still consolidating what they had seized. German Togo and Cameroon were invaded late in 1914, and the fighting in Cameroon ran into 1916. South African forces took German South West Africa and stayed there for more than seventy years. In eastern Africa the German commander von Lettow-Vorbeck kept a column moving through Mozambique, Nyasaland and northeastern Rhodesia and gave himself up only when he heard of the armistice in November 1918. Most of the soldiers on both sides were African, led by small numbers of European officers. Between 750,000 and one million Africans were pressed into service as porters, and roughly one in five of them died, mostly of disease. Armies burned crops and stores as they moved. France sent 150,000 West Africans to the Western Front and thirty thousand of them were killed. Conscription acquired a name among Africans, the blood tax. French operations against resistance to recruitment completed the conquest of West African districts that had held out since the 1880s.
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