Istwa Nou

At Versailles in 1919 the victorious Allies divided Germany's African colonies among themselves. Britain and France split Togo and Cameroon. Britain took Tanganyika. Belgium took Rwanda and Burundi. South Africa was given German South West Africa to administer. The rhetoric of the 1880s was no longer usable, so the treaty said these territories would be administered on behalf of the new League of Nations, held in trust, with the administering power preparing them for eventual self-government and protecting the interests of the people who lived there. The Mandate system had no means of enforcing anything, since the two most powerful members of the League were the two largest colonial empires, but the secretariat did send inspection teams and ask for reports. The principle it established was guardianship: that some peoples were less developed and required managing until they reached political maturity. That idea outlived the League by a century. Its vocabulary is still audible in the language of development and capacity building used about countries under foreign supervision, Haiti among them in the same decade.