GERMANS IN EAST AFRICA

Waipa Post, Volume 49, Issue 3505, 14 August 1934, Page 7

GERMANS IN EAST AFRICA

STEADY INCREASE IN POPULATION. GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE. London, June 17. In the steady movement that is going oh for the recovery of the lost German colonies in Africa, few people in England appreciate the sinister importance of the Usagara Company, whose sole object is the peaceful penetration of Tanganyika, writes a special correspondent of the Morning Post, from Dar-es-Salaam. Herr Adolf Hitler has recently stated that Germany has abandoned all idea of overseas colonies. Behind this and other camouflage, the Usagara Company, highly subsidised by the Hitler Government, sits, smiles, and is silent. In the last few months it has become clear that there is in Tanganyika a subversive movement, composed of determined, organised and energetic Germans. This movement includes a “Bund” or militant block of German settlers in that country, a boycott of British goods, together with claims for German as the second official language, and for four out of the 10 non-official seats on the Legislative Council to be reserved for Germans on the basis of white population. Political Aims. . This movement is something more than the waving of a few swastikas. It is fostered and sustained by the offshoots are the German Develop- ' ment and Mortgage Company and the I.G. Company, all at work in Tanganyika. With formidable capital, and staffed (as regards the higher executive posts) by agents of the German Foreign Qffice itself, the parent company at least, if not working exactly under the same Charter as before from the German Government, has objects which are not commercial, not economic, but political. These supposed merchants and traders, working like the white ants which cause such havoc in Africa, have been tunnelling beneath the complacent British rule. The sole activity over a period of years of the first company formed as subsidiary to the Usagara has been the settlement in large numbers of German nationals in Tanganyika. For this purpose the Mortgage and Development Company exists, with ample funds for assisting German settlers to buy land, plant and tools, lorries and tractors, and to root themselves in definite settlements. The result to-day is that German settlers everywhere outnumber British settlers, and are in the proportion of 4 to 10 in respect of the total | European population of Tanganyika.

British immigration, dispirited by a variety of causes, has dwindled to a vanishing point. Every German ship which arrives brings new settlers in the same ratio. In five years’ time, given the same proportion of increased immigration, Germany will not need to say: “Give us back Tanganyika,” for Tanganyika will be hers by sheer weight of numbers. The first post war attempt at German settlement was made some six years ago, when the Tanganyika Moravian Brotherhood was induced, or subsidies offered through the German Foreign Office, to subsidise the mission holdings among Teutonic settlers. Stock of Firearms. Since then things have moved more subtly and with a minimum of publicity. As the vessels of the German East Africa Line disembark their scores of German immigrants month after month, these families are met at the ports of Tanga or Dar-es-Salaam by discreet agents of the Usagara Company, who welcome them, pay the £IOO deposit required of every immigrant, shepherd them through the British Customs formalities, and see them on to trains for the highlands of the interior. The Tanganyika Government is at last waking up to the fact that each German settler entering the territory brings with him on an average five firearms, rifles, shotguns or British rule! had grown very turbulent under pensable against the natives, who' Fatherland that arms were indispistols. While leaving such people a shotgun for self-defence, the Governder. The writer asked several such immigrants what the battery of firearms was for. They replied that they had been told before leaving the ment now confiscates the remainThe Longest Purse. Up-country these German settlers find that the Benevolent British Government has thrown open yet another area suitable for white farming. As such land is put up for auction the man with the longest purse wins. In the case of Germans, Usagara Company funds are available, not only for land purchase, but for development, as loans on easy terms. Is it any wonder that to-day there are definite “pockets” of German settlement throughout Tanganyika, notably at Mufindi, Sanya, Oldeani, and in the Tanga province? The total number of Germans is now approximately 3000. The men are well-organised, determined, and liberally supplied with arms. The women have their own Colonial FrauenBund, also assisting settlement activity. One result of recent German pene-

tration, propaganda, and boycotting has been a stiffening of opinion among British settlers in East Africa who now forcibly declare that the sooner the present mandate is discarded or drastically revised to permit of Tanganyika being run more on the lines of a British Colony the better.