Maji Maji, 1905–1907: Resistance to German Rule in East Africa

A war across many communities

In July 1905, resistance in the Matumbi hills developed into a war that spread across much of southern German East Africa. Messages and mobilisation moved through Ngindo-speaking networks towards Lindi, the area around Dar es Salaam and the southern highlands. The movement attacked colonial authority and people associated with it: officials, settlers, traders, missionaries and local rulers who supported the government. Its participants shared opposition to domination, but they did not all have the same grievances or political ambitions. The name Maji Maji recalls the water medicine associated with their struggle. ¹

The fighting took place largely in territory that is now mainland Tanzania. German East Africa was a colonial possession, encompassing lands within several present-day countries, rather than an African state with the boundaries or institutions of modern Tanzania. German imperial claims dated from 1885, and Britain and Germany negotiated their respective East African interests in 1890. Such agreements among European powers were followed by campaigns to enforce authority locally. ²

German control remained dependent on military force and intermediaries. The suppression of Hehe resistance under Mkwawa, which continued until 1898, was one earlier struggle over the imposition of colonial government. Administrative offices and plantations then extended the demands made on African inhabitants. Economic exploitation and political conquest belonged to the same process: the authorities sought both obedience and labour for the colonial economy. ²

Cotton and the pressure on households

African accounts explain what these demands meant at home. An eighteen-year-old schoolgirl writing from Chiwata in 1898 described weekly courts, beatings and imprisonment. She questioned taxes payable in money when household wealth consisted of crops such as maize, millet and groundnuts. Her letter, reproduced in the documentary collection edited by Tanzanian historian Gilbert Gwassa and John Iliffe, records an African woman’s understanding of colonial power well before the outbreak of war. ³

Testimony collected by Gwassa in the 1960s described compulsory work on cotton plantations around Matumbi. Villages supplied workers in rotation, and a woman might be forced to work when the authorities accused her of concealing an absent husband. Work for an overseer competed with planting, harvesting and protecting a family’s own crops from birds and wild pigs. The recollections describe whipping and little or no benefit to the labourers. They make clear that resistance concerned the terms on which people were compelled to produce cotton, including the damage to their ability to feed themselves. ³

The communal cultivation scheme placed neighbourhood plots under local headmen, with European-controlled committees supervising production and marketing. In the Dar es Salaam district, a scheme initially producing several crops increasingly concentrated on cotton. Historian John Iliffe found that payments were meagre or failed to reach workers. Officials held headmen responsible for delivering labour, putting them under pressure from the administration and from the people ordered into the fields. A commercial crop had become a means of governing households. ⁴

Maji, belief and the possibility of unity

Kinjikitile Ngwale became associated with a message that resistance could overcome the colonial power. Maji means water in Kiswahili; the medicine distributed through the movement was believed to offer protection, including protection from bullets. Such promises mattered to people confronting a heavily armed opponent. They also created shared obligations across communities. Treating the medicine only as a mistaken belief would miss its role in helping people imagine and organise action together. ⁹

Iliffe traced the movement through religious networks associated with the spirit Kolelo and the distribution of water medicine. People travelled to obtain it and carried instructions home. These networks could connect participants beyond existing local political structures. Yet the spread of a common commitment did not create a single command directing every district. As the war expanded, established leaders and forms of military organisation remained important. Religious mobilisation and local political authority interacted throughout the struggle. ⁴

Local leaders and different reasons to fight

Historian Felicitas Becker places the rebellion within older tensions between the coast and interior. Nineteenth-century trade and warfare had helped some leaders accumulate followers and influence. Relationships between these powerful men and those following them could be unstable. Colonial intervention therefore entered a region with its own histories of authority, competition and dependence; it did not encounter communities without politics until Europeans arrived. ⁵

Becker’s analysis also shows how resistance to German rule could intersect with opposition to coastal elites and the ambitions of local leaders. This helps explain why a common movement contained different projects. A cultivator resisting forced work, a leader seeking to defend authority and a religious organiser building new connections could participate in the same struggle without having identical aims. Recognising those differences gives African decisions greater substance than a story in which everyone simply followed one prophet. ⁵

The colonial army and the changing war

Most soldiers enforcing German power were Africans. The colonial army, known as the Schutztruppe, developed through recruitment from several regions, including north-eastern Africa, Portuguese East Africa and communities within and around the German colony. Its rank-and-file soldiers were commonly called askari. Historian Michelle Moyd explains that pay, opportunities and relative privilege helped make military employment attractive. German rule recruited and rewarded African intermediaries while maintaining a racial hierarchy with white officers at its head. ⁶

Askari conducted daily policing as well as campaigns of conquest. Their role in suppressing Maji Maji included destructive operations against civilian communities. Soldiers could acquire resources through wages and plunder, building substantial households and positions of local influence. These relationships complicate any account that places all Africans on one side of the conflict. They also help explain how a colonial power with comparatively few European personnel could inflict violence over a large area. Responsibility for the campaign must encompass the system of command and reward that sustained it. ⁶

The early resistance spread quickly and attacked military posts, farms and missions. At Mahenge, however, an assault on the German administrative and military station in late August 1905 was repulsed with heavy losses. The defeat did not end the war. Resistance subsequently included guerrilla operations, while colonial troops sought to destroy the conditions that allowed fighters and communities to survive. By 1906, the authorities had regained control over much of the affected territory. ⁷

German officials proclaimed an end to the war in February 1907, although operations continued in some places into 1908. The familiar dates 1905–1907 describe the main conflict without marking a simultaneous return to peace in every locality. Captured participants could face death or prolonged forced labour. Kinjikitile had been arrested and hanged early in the struggle, but the movement continued without him. Military defeat also left people confronting the loss of homes and food supplies, so the end of organised fighting was not the end of its consequences. ⁷

Destruction as a method of warfare

The campaign deliberately attacked the material basis of civilian life. Colonial forces destroyed villages, fields, stores and wells. Hunger followed the destruction of the means of producing and keeping food. People who had never fought could be caught in the same disaster as armed participants: children, older people and those trying to maintain households all depended on those resources. The description “scorched earth” identifies a strategy whose effects continued after soldiers had moved on. ⁹

A series of postcards written by the German officer Robert von Krieg provides a disturbing view from within the campaign. In November 1905 he accompanied ammunition towards Mahenge and continued on military operations. Writing to his brother, he boasted of the casualties inflicted by rapid fire and of harm done through burning villages and destroying fields. The German Historical Museum reproduces this evidence, including his praise for the work of auxiliary forces. Destruction appears in the officer’s account as an achievement to report home. ⁸

The total number of African deaths cannot be stated with precision. The German Historical Museum considers approximately 180,000 likely, whereas other accounts offer different totals. Such estimates require attention to the populations and periods counted, including famine deaths beyond particular battles. The scale of civilian suffering is clear even where an exact figure remains uncertain. Turning an estimate into a seemingly exact count would conceal the limitations of the surviving evidence. ⁸

Women, food and the struggle to survive

The consequences also appear in women’s responses to threatened hunger. Historian Thaddeus Sunseri examined a missionary’s account from Kisarawe late in 1907. It described Zaramo women performing an ngoma, a ritual dance, around a well during a drought threatening the maize crop. They wore men’s clothing and carried muskets as they appealed for rain. Christian and non-Christian women participated together, indicating that the urgency of protecting food supplies could cross religious divisions. ¹⁰

Sunseri reads this action as evidence of women actively reshaping gender roles under severe pressure. The missionary’s disapproval must be distinguished from the purposes of those he described. For the women, securing food was an immediate collective concern. Their action also widens the history beyond armed men and defeated armies. Households confronted changes in labour, authority and survival that continued after major military operations, and women responded through practices that combined practical necessity, spiritual conviction and public assertion. ¹⁰

Songea: execution, burial and remembrance

In Songea, colonial punishment left a particularly enduring physical record. The National Museum of Tanzania identifies the execution ground, known as manyongeo, as the place where sixty-six participants in the resistance were hanged. Its account describes relatives and other inhabitants witnessing the deaths of fathers, uncles and other members of their families. The museum preserves the names associated with the mass grave. These records give individual and family identities to people easily reduced to anonymous figures in a military account. ¹²

The execution ground and burial place connect public history with bereavement. The museum’s presentation asks visitors to encounter both the named dead and the site at which relatives saw colonial violence inflicted. Remembering the war through such places changes the questions a visitor can ask: who was lost, who survived to preserve a name, and how did a community continue after so many deaths? The memorial therefore holds a local family history alongside the wider history of resistance. ¹²

The museum’s exhibition identifies Songea Mbano as a senior Ngoni leader associated with the struggle. It records that he refused an offer to cooperate with the colonial authorities and was killed separately from the other condemned men. The exhibition presents his refusal as an act of loyalty to those who had fought alongside him. His separate grave and the communal burial site remain central to the way the war is commemorated in the town that bears his name. ¹¹

The Maji Maji Memorial Museum opened to the public in July 1980. Its development involved regional authorities and the Ruvuma Elders Council; it later became part of the National Museum of Tanzania. The institution’s history shows that remembrance was sustained locally as well as through national recognition. Preserving graves, objects and accounts required continuing work by people for whom the events belonged to the history of their own communities. ¹¹

Recovering histories beyond official reports

Archaeologist Nancy Rushohora has combined documentary research, local knowledge, landscape survey and excavation to investigate the war. Her work maps battle sites, routes and places of refuge, and examines materials including pottery, building remains and metal objects. This evidence can illuminate experiences poorly represented in records written by colonial officials. A refuge cave or a destroyed settlement prompts questions about movement, shelter and survival that a report of military victory may scarcely address. ¹³

Rushohora also examines the changing interpretation of Maji Maji. After independence, it became an important example of collective resistance in Tanzanian national history. Later researchers have paid closer attention to local differences and groups often left out of earlier narratives, including women, children and non-combatants. These approaches can be read together. The achievement of building connections across communities remains significant, while historical research can recognise that participation, belief and suffering varied. Shared remembrance need not require an identical story for everyone. ¹³

The war’s long afterlife

The defeat of Maji Maji preserved colonial government. Some policies concerning compulsory labour and cash-crop production changed as officials reconsidered the causes of resistance. Those reforms did not amount to African independence. The war instead became part of a longer history in which its meaning was debated and carried forward by later generations. Its immediate outcome and its subsequent political importance belong to different moments. ¹

On 1 November 2023, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Songea and met descendants of Songea Mbano. In his speech he asked forgiveness for what Germans had done to their ancestors. He also addressed the removal of human remains to Germany and promised efforts to search for and identify Songea’s skull. This was a dated public commitment, not evidence that the identification or return had already taken place. ¹⁴

The encounter placed descendants’ questions at the centre of an official visit: why had their ancestor been killed, what had happened to his remains, and where were they? Steinmeier acknowledged the continuing burden carried by the family. Those questions demonstrate how the history extends beyond the dates of military campaigns. Maji Maji remains a history of Africans organising against coercion, of communities devastated by colonial warfare, and of descendants insisting that the dead and the circumstances of their deaths be recognised. ¹⁴

Sources

[1] Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History / Oxford University Press. Thaddeus Sunseri, The Maji-Maji War, 1905–1907 — reference article abstract; 24 February 2022.

[2] Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO. Jan Antosch, Die Kolonie Deutsch-Ostafrika; 2 November 2004.

[3] Historical Association of Tanzania / East African Publishing House; digitised copy at Internet Archive. G. C. K. Gwassa and John Iliffe (editors), Records of the Maji Maji Rising, Part One, especially pp. 3–5; Preface December 1967.

[4] The Journal of African History, 8(3), pp. 495–512 / Cambridge University Press. John Iliffe, The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion; November 1967.

[5] The Journal of African History, 45(1), pp. 1–22 / Cambridge University Press. Felicitas Becker, Traders, “Big Men” and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania — research abstract; March 2004.

[6] 1914–1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War / Freie Universität Berlin. Michelle Moyd, Askari; 16 March 2015.

[7] Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Vor 115 Jahren: Der Maji-Maji-Aufstand; 26 August 2020.

[8] Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO. Sebastian Gottschalk and Heike Hartmann, Der Maji-Maji-Krieg; 2 March 2017.

[9] Botanical Garden, University of Potsdam. Maji Maji War; Updated 26 August 2023.

[10] The Journal of African History, 38(2), pp. 235–259 / Cambridge University Press. Thaddeus Sunseri, Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Majimaji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania) — research abstract; July 1997.

[11] National Museum of Tanzania. The Germans and the Majimaji War of Resistance — exhibition booklet, especially pp. 9–10 and 14.

[12] National Museum of Tanzania. Eneo la waliponyongwa Mashujaa wa Vita ya Majimaji [Execution ground of the Maji Maji heroes]; 11 January 2024.

[13] Archaeologies, 11(2), pp. 246–271; author manuscript at University of Pretoria. Nancy A. Rushohora, An Archaeological Identity of the Majimaji: Toward an Historical Archaeology of Resistance to German Colonization in Southern Tanzania; August 2015.

[14] German Federal Government, Bulletin 121-1. Speech by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the Maji Maji Museum, Songea; Delivered 1 November 2023; published 2 November 2023.

Sources checked on 23 October 2026.