At the turn of the century, the
Germans were declaring China's Shandong peninsula as their sphere of
influence, and they were established in Africa. They were established in
Tanganyika
(later to be known as Tanzania) on the east coast of Africa. And they
were established in
Togoland,
in
Cameroon
and in
Southwest Africa
-- areas that Germany had claimed for itself in the mid-1880s.
Cameroon was largely tropical
wilderness and sparsely populated, and there the Germans suffered from a
scarcity of labor as they tried to produce and export rubber and to harvest
and export palm kernels. In Southwest Africa, water was too scarce for
agriculture, and the Germans were hoping to create a German owned cattle
industry. By 1903, 4,700 Germans civilians were in Southwest Africa, enough
Germans for an expansion that drove local people from their tribal lands. In
1904, the pastoral Herero and Nama peoples, who traditionally had warred
against each other, rebelled against the Germans. German troops crushed the
rebellion, killing local chieftains and one-third of the Nama nation. Five
thousand Germans died in the war. Thousands of Hereros were driven into
exile, and only one-third of the Herero people remained in Southwest Africa
after the war.
In Tanganyika, the Germans tried to
create a plantation agriculture, introducing a rubber industry and the
growing of tea and cinchona. In 1905, the German administration in
Tanganyika ordered local people to give up their traditional pursuits and
raise cotton on communal plots. The distressed people turned to their tribal
priests, who gave them water medicine (maji) said to be powerful enough to
protect them from the bullets of white men. A violent uprising against the
Germans began in July 1905, and within a few weeks the Germans broke the
main thrust of the revolt. But order was not restored in Tanganyka until
1907, with the war, famine and disease having killed an estimated 75,000
Africans.
.
.
.After the Spanish-American war concluded in 1898, Germany brought from Spain various islands in the Pacific: the Mariana Islands -- except for Guam, which the United States had expropriated -- and the Caroline and Marshall islands. In December 1899, an agreement signed by Britain, the United States and Germany gave recognition to Germany's control over Western Samoa, Germany having been involved in that part of the world for a half century or more.