Telecommunications and Conflict in German East Africa: 1891-1907

Abstract

In modern Tanzania the ability to connect people and institutions within the context of the Internet and, even more specifically, via the mobile telephone network, would be considered an integral component of daily life. Yet there is almost no consideration by modern historians of the development of telecommunications within the country, a process that extends back well over a century. Within the entity that became known as German East Africa a telegraph line ran 791 kilometres from Tanga in the north to Mikindani in the south. It was created between 1891 and 1897. It was the ‘unbroken cable’ that literally tied together an initial strip of coastal territory under tentative control by the German colonial authorities. This essay looks at the circumstances in which this earliest physical infrastructure was constructed and used, and how it fit into a more pervasive postal framework.  It also considers that there was an early public awareness of the functionality of such infrastructure, an awareness that led to it being dynamically targeted and then protected during several periods of internal insurgency. Since such insurgency primarily occurred south of the Rufiji, there is a particular emphasis on providing context for that geographical area.