CO 691 and the Non-Commemoration Programme in East Africa

Elizabeth Haines, Team Leader, Overseas and Defence, November 2024

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Transcript

Elizabeth Haines: Welcome. I’m Elizabeth Haines. I’m a record specialist in Empire and Commonwealth collections at the National Archives. And in this video, we’re working towards our programme in Catalogue Week that celebrates the work that goes on behind the scenes at the National Archives to make our collections more accessible and in particular, we’re taking a closer look at one series, CO 691, which we finished cataloguing work on earlier this year.

And to do that, we’ve invited George Hay and John Burke from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

George Hay: Hello.

John Burke: Hello.

Elizabeth Haines: They’ve been using records from the series CO 691 in their work on a project known as the Non-Commemoration Programme, and we’ll hear more from them shortly, but I want to just first introduce the series CO 691 in more detail.

It’s a series of correspondence received at the Colonial Office from and about the territory, which was then known as Tanganyika, which became Tanzania after independence in 1961. In the nineteenth century, this area of East Africa was home to many different African communities who had a long relationship with the Arabian Peninsula and lots of important international trading centres. In 1885, it was claimed as a German colony and as a result, at the outbreak of the First World War, it became a key site in the conflict.

From 1920, Britain formally administered Tanganyika as it was laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, but it was under British military occupation from 1916, and that’s the date that this series CO 691 that we hold at TNA begins.

Despite the fact that these records have been, relatively speaking, uncatalogued, researchers have already used them to explore a huge range of topics from the history of the creation of boundaries with Rwanda and Burundi, to local African politics, to research in trading and agriculture, including famine, as induced by the war. But like other colonial records, the voices and perspectives and histories of the colonised are often silenced or ignored, even though these records can be used to recover some of those histories. So we hope that now the records have been catalogued much more of that work will be possible, and and this is what George and John have been doing. I imagine that you’ll have guessed that John and George will have been using the wartime records from CO 691. So from the First World War.
But yeah, I’d like to introduce you both. Tell us about yourselves and the Non-Commemoration Project.

George Hay: You want me to start?

Elizabeth Haines: Yeah, go ahead, George.

George Hay: Well, my name is George Hay. I’m the official historian of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I don’t know, John, you may as well do your bit first and then I can say something about the project.

John Burke: John Burke. I’m also a historian at the Commission. I work with George on the Non-Commemoration Programme.

George Hay: Yeah, the the origins, the origins of it first is that the best place to start?
I’m being too chatty now for your concise video, aren’t I?!

Elizabeth Haines: Oh no, it’s all good.

George Hay: Yeah. I mean, at the beginning of 2020 we began this exercise to explore the early history of the Commission and what was the Imperial War Graves Commission. Things have changed since the 1960s there as well, but we were effectively testing the extent to which the promise of the ‘quantity of death’ had been adhered to. There’s lots of reasons for that, but what that led to was the establishment of a committee of some external people who were supporting us, and I was able to bring John on to work on that with me. And over the course of the year, we produced a report which we published in April 2021.

And basically it highlighted some really substantial shortcomings in the way in which the Commission has been commemorating people for the last best part of 100 years. But, most significantly probably, some of these substantial holes or gaps in our named commemorations and the largest of those gaps was in East Africa.

So there’s lots of work going on about this, but at the time we thought it probably affected at least 100,000 people. So give people some context. If you’ve ever been to Thiepval on the Somme one of the largest monuments to the missing, it’s sort of like 72,000 names on that. So that’s the sort of scale we’re talking about.

When we published that report, the special Committee we were working with also submitted alongside it ten recommendations to the Commission, one of which was to continue this research to to understand more, but potentially hopefully fill in some of the gaps and so following that began a five-year programme the Non-Commemoration Programme that we just you’ve just spoken about and we’re now four years into it, we’re in our fifth year. There’s still lots to do, but it is, you know we’re going to come on to the significance of records and everything else but.
It is not really an exaggeration for us to say that the entire programme really is underpinned by archival research.

So whether that’s the recovery of names that we don’t have, you know that this is the only way in which we can find evidence of them and and submit them for commemoration, but also the attempt to understand what happened to the mortal remains of those people.

So those are from our perspective, from the research perspective, those are our primary interests. Can we name the people we’re not naming who should be commemorated and can we find out what happened to them? And then more broadly, a little bit around, you know how we got to this position. So the context in which all these decisions were taken and actually came to pass, Those are the sort of key themes of the research. I don’t know, John, if you wanted to add anything to that.

John Burke: No, just to say that indeed the significance of archival research in the work is that
one of the single biggest finds that we had for the number of names to add to our collection came from one of the series in The National Archives, WO 95, and it was a list from the Adjutant-General […] and we extracted around 3000 names from those, people, individuals that we had not previously commemorated. So it was a massive find for us in the in our research.

George Hay: People who know anything about the series WO 95 we shouldn’t have any names in it because it’s supposed to be war diaries and lists shouldn’t be there.
Very good point. Just to sort of emphasise why things like cataloguing matter.
You know, we found that by chance, actually it shouldn’t be what it is, which is a series of copies of telegrams which were being sent into the War Office Casualty Branch. Why? Why are they in there? Who knows? But they were, as John says, one of the single biggest, most important find of the entire project came from somewhere here didn’t expect it to be.

That’s obviously great when things like that happen, but they happened in those cases more by chance than by planning, and the significance of sort of large cataloguing projects like this is obviously it directs you towards that important information and it saves you from having to crawl blindly through hundreds of thousands of records.

But there’s just one other thing that was wanted to add to this that I think is why this project is quite interesting, and why contemporary records are so important, because if you’re working like we are within an organisation that’s more than a century old you have a sort of form of institutional memory and that there’s sort of layers of interpretation and understanding. I think that have been built up over decades and stuff that then becomes accepted as truth because it’s just always been understood to be like that. Because when you when you join, or when someone joined, that’s what they were told.

You know, we can strip all that away because we don’t need, we can go, we can go back to source and that’s the only way you can do things like this. What’s made it difficult is obviously the nature of colonial records, as they survive, not just in the UK, but actually what’s left behind. And I think everyone, anyone who’s worked on any form of sort of British colonial history will know that there’s a portion of stuff that’s brought back to the metropole as part of the normal everyday administration of Empire. There’s some stuff that got left behind and there’s a whole lot more that got destroyed. You know you’re working around those issues and what we’ve been trying to do in the last few years is to piece that back together to try and get back to the truth.

Elizabeth Haines: I think that’s one of the things that I often try to emphasise is that working with those colonial records, is that you’re often working with records in multiple places and you often can’t be in all of those places at once. So that’s where the catalogue really comes into its own, because even if you can’t see the things which are… If you’re in East Africa or if you’re in Dar es Salaam, you can’t necessarily see the records in London, but you can get a better sense of comparing or kind of working through those that material. So yeah, thank you for the cheerleading for the cataloguing and yeah, I mean, we can wholeheartedly agree with you on its value.

Maybe just before we, before we go into a little bit more detail about a specific example that you’ve that you’ve been working with from CO 691.

Maybe could you give us a little bit more of a sense of what the war in East Africa, I mean, how how that was playing out? Because lots of people aren’t familiar with the First World War in that context?

George Hay: Yeah, I I think it’s one of the theatres that that people often have heard almost nothing at all about. And certainly not the sort of the broader impacts of it. The short and easy way to understand it – it is nothing like the war in Europe. It’s not even close.

It’s relatively, well at least in from the German perspective, small numbers. of soldiers ultimately for the British it actually expands to quite a large number of people, and that’s one of the reasons why from a German perspective, it’s huge, is relatively successful, even though they’re ultimately not because they’re drawing in those forces.

It centres on what was British East Africa and German East Africa, So what is now Kenya and Tanzania, and it is this mobile conflict, sort of hit and run, that takes those British forces out of what is now Kenya all the way down through Tanzania into what was Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique and then back up through, chasing German forces under the command of Von Lettow-Vorbeck in an attempt to pin them down and defeat them. Which they never really do. And the [German] surrender that comes is two weeks after that’s seen in Europe, which gives an idea of because he [Von Lettow-Vorbeck] is still on the run. He hasn’t got the message yet. So to give you an idea, of how … 650,000 square miles. They talk about something to that effect, John?

John Burke: It is, yeah, it’s a. It’s a vast distance.

George Hay: In the aftermath, when, when the Commission is is basically doing its work or trying to track down the burials of people lost, you know, that’s the space you’re dealing with. And you compare that to somewhere like the Western Front, which is, though vast, the front lines don’t move that considerably over that period of time and so
the sort of concentrations of burials and deaths are in a very relatively small space. It’s much easier (in inverted commas) to trace than it is in this wild, vast open space. But the other thing that’s that’s hugely important is, yes, there are Europeans committed to that fighting, particularly by the British. Also, two Indian Expeditionary Forces. I think who, joined that fight. But the the brunt of the fighting, and certainly the brunt of the deaths was to African civilian populations who are drawn into the fighting, but actually far, far more of them are drawn to do carrier work, labour work because East Africa at that point, there’s barely any metalled roads, there’s a very small number of railways and for most of it, it’s really hard to keep pack animals alive because of Tsetse fly. And I think it’s a form of sleeping sickness that that kills livestock. So the way they solve that problem is to use something called “human porterage” which is, which is people carrying, literally carrying. They get called ‘carriers’.
Most of them are employed by an organisation called the Military Labour Bureau but what we know is that casualties within the military forces are quite bad, casualties amongst the civilian porters are astronomically high for the number committed.
And it’s those people, and I mentioned this idea of large black holes in our database for those … the names we’re missing basically for those we know who died, the bulk of those fall to carriers or military labourers.

Elizabeth Haines: So maybe I’ll just, because we have some, we have some, a small number of images from the from the conflict in in our collections.

George Hay: And there’s good there’s a good example of porterage there isn’t there, as well as the sort of the issue you might have with them trying to use a traction engine? Hauling boats in that case, I think you probably don’t have much option.

Elizabeth Haines: Yeah, the difficulty of using kind of twentieth-century military technology in a context without roads.

George Hay: Yeah, and this this is, yeah, this is what we, I guess we know to have been the backbone of the logistical effort. And so it’s not like the Western Front where we sort of said there is relatively little movement around the front lines. Ultimately on a day-to-day basis much easier to maintain logistics somewhere like that whereas here I think I’m right in saying statistics if you want to keep 1000 fighting men in the field ‘Askari’ [African soldiers] if you’re talking about something like the King’s African Rifles you need somewhere in the region of 15,000 carriers, porters to support them there. So if you want to move around, that’s the sort of quantities of human beings you need.

Elizabeth Haines: Affecting huge numbers of civilian populations and including women, I think also working as porters and across this really vast area. So, so villages and towns right across that really large territory.

George Hay: Yeah.

Elizabeth Haines: I think we’ve got, we’ve just got a picture of the hospitals that are plague hospital in fact here, just indicative of some of the challenges around disease as well and the, the kinds of consequences of that work for those individuals.

George Hay: Yeah, I’m gonna pick up this because the bottom right one is really interesting to us because it is, it is from the Carrier Hospital at Dar es Salaam.

Elizabeth Haines: Yeah.
Oh yes.

George Hay: And whilst we know plenty of these people are dying in the field from exhaustion, from sickness, we believe just because of the way in which this system operated, that the vast majority of them would have died in those hospitals. And so that’s sort of been one of our interests, in terms of how we might trace what happened to people and then what happened to their mortal remains, if they did die.

Elizabeth Haines: So if I if I stop sharing. So yes, so you wanted to focus on one record in particular that comes from CO 691 which has been useful to this work. Yeah. Tell us about it.

George Hay: John, do you want do you want to start? And then I can I’ll share it.

John Burke: Yeah, I can. I can. I can dive in. So yeah. So like George is mentioning about the significance of the carriers to the campaign in East Africa. Without these, these carriers, the campaign simply wouldn’t have happened. And given the vast majority of those who were raised died of disease, one of the focus we’ve had as part of the programme is looking at some of the central transit points across the network across East Africa. So if you think of Mombasa as a is an important port in Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, once, it was captured by the British in 1916, becomes a very important port ss well as a series of other ports going across the coast, where you can get men, material, everything else, between these different areas.

So Mombasa is one area that we’ve looked at extensively and we’ve published a report a few years ago where we’re able to connect some archival documents from the Kenya National Archives with some maps held by the National Archives to try and locate some cemeteries. And this one is an extension of that. And it was focusing on Dar es Salaam.

So Dar es Salaam was captured by British forces in late 1916 and the Military Labour Bureau, which was the main Carrier Corps in East Africa. They moved their headquarters down to Dar es Salaam in the end of 1916, and this particular map is extracted from CO 691 and that shows you the British military presence in Dar es Salaam after it was taken. So the Military Bureau Headquarters is inside the centre of town, but in particular for us the important part was the position of the carrier depot, and the carrier hospital. So within Dar es Salaam, as we’re in a lot of cities in Africa, there was, there is today a [an area called] ‘Kariakoo’ So it’s a ward of the city.

And this name derives from this these carrier depots that were established at the time during the First World War. And what’s particularly interesting and important about this map is where the carrier depot is. The shaded area that was the central depot area, the holding area for the carriers and that today, is the Central Market, the market in Dar es Salaam. So it’s a hugely important site.

So discovering this map was really important because the position of the Carrier Corps depot and hospital had never been accurately mapped previously, or not known. Anyway, the Carrier Corps area was known, but not the mapping like this which is hugely significant and it was it was connected to some correspondence linked to Belgian port concessions from the 1920s. This is a wartime map, but it was being linked to discussions in the 1920s about the Belgians having concessions in the port. So it’s the things that you can find connected to something, which isn’t always directly related to what you think is important, but actually it can be really important to your research.

So we’re able to take this map and then connect it to some other documents held within the Commission’s archives within archives in in Tanzania and elsewhere and we’re able to accurately map where the Carrier Corps depot and hospital was and then also whereabouts the potential Carrier Corps cemetery was. Because within WO 95 there is reference in a war diary to an MLB cemetery, which is the Military Labour Bureau Cemetery, but that was basically the only reference we had to that. We knew the cemetery existed, but we didn’t know where it would be. So we were able to take this map and then connect it to a document that we found within Commission’s records which referred to Bagamoyo Cemetery, just off Bagamoyo Street, on a coconut plantation. So we’re able to take that reference and then connect it to this map and then we’re able to plot the likely position of this lost Carrier Corps cemetery, which is a hugely important find because we know that tens of thousands of carriers likely died in in Dar es Salaam. It was one of the principal areas principal ports of the conflict. So this is an area which is hugely important.
To us, so a lot of it is rooted around this map. Sorry, go ahead.

George Hay: Good answer that John just now was going to add to it because the what I think is it is an important port. And it corresponds, it has that relationship with Mombassa because the longest serving carriers are coming out of Kenya, British forces. So they were recruited earliest and they fight for the longest, and they’re then furthest from home and so they suffer the worst basically, whereas this operation, you know the carrier depot based in Dar es Salaam, is recruiting locally.

It recruits, it’s at least 30,000, I think maybe, maybe significantly more than that. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but one thing that’s really interesting when you look through the operational records for this campaign is that once it reaches German East Africa, it reaches Tanzania, is that desertion skyrockets because people don’t have to go very far to get home. But if you’re if you’re from Kenya, if you’re from British East Africa, it’s a long way home and it’s potentially even more dangerous for you to desert.

And that’s something that’s spoken about in another piece of work we’ve been looking at. There’s substantial numbers of people from what is the Military Labour Bureau who are recorded as deserters. But the presumption is that a large quantity of them probably will have died, but they don’t know how many because they simply just disappeared. But the thing I wanted to say about Dar es Salaam is for a lot of the war, this is going to be the place where people pass through. So you might not spend very much time there but if coming down from Kenya almost certainly you’re gonna be on a ship, you’re gonna get off that ship in in Dar es Salaam probably spend some time in the Carrier depot before you’re committed somewhere else in land or even further around the coast. We know it’s then a central hub for repatriations as well. When people are sick, wounded and they go back up to Mombasa, and lots of the people with that, we know who died there, who are spoken about and referenced in the previous report we wrote for Mombasa this is probably where they came from.

So they would have got on ships, campaigning in 1917 in a particularly in in a wet season, they suffer incredibly badly these carriers, but they start as well trying to repatriate them in the hope that they may be able to recover and that’s why so many of them are dying in Mombasa. So there’s this really strong link between the two places. But as the war progresses downwards, it’s it’s like we think we so tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people will have passed through here.
And the only other thing I was going to mention and hopefully people can see the map, we’ve got a relatively vague, I think it’s about 50 acres. It equates to circle off the Bagamoyo Rd, but you can see the coconut palms that sort of occupied space.
That’s one example. We also have some corresponding evidence from pre-war German mapping which referred to this area as, I think it’s, Sultan Shamba, which was a basically coconut plantation business under the ownership of a colonial German. Who lived and ran it in Dar es Salaam. So we we’re quite confident we’re in the right place, but the site was big, and it was big because of all of the reasons we’ve just highlighted.

Elizabeth Haines: So this this work has really been able to…. I mean it gives us a sense of these really landmark places that for all, but for the carriers, I guess, in particular will have been really important locations which were part of their experience of the war as well as in fact possibly the resting place for those who who died in that location.

George Hay: Yeah.

Elizabeth Haines: So they have this? Yeah, they’re very symbolic locations for the region.

George Hay: Yeah. I think the thing that that staggers me sometimes. I mean, people will instantly realise that one of the tragedies of what we’re discussing here is the fact that this area is completely developed. So the area we think is likely to be the final resting places of, you know, what might be many thousands of people is no longer accessible. Basically it’s underneath this developed, wildly developed city.

But to pick up on what you’re saying is what I think is is utterly fascinating, it’s not just Dar es Salaam, but Dar es Salaam is a very good example. You have this area of the city that just becomes known as ‘Kariakoo’. You know, that is the legacy of this. People don’t necessarily know it. They don’t necessarily understand that there’s this direct connection but that is it and it’s this sort of been passed down. And at least linguistically or otherwise, it’s been sort of written into the fabric of Dar es Salaam now, whether people realise it or not.

And one of the things that we also thought was quite staggering when we started or when we first found the map was, you know, if you if you zoom in onto the Carrier depot there’s a shaded space. We know now that the shaded space was a covered exhibition hall built by the Germans in the the late 1910s (ish), ahead of what would have been a colonial exhibition, around 1914 which never obviously takes place for obvious reasons. It gets taken over by the British, and sort of then serves as part of the carrier depot, and there are pictures from the inside of it showing sort of carriers, getting ready to to be deployed.

But that space, if you if you take it away overlays what is now the current, very famous covered market, which I think actually burned down a couple of years ago, but it’s being rebuilt. In Dar es Salaam it’s known as Kariakoo market, so you know the ties between the history of this place and the present day are they’re right. You’ don’t have to scratch very far to find that.

Elizabeth Haines: And so what will the outcome of this work be? I mean you talked a bit about the programme and its intentions, so the goal is to retrieve the names of as many people as possible and to try and locate their remains. That’s right?

George Hay: Yeah. So basically, yeah, this is an unfortunate example in one case, because what we can do is say where we think they are. But what we probably can’t do is anything on that space simply because it’s occupied by businesses and homes. So what happens there, I don’t know, but ou know, at least one substantial part of the project is to share this information, to educate, to help people understand the significance of these events and the impact they had on this part of the world and the population who lived there. The other unfortunate part of this example I guess, is the fact that we’re not talking about the names of these individuals, so that’s another piece of work, that’s separate from this. But yeah, hopefully at some stage what we will see in Tanzania, whether it’s in this space or elsewhere is some form of commemoration that hopefully at least named some of these people. That’s an ongoing effort.
But also [something that] simply shares this history and helps people to engage with it and understand it beyond, you know what we already have in this space, this city, in in the form of existing CWGC [Commonwealth War Graves Commission] commemoration. And when, when you look at the First World War.
I don’t if you have a picture of the Askari monument, as it’s quite cool. Yeah, good because it’s a beautiful sculpture that was created after the First World War.

Elizabeth Haines: I do have a picture of the Askari monument. Let me find it for you.

George Hay: And it is one of the conflicted and interesting legacies of of the period, because whilst it is beautiful, it is one of three that we’re believed to commemorate, at that time they thought it was around 50,000 … we think it’s no closer to double that. And it does so without any of their names. So that’s the previous I guess effort to commemorate some of the people we’re talking about. In future, hopefully there will be something else, but it won’t be something that Commission creates exclusively.
The the idea is that that would be co=created with affected communities.

Elizabeth Haines: So with communities in in Dar es Salaam itself, yeah.

George Hay: Yeah, in Dar es Salaam, and across Kenya, across Tanzania and across the region. Those who those who were committed to this fighting and who lost their lives. And up until this point have not really received well, tirst of all individual named commemoration. And then what? I guess at this point iIt may not be possible for us to recover all of their names. They’re thinking about how we would therefore look to to commemorate those people in other ways.

Elizabeth Haines: Well, that’s been in a fantastic and really interesting insight into some of the things that these records can do when they when they go out into the world and they meet, they meet meet satellite imagery and and other kinds of records and researchers in and across different continents. So thank you very much for sharing that.
Yeah, if you’re interested, if people are interested in finding out more about the Non-Commemoration Programme is there a website that you could read to them, it will go in transcript as well. So if you will be able to find it there.

George Hay: Yep. www.cwgc.org

If you navigate to the main website, you’ll see a banner across the top, and there’s a specific section named ‘Non-Commemoration’. It’s probably the best place to start.

Elizabeth Haines: Fantastic. Thank you. Very much and we look forward to hearing the progress of that as it continues.

George Hay: Thanks for having us.

Elizabeth Haines: Thank you.

John Burke: Thank you very much.