Paper short abstract:

The links that existed between the different sections of the creolizing community of the relatively new East Africa Protectorate and their British colonial rulers were exploited by German espionage during the First World War, to the detriment of the British war effort.

Paper long abstract:

In the decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War in the East African Protectorate, the community of the Protectorate changed considerably. The Indians and Europeans who arrived via the Indian Ocean joined the Afrikaners, who had migrated north, to establish a creolized community in the new British colony alongside the indigenous African population.

The events of the Great War in the East African Protectorate have been little studied, and yet this creolized community, which had by no means germinated into a cohesive society, caused, through a minority's collaboration with German-backed espionage, security problems not only internally within the Protectorate, but in the East African Theatre of War and in the Indian Ocean more widely.

Although the Second Boer War had highlighted deficiencies in British colonial intelligence, the British Government in London did not study the impact of this on the Protectorate, having instead decided to focus on revolutionising British intelligence to deal almost exclusively on threats from Europe.

Thus, by 1914 the British had few resources in Africa to combat the influence of German-backed espionage on the Protectorate's society. Although this has been previously neglected within the literature, this espionage, and the divisions it caused, negatively affected the British war effort; fighting was to be found across Eastern Africa in both urban and rural areas.

The history of the East African Protectorate during the Great War was thus fashioned by the many societies which lived within it, and the links that existed between them and the colonial rulers.