On to Kilimanjaro: The Bizarre Story of the First World War in East Africa

by Brian Gardner

First World War in East Africa

284 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

Reviews

[Ruppert Baird · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrative of a mostly-forgotten theater of WWI, this title is almost ironic in that both sides looked at the great Mount Kilimanjaro as a symbol of victory. The irony is that the battles around Kilimanjaro were in the first maneuvers of the war in East Africa, but the majority of the war was fought far to the south for many months after.
Published in 1964, the author first acknowledges the dearth of first-hand accounts of the war and the loss of much accuracy in the official histories. Nevertheless, Gardner clearly worked hard to glean as much history as was available. And it comes out in an at times strange narrative of a war that is at once familiar at other times almost alien.
There is so much packed into this small volume, it is certainly worth a read if one is interested in WWI, jungle warfare, and Africa.

[Jon Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased my copy of this book in mass market paperback at the Dickson Street Bookshop in Fayetteville, AR when visiting that area in September 2022. The book was published in 1964, and my copy is in pretty bad shape. The pages have yellowed to the color of chicken soup, and when I started reading the book, both the front and back covers fell off. This is a book that hasn't seen much reading since it was published, judging by the fact that I had to provide the cover image for the GR listing. Anyway, being written in the early 1960's, the book is very much a product of its times. Both the front and back cover titillate the potential reader by mentioning the menace of cannibals. Throughout the whole book, however, there is maybe one mention of actual cannibals, and this mention does not involve anybody getting eaten. The book is loaded with lots of "white savior" talk, a lot of bemoaning the "white man's burden", and a super-irritating habit the author has of referring to Africans as "savages." The African troopers in both the British and German armies outnumbered their white commanders by a factor of something like 25 to 1, yet in the entire book, not a single African soldier or carrier is named. So it's pretty bad from that perspective. BUT - if you can find some way to set all that aside, the book does tell the story of the military campaigns in German East Africa during WW1, which were much more extensive than I was aware. I'm sure there are newer, better, and more nuanced books out there about this chapter of WW1, and I would encourage the interested reader to seek those out. Three out of five stars.