'Africa for the Africans'!

: How British Imperial Counter-Intelligence Prevented the Threat of Pan-Islamism to the Security of the British Empire in East Africa during the East African Campaign of the First World War

Abstract

The First World War allowed for two sources of Pan-Islamism to mature in East Africa: the German Empire and East Africans and the African diaspora. The former had an incentive to develop Pan-Islamism as an element of the ‘special feature’ policy they were employing to assist in securing victory in the First World War. This was a policy ‘to foster and encourage any movements of unrest and sedition’, including the Pan-Islamic movement, ‘directed against the British Empire’.1 The latter, who, due to the military needs of the European empires, had been forced to converge in East Africa in a manner never previously seen, conversed about Pan-Islamism amongst themselves. Officials of the British Empire identified that Pan-Islamism had manifested itself into two threats: Pan-Islamic unity and the use of the machinery developed by Pan-Islamism by those who advocated for Pan-Africanism. The developing counter-intelligence arm of the British imperial intelligence establishment worked to counter these threats. This development resulted in the institution of the East African Intelligence Centre in 1917. They were successful: to a point. The British Empire in East Africa was not destroyed by Pan-Islamism during the First World War. But they were unable to remove the threat posed by Pan-Islamism from the East African region. In the early Twentieth Century the United Kingdom had revolutionised its intelligence establishment, but it had failed to realise that counter-intelligence in the British Empire had not been accounted for. Consequently, the British Empire was forced to institute a colonial counter-intelligence establishment during the hostilities of the Great War. With little previous work to build upon, the British Empire was faced with a severe shortage in relevant expertise

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aberystwyth University
Supervisor	R Gerald Hughes (Supervisor) & James Vaughan (Supervisor)