The Social Gospel in East Africa

The pamphlet I studied is called “The Black Slaves of Prussia”. It is a letter from Frank Weston, a bishop in Zanzibar, to Jan Smuts in South Africa. Frank Weston was a Anglo-Catholic missionary in Zanzibar, located in East Africa. This letter was sent to persuade Jan Smuts, who was general in East Africa during The Great War, to continue the fighting to liberate the  native Africans from German rule. Many military leaders were getting weary of the fighting and could not see any reason to keep it up, but in this letter, Weston argues that it is their duty to do so in order to free Africans from German oppression. His letter was published and distributed in order to rouse British support for the continuance of fighting in East Africa.

Weston carefully lays out his arguments for why Great Britain had a duty to East Africa to defend them and ensure their liberty. His first major point is that since the Africans left the Germans, their former masters, to assist the British in fighting, the British could not turn their backs on the Africans “just because [they] were not white” (Weston 5). This appeal was fascinating to see in the letter because it is a perfect example of the Social Gospel view during The Great War, and, is such a stark contrast to the Social Darwinism that we’ve been studying with people like Theodore Roosevelt. Weston goes on to describe the brutality of the Germans. He says that due to their “inbred cruelty”, the Germans only know how to rule by force and treat their subjects inhumanely. He talks about how the Germans constantly abused the African people with their “sjamboks”, whips made of elephant skin, or would chain eight of them together by the neck for days on end. He also talks about the corruption in German rule. He describes how the German police ruled arbitrarily and cruelly, with no fear of consequence, and how they mistreated the native chiefs and their families, even to the point where they sexaully assulted the daugthers of the chiefs. Next, he tells about the German Slave trade in East Africa. This was something he found particularly appalling, being a proponent of the Social Gospel. It had been almost a full century since the British had abolished slavery in their empire and so to them this would have enhanced their view of German moral inferiority. Weston ends his letter by laying out Germany’s inability to rule well. He says, “the German does not understand the elementary principles of humane government” (Weston 17). In his opinion, Germany was totally unfit to rule any colonies because they were essentially an inherently cruel people. He calls on Smuts to not back down from the fight and stand up for the liberty of the East African people.

Clearly, Weston had a very forward looking attitude when it came to the East African people. Because of his belief in the Social Gospel, he believed strongly that the British government had a duty to act as Christ to the African people and save them from German tyranny. The thing that is most fascinating about his view though, is that he still had a seemingly Darwinian perspective when it came to the Germans. He didn’t attribute failure in German rule to a poorly run regime, but to cruelty and inadequacy that was inherent to the German people. This demonstrates the gray areas that we see in history, but more specifically in The Great War. Even though his view of the Africans was extremely progressive in his day, he blamed his quarrels with the German government on the deficiencies of the “German race” as opposed to the evils of the current German Regime. It is so interesting to see the elements of Social Darwinism creep into Weston’s rhetoric, even though he would have radically opposed anyone who leveled that accusation against him.