Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Factoid of the day

Funny, I don't remember this part in the movie: Jane was killed by the evil Germans? Huh?

Audiobook at Librivox:



Tarzan the Untamed

by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 - 1950)
This book follows Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar chronologically. The action is set during World War I. While away from his plantation home in East Africa, invading German troops destroy it and kill his wife Jane and the Waziri warrior Wasimbu who is left crucified.

one of 26 audiobooks by Edgar Rice Burroughs at Librivox...

Obviously written during the anti German propaganda era of World War I. And Burroughs made up most of the African stuff himself, of course. There is no Waziri tribe, for example...

The background for the novel is Germany's East African campaign, which was pretty bloody, at least for the locals, and much of the fighting was done by Germans and the German's African soldiers on their side and South Africans and Indians on the British side, often using local people to carry supplies.



The British Commonwealth forces lost over 10,000 men, ⅔ of them from disease. German losses were about 2,000. But the black people of East Africa suffered far more as carriers who died from disease, exhaustion and military action. One modern estimate is 100,000 dead on all sides. Black civilians also suffered dreadfully. War devastated many localities, bringing hunger, disease and death in its train. Thousands of Africans perished in the outbreak of influenza that swept over their continent at the end of the war.

Here is another point of view: a sympathetic article about the Germans and their Askaris troops. 

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correction: I accidentally wrote World War II...now fixed. This of course happened during the First World War, when Germany still had colonies in Africa.

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