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The Abushiri Revolt, also known as the Slave Trader Revolt (), but generally referred to by modern historians as the Coastal Rebellion, was an insurrection in 1888–1889 by the Arabs, Swahili people and African population of the coast of what is now Tanzania. This coast had been leased, under protest, to German Empire by the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1888. The rebellion was eventually suppressed by a German expeditionary force commanded by Hermann Wissmann.
Negotiations between Germany and Britain late in 1886 established the final boundaries of the colony of German East Africa, but reserved a strip of land, ten miles wide, along the coast as the property of the Sultan of Zanzibar. On 28 April 1888, Sultan Khalifah bin Said finally signed a treaty, leasing the coastal strip to the German East Africa Company.John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p.91.
From August 1888, the company tried to take over the coastal towns against fierce resistance from the Arab elite, who feared for their slave and ivory trade, and also from the Swahili and African population. The company's administrator, Ernst Vohsen, made no attempt to conciliate his new subjects. He decreed that owners of land were obliged to register and prove ownership of their holdings, and that all other land would pass into the ownership of the company. Various other levies and rules were imposed, and the Sultan's former officials and military forces were taken under the control of the company, on much reduced salaries.Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995), p.200-1. The haughty attempts by Emil von Zelewski, the German administrator in Pangani, to raise the company's flag over the town sparked the uprising.Glassman, Feasts and Riot, p.214-8.
In January 1889, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck intervened and appointed Lieutenant Hermann Wissmann as Reichskommissar for German East Africa. Wissmann created a Schutztruppe of German officers and African askari soldiers whom he hired in Egypt and Mozambique. The German and British navies collaborated in establishing a blockade of the East African coast, to prevent assistance reaching the rebels. Wissmann's force landed at Bagamoyo early in May 1889, and from there they advanced against Abushiri's fort, which they seized with great loss of life to the defenders. Abushiri retired to the interior, but he was pursued by Wissmann and returned to the coast, where he was captured and executed on 15 December 1889.Jackson, "Resistance to the German Invasion," p.67-72.
The other major rebel leader in the north was Bwana Heri, a former trader who had established himself as ruler of the Saadani district. He repulsed a German force in December 1889, but further expeditions early in 1890 caused him to surrender and submit to German rule. Wissmann then took his forces to the south of the colony, where with the assistance of the German navy he had no difficulty in recapturing the coastal towns in May 1890. However the Yao chief, Machemba, from his fastness on the Makonde Plateau, was able to repel the forces sent against him by the Germans. He finally negotiated a peace agreement with his opponents in May 1891.Jackson, "Resistance to the German Invasion," p.72-74.
The German victors dismissed the Coastal Rebellion of 1888-90 as an "Arab Rebellion," as reflected in the title of Rochus Schmidt's standard history of the military campaign.Rochus Schmidt, Geschichte des Araberaufstandes in Ost-Afrika: seine Entstehung, seine Niederwerfung und seine Folgen (Frankfurt an der Oder: Trowitzsch, 1892). It was not until the publication of Jonathan Glassman's doctoral thesis in 1995 that a fuller picture of the rebellion emerged, with a better understanding of the motivations of the different elements of the coastal population, and of how these combined to spark the rebellion.Glassman, Feasts and Riot.
The German historian, Jörg Haustein, has expressed very effectively the latest thinking on this question:
by dubbing al-Bushiri's military resistance the 'Arab Uprising,' the Germans completely misread the political dynamics beneath the opposition they faced. In the decades prior to the arrival of the Germans, Tanganyika had seen a progressive encroachment of Omani military and administrative power, which altered the established trading networks and socioeconomic relations between Shirazi patricians, Indian merchants, and Arab traders of various origins (Hadramaut, Comoro, Zanzibar). As Glassman pointed out, the German colonizers were tolerated as long as they were seen as challenging Omani domination. However, with the treaty of 1888, Germans were perceived as clients of the sultan, and now their former allies turned against them, simultaneously contesting German and Omani authority over the coast. The uprising, in other words, indicated the precariousness of Omani Arab hegemony, rather than 'Arab' leadership, and was rooted in a social contest that pitted diverse religious and ethnic identities … against each other.Jörg Haustein, "Provincializing Representation: East African Islam in the German Colonial Press," in Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita and Marie Rodet (eds), Religion, Media and Marginality in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), p.75.
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