Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure : The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
By Giles Foden
The author of The Last King of Scotland tells the unlikely tale of the WWI battle for Lake Tanganyika.
Tucked between the former German East Africa (Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi), British East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Northern and Southern Rhodesia), and the Belgian Congo, the world’s longest freshwater lake (420 miles) was of interest to both the Britain’s Royal Navy and the German Imperial Navy. Cotton, which the German colonists grew with African labour through ‘agricultural imposition’, was one reason why.
On the eastern shore, Kigoma in Tanganyika was a busy port and railhead for traffic to/from Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa; on the western shore was its Belgian twin, Albertville, with its railroad to Kabolo on the Congo River. In addition to considerable presence on the lake, the Germans already had a cruiser, the Königsberg, patrolling the Indian Ocean coast south of Dar, along the crocodile-infested Rufiji delta.
To lead the Naval Africa Expedition to the War’s backwaters, all the British Admiralty could produce was Geoffrey Spicer-Simon, “the oldest lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy,” who was widely despised by his shipmates for being an overbearing, pretentious know-it-all. His swagger was amplified by his arms and upper torso being lavishly covered in tattoos of snakes and butterflies, which he showed off to the Hola-hola natives by bathing in public, complete with servant, cigarette and vermouth. He also wore a skirt – a khaki invention of his wife for the tropics.
In 1915, Spicer-Simon was given a ragtag unit of 28 military misfits and two 40-foot mahogany motor launches, outfitted with Maxim machine guns and Hotchkiss guns, to drive the Germans to the coast. Foden’s book is also the tale of getting the HMS Mimi and Toutou (French for ‘meow’ and ‘bow-wow’…) from London to Cape Town and then through the 2,000-mile dark heart of equatorial Africa. Men and equipment travelled Cape Town, Joburg, Victoria Falls, Elizabethville by train; then overland to the Lualaba River, and by boat to Kabalo; then finally by rail to Albertville.
The task of getting the boats over the steeply graded 6,000-feet Mitumba Mountains of the western Rift Valley is especially readable. When the two steam tractors also hauled from London failed, a team of 32 oxen driven by a Boer farmer filled in. Plenty of raw muscle, mostly African, was required to haul water and cut the heavy wood of African trees to feed both steam engines and men.
Incredibly, Spicer’s party managed through luck and skill (in that order) to capture the 45-ton German gunboat Kingani and sink the 60-ton Hedwig van Wissmann – boats five times larger than theirs. They forced the captain of the third, and twenty times larger, Graf von Götzen to scuttle her. (The Kingani was renamed the HMS Fifi (‘tweet-tweet’) and was reputed to be the first German warship captured and transferred to the Royal Navy.)
Despite medals, Spicer was never given another command, and died in British Columbia in 1947 at 71 after decades of irritable self-mythologizing at banquet tables. Foden also tracks down some of the 28 – all of whom survived – as well as characters from the German side, including General Von Lettow, to whom Hitler later offered the post of ambassador to Britain. (South African Field Marshal Smuts supposedly discovered Von Lettow living in poverty in Hamburg in 1951.)
Foden tells the story with animated descriptions of personalities, equipment and battles. Only with wildlife does it feel like padding, because he loses his narrative style, ‘going dictionary’ on the reader.
The reader is reminded that the 1951 John Huston film, African Queen, with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, was inspired by C.S. Forester’s 1935 book, which was derived from this watery battleground. Although it, too, feels like padding, Foden takes us through the adventures of filming African Queen in Uganda around Lake Albert, and in the Congo, not far from former Stanleyville. Foden’s own voyage to the lake results in his discovery that the scuttled Graf von Götzen lives on as a rusty, overburdened ferry, whose peacetime ending any old Africa hand can predict.
Now that Foden’s book on Idi Amin was turned into an Oscar-winning movie, there’s a good chance that if you don’t read this book, you’ll get to see the movie.
Bottom line: A light-to-read and amusing history, perfect for the blind.
Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure : The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
By Giles Foden = Alfred A. Knopf 2005 - Illustrated. 250 pp. $24