Some time towards the end of the last century, a British Airways 747 was flying over Burma at midnight when the pilot — Captain Downey — received an unusual request from a passenger.
The passenger was one John Nunneley, a retired British army officer, a veteran of the Second World War and a leading chronicler of the role the King’s African Rifles played in two World Wars.

Now well into his twilight years, Nunneley was in the flight deck, and wanted the pilot to dip a wing of the massive jet in salute to Tomasi Kitinya, son of Liech, a member of the Kar who died in action in the furious battlefields of Burma during the Second World War.

The intriguing story of Tomasi, how he left his home in Nyanza as a teenager, for the big city — Nairobi, and eventually ended up in the battle field, is one of the best documented in Nunneley’s Tales from the King’s African Rifles. The book was first published in 1998, when its author was 76-years-old. The book which has since been reprinted many times, has become a classic of war history, with particular focus on the contributions of hitherto unsung but extremely brave African soldiers who made the King’s African Rifles one of the most formidable regiments of the British Army.
The roots of what was to later become the Kar were planted by the Imperial East India Company (which heralded the colonial era in major pats of East and Central Africa) during the last decade of the 19th century. To protect its interests, the company set up some regiments which were represented on the ground by distinct agents such as the Uganda Rifles, the Central African Regiment and the East African Rifles.

On January 1, 1902, these regiments were placed under one umbrella to constitute the initial six battalions of the Kar.

Although at its formation the Kar regiment had 4,683 men, among them 104 British officers, it grew into a massive 22 battalions, by July 1918, towards the end of the First World War, made up of 30,658 African soldiers, 1,193 British officers and a further 1,497 non-commissioned ones. And by the time the Armistice was declared in November 1918, the regiment had lost 5,117 men in the ferocious battlefields, while a further 3,039 succumbed to diseases. There were casualties as well — an incredible 15 million people lost their lives and another 20 million had irreversibly lost their health — victims of the advanced technologies that had emerged from the Industrial Revolution (which is also to blame for what is now referred to as weapons of mass destruction.

If the African soldiers gave their all fighting “for King and country” during the two world wars as crucial components of the Kar regiment, whose Colonel-in-Chief was the British King himself, their travails on the different fronts were by any account daunting. Apart from the horrifying casualties and unmarked graves in faraway places, tales of soldiers running amok in the battlefields are ample evidence that participating in the great wars was anything but a walk in the park.

Insurmountable pressures

Nunneley aptly captures the devastating effects of inestimable pressures these soldiers endured, in unforgiving terrains far away from home — a combination of stress, ennui, self-deprivation and simple nostalgia. Sustained for too long, these pressures could and often became the last straw that broke the back of a driven African askari.

That was apparently the case with regard to one Private Devesias Ndembo from the 13th Nyasaland Battalion. After committing some infraction, he had been awarded an appropriate punishment by his British company commander. Distraught about the disciplinary action — most likely in the form of very painful and humiliating public flogging as one’s peers watched — Ndembo had on that night desperately armed himself with a grenade and set out to extract his revenge. He lobbed it into the lighted mess-tent of his superiors, and the results were ghastly — one officer was killed and four others and a warrant officer were wounded. There was no respite for the hapless Ndembo though, for he was shot by a firing-squad after a hasty trial by court-martial.

There was, however, some measure of respite for a fellow African colleague, one Private Antoni of the Signals Platoon. Having slept on the job at his guard position, an offence considered as extremely serious, he was tried and found responsible for the fact that some Japanese enemies had sneaked into the battalion headquarters. But luckily, they had been spotted and killed, which is why Antoni managed to escape the mandatory firing squad. He was far from amused, however, when the announcement was made that he was to receive 12 lashes of the dreaded cane instead. Instead, he abruptly broke away from his escort, dashed to a nearby slit trench and, just like the ill-fated Ndembo would do later that month, armed himself with a hand grenade.

He promptly pulled out the pin, and menacingly approached the officers he considered as his tormentors, threatening to blow them all up. That he was nervous and hesitant saved the day. He was eventually disarmed after his femur was shattered by a rifle shot fired by none other than Nunneley himself. Rumours that Antoni’s tribesmen would soon take their revenge by killing Nunneley remained just that, and Antoni presumably got what were considered to be his just desserts, as did many a subdued African offender, of the dreaded 12 lashes as soon as he had sufficiently recuperated from his leg wound.

Whereas offences like this and others as serious as raping defenceless civilians, were not uncommon, there were also hilarious incidents resultant from the sheer cultural shock that new recruits to the Kar had to contend with. A case in point involved one Private Mumbwa, described by Nunneley as “a good, conscientious askari, a heavily-built coal-black Mgogo from Tanganyika’s jungly savannahs.”

Like many of his fellow recruits, Mumbwa was totally unfamiliar with vehicles, and he kept losing his bush hat, once too often blown away by the wind as he rode in the back of a truck. This often made him the object of perpetual derision among his buddies. Determined to stop them from taking the Mickey out of him, the happy-go-lucky private one day found himself leaping over the tailgate of a truck in pursuit of his hat, when it was once again blown away by the wind.

Hitting the road with his head at 30 miles an hour, the befuddled Private Mumbwa was lucky to escape with his life. But alas, instead of retrieving his precious bush hat, he ended up spending quite a stretch in a hospital in Anuradhapura, somewhere in the Far East, far, far away from his native Tanganyika.