Glossary

Askari is the Arabic word for soldier.  During WWI in Africa, soldiers were recruited locally to serve in the Italian, British, German, Belgian and Portuguese armies.

A boma can be a livestock enclosure, a stockade or a kind of fort.  They were built of poles, stones or impenetrable thickets of acacia thorns.

Dar-es-Salaam was the administrative and commercial centre of German East Africa.

The East African Mounted Rifles (E.A.M.R.) was a unit made up of British settlers who had been living in British East Africa when the war broke out.

B.R. Graham, Lieutenant-Colonel of 3/KAR was killed in the Battle of Latema Nek, March 11, 1916.

British forces led by Col. Hannyngton.

Major General Reginald Hoskins, KAR, took over command of the British forces in 1917.

King Edward VII was sunk by a mine off Cape Wraith, Scotland on January 6, 1915.

The King’s African Rifles was a colonial regiment consisting primarily of African soldiers. At the beginning of WWI there were three battalions comprising 21 small companies.

Nairobi, capital of British East Africa, was founded in 1899 as a railway depot on the Mombasa - Uganda Railway.

The Royal Engineers, officially the Corps of the Royal Engineers, is one of the corps of the British Army.  The Royal Engineers, often referred to as Sappers, are responsible for building and maintaining transportation and communication infrastructure for the armed forces.

Serengeti was a small post in British East Africa.

Horace Smith-Dorrien was Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in East Africa in 1915.

Jan Smuts, a South African, was Commander in Chief of the British forces in East Africa in 1916.

Major-General Michael J. Tighe, Commander-in-Chief of British Forces 1915-1916.

General Jakobus van Deventer was a South African military commander who took over the command of the British forces in East Africa in 1917.