[4][page needed] The colony began when Carl Peters, an adventurer and the founder of the Society for German Colonization, signed treaties with several native chieftains on the mainland which is opposite Zanzibar.

On 3 March 1885, the German government announced that it had granted an imperial charter, which was signed by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck on 27 February 1885.

Peters then recruited specialists who began exploring south to the Rufiji River and north to Witu, near Lamu on the coast.

In November 1886 Germany and Britain reached an agreement declaring they would respect the sovereignty of the Sultan of Zanzibar over his islands and the 10-mile-strip along the coast.

In 1890, London and Berlin concluded the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty, which gave Heligoland to Germany and decided the border between GEA and the East Africa Protectorate controlled by Britain, although the exact boundaries remained unsurveyed until 1910.

[10][11][page needed] The stretch of border between Kenya and Tanganyika, running from the sea to Lake Victoria, was surveyed by two British brothers: Charles Stewart Smith (British Consul at Mombasa) and his younger brother George Edward Smith (an officer and later a general with the Royal Engineers).

Stewart Smith had been appointed British Commissioner in 1892 for the delimitation of the Anglo-German Boundary in Africa, and in the same year they both surveyed the 180-mile line from the sea to Mount Kilimanjaro.

Twelve years later George Edward Smith returned to complete the survey of the remaining 300 miles from Kilimanjaro to Lake Victoria.

[12] The German expansion was undertaken by military groups such as the notorious Wissmann Truppe, armed with modern weaponry.

A German newspaper commented on the affair: "[Germany] has found its Menelik in a German—in a ‘truly Teutonic man,’ an enraged ‘Aryan,’ who wishes to destroy all Jews, but, for a lack of Jews over there in Africa, shoots Negroes dead like sparrows and hangs Negro girls for his own pleasure after they have satisfied his desires."

[19][20] German colonial administrators relied heavily on native chiefs to keep order and collect taxes.

[24] Under the governorship of Albrecht von Rechenberg, from 1906 to 1912, the colonial administration began to place more emphasis on the economic potential of African small-holder agriculture, for which railway construction was an essential precondition.

The Central Railroad covered 775 mi (1,247 km) and linked Dar es Salaam, Morogoro, Tabora, and Kigoma.

The final link to the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika was completed in July 1914 and was cause for a huge and festive celebration in the capital with an agricultural fair and trade exhibition.

After 1891, the German colonial administration undertook efforts to overhaul the region's caravan routes, which had existed before European colonisation, into all-weather highways, although most of these projects proved to be unsuccessful and ended in failure.

[31] In 1912, Dar es Salaam and Tanga received 356 freighters and passenger steamers and over 1,000 coastal ships and local trading-vessels.

[37] Lettow-Vorbeck's guerrilla warfare compelled Britain to commit significant resources to a minor colonial theatre throughout the war and inflicted more than 10,000 casualties.

He withdrew south into Portuguese Mozambique and then into Northern Rhodesia, where he agreed to a ceasefire after he had received news of the armistice between the warring nations three days earlier.

His Schutztruppe was celebrated as the only colonial German force during World War I that was not defeated in open combat, but it often retreated when it was outnumbered.

The Askari colonial troops who had fought in the East African campaign were later given pension payments by the Weimar Republic and West Germany.

[39] The SMS Königsberg, a German light cruiser, also fought off the coast of the African Great Lakes region.

She was eventually scuttled in the Rufiji delta in July 1915 after running low on coal and spare parts and was subsequently blockaded and bombarded by the British.

[citation needed] The Supreme Council of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference awarded all of German East Africa (GEA) to Britain on 7 May 1919, over the strenuous objections of Belgium.

[42]: 612–3 On 12 July 1919, the Commission on Mandates agreed that the small Kionga Triangle south of the Rovuma River would be given to Portugal;[41]: 243  it eventually became part of independent Mozambique.