The four-year campaign in East Africa was fought across country without roads or railways, so both sides moved supplies on the heads of conscripted African porters. Recruitment was formally voluntary in places and openly compulsory in others, and men were taken from their farms for long periods, often far from home. Murphy records that no fewer than 95,000 carriers died, about 10 percent of the manpower used, overwhelmingly from dysentery, malaria and exhaustion rather than combat, with the influenza pandemic that reached the region in October 1918 adding heavily to the toll. The removal of adult labour and the requisitioning of food and livestock produced serious famine in parts of German East Africa, Kenya and Nyasaland in 1917-18. Civilian mortality is not reliably known and is usually estimated at several hundred thousand across the region.
British, German, Belgian and Portuguese forces conscripted African porters for the East African campaign and requisitioned food and livestock across British East Africa, German East Africa, Nyasaland and Mozambique
Contemporary colonial estimates give roughly 7.5 million for German East Africa, 2.5-4 million each for British East Africa and Uganda, about 1.2 million for Nyasaland, and several million more in Northern Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa. All are administrative estimates rather than censuses and carry wide margins.
The lower figure is Murphy's count of carrier deaths in 1914-1918-Online, which he describes as a minimum drawn from British military records; the upper end includes civilian deaths from the war-driven famine and the 1918-19 influenza in the campaign zone, which no administration counted and which historians reconstruct only in outline. Deaths were caused by disease, exhaustion and hunger rather than by killing.
Compulsory carrier recruitment and the requisition of food and livestock are documented in British, German and Belgian military and colonial records, summarised by Murphy in 1914-1918-Online.
Tanzania, Kenya