From July 1905 a broad rising spread across southern German East Africa, drawing together many peoples around the maji water medicine that fighters believed would turn bullets to water. German forces, heavily outgunned in weapons if not in numbers, met the rising with machine guns and then with a deliberate scorched-earth campaign that destroyed villages, standing crops and grain stores across the affected districts. The resulting famine, rather than combat, caused most of the deaths and continued after the fighting ended in August 1907. Encyclopedia.com summarises the death toll at roughly 250,000, and the campaign is generally treated as one of the deadliest colonial counter-insurgencies in Africa. Germany and Tanzania have since 2017 discussed the return of remains and objects taken during the period, but there has been no formal determination equivalent to the 2021 Namibian declaration.
German colonial forces and their auxiliaries suppressed a mass rising in southern German East Africa by destroying villages, crops and food stores across the southern highlands and the Rufiji and Kilombero valleys
German colonial administrative estimates, the only figures available and themselves rough, put the colony at roughly 7-7.7 million before the First World War. The rising and the famine created by the deliberate destruction of crops and food stores were concentrated in the Matumbi, Ngindo, Pogoro, Bena and Ngoni districts of the south; Iliffe and others estimate 75,000 to 300,000 deaths there, chiefly from starvation.
Encyclopedia.com gives about 250,000 deaths, most caused by the famine that followed the German scorched-earth campaign rather than by fighting. The lower bound reflects historians who regard the widely repeated figures as extrapolations from colonial district reports; the higher end includes deaths from famine and disease over several years after 1907. There was no census, and all figures are reconstructions.
The burning of villages and food stores, the resulting famine and the forced cultivation regime that provoked the rising are documented in German colonial military and administrative records and in the oral testimony collected by the Maji Maji Research Project in the 1960s.
Tanzania