Sideshow on the lake

During the night of 9 February 1916, two men were sitting on opposing shores of Lake Tanganyika. The longest lake in the world, it at that time divided German East Africa from the Belgian Congo. One of the men was Herr Kapitänleutnant Gustav von Zimmer, the other was an eccentric British navy officer, Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson. The following morning, Zimmer would launch the Graf von Götzen, a large vessel which floats to this day on the waters of the lake.

Spicer-Simson takes a starring role in my narrative non-fiction book, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (2004). The history of the two British motor launches, Mimi and Toutou, and their vainglorious, skirt-wearing, tattooed commander — who brought them from the Thames to Africa, tugging them by steam engine through the bush to the lakeshore — is extraordinary enough. Now Alex Capus has added another layer to this strange episode in a sideshow of the first world war, with a wonderful fictionalised account of what the Germans did while Spicer pranced about in his skirt.

The bizarre battle for Lake Tanganyika and the wider East African campaign has produced interesting fiction. C. S. Forester’s The African Queen (1935), later made into the classic film by John Huston, was the first strike. In 1968, Wilbur Smith’s Shout at the Devil dramatised another, related naval encounter on the east coast of what would later become Tanzania. This involved the Konigsberg, a German cruiser lying hidden in the Rufiji Delta. In 1982 William Boyd published An Ice-Cream War, which covered the whole campaign. At a tangent to Boyd’s plot lies an episode fully dramatised in Smith’s most recent novel, Assegai (2008), involving a Zeppelin mission from Europe to East Africa.

The Zeppelin turned back over Sudan, but the Götzen played an active role in the war, albeit by sleight of hand.