Battle Of Adibo
Written accounts of the incursion primarily come from the personal letters and diaries of von Massow to his mother, as well as his official reports addressed to the Governor of Lome under the colonial department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin. Dagbaŋ drummer storytellers maintain a different oral account of the event.
Background
Before 1850, German missionaries had become well-established among the southern tribes of present-day Ghana and Togo, but Germany first established a formal protectorate along the coast of West Africa on July 5, 1884. They continued their advance northwards and from 1884 established the Togoland protectorate as a discontinuous part of the Deutsch-Westafrika protectorate that included Cameroon.
Their advance was influenced by the need to expand agricultural plantations, road and railway lines; and to exact forced labour for those purposes. Factors that facilitated their movement into the hinterlands included the construction of a port at Lomé, installation of the Kamina Funkstation radio communications transmitter, and the minimal resistance posed by the tribes they encountered such as the Ewe people, who mostly settled as fragmented clans.
By 1890, the German expeditions had ventured into the savanna regions of present-day Ghana and Togo, where they encountered the more formidable Dagbamba warriors.
References
- ^ Pukariga, Dasana. "Dagbon ? Recalling History, the Battle of Adibo".
- ^ Quesada, Alejandro de; Dale, Chris (2013-08-20). Imperial German Colonial and Overseas Troops 1885–1918. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781780961668.
- ^ Massow, Valentin (2014-07-07). Die Eroberung von Nordtogo 1896 – 1899: Tagebücher und Briefe (in German). BoD – Books on Demand. ISBN 9783954940424.
- ^ Papathanassiou, Manolis. "Battle of Adibo". www.10000battles.com. Retrieved 2018-02-23.