Top 10 Anti-Colonial Wars in Africa You Were Not Taught About

Summary

• In March 1896, an Ethiopian army annihilated Italy's invading force at Adwa — the rare colonial-era battle an African power won outright, and it toppled a European government.
• Germany's first genocide happened in Africa: between 1904 and 1908, some 80 percent of the Herero people of Namibia were exterminated, most driven into the desert to die of thirst.
• A Somali sheikh the British dismissed as the "Mad Mullah" fought Britain, Italy, and Ethiopia for 21 years — and was finally beaten by airplanes.
• Holy water that promised to turn bullets to rain, a queen mother who took supreme command of an army, a desert scholar hanged at 73: the resistance was stranger and braver than the textbooks admit.

The List at a Glance

Selected Details About Each War on the List

1. Maji Maji Rebellion (1905–1907)

In July 1905, a spirit medium named Kinjekitile Ngwale began distributing "maji" — holy water mixed with castor oil and millet seed — that he promised would turn German bullets into rain. The grievance behind the prophecy was brutally real: the German governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen had forced villages to grow cotton for export on impossible quotas, backed by head taxes and forced labour. On 31 July 1905, Matumbi tribesmen destroyed a cotton crop and trading post at Samanga, and the revolt spread across southern German East Africa, eventually mustering some 90,000 fighters against barely 2,000 Germans. Kinjekitile himself was arrested and hanged for treason in August 1905 — dead before the war peaked — but the movement outlived him. At Mahenge that August, thousands charged a German position defended by two machine guns and were mown down. Götzen answered with scorched earth: villages, crops, and food stores were systematically destroyed until famine — the Great Hunger, ukame — did what bullets could not. Between 75,000 and 300,000 people died, overwhelmingly of starvation and disease; German losses were 15 Germans, 73 askari, and 316 auxiliaries. Tanzanian nationalists later claimed Maji Maji as the first stirring of a shared national identity — the moment peoples who had never fought together discovered a common enemy. [Maji Maji Rebellion]

2. Herero and Nama War (1904–1908)

The first genocide of the twentieth century happened in what is now Namibia. On 12 January 1904, Herero chief Samuel Maharero launched a surprise uprising against German settlers who had been seizing land and cattle; the Nama, led by Hendrik Witbooi, revolted that September. Berlin sent General Lothar von Trotha, who routed the Herero at the Battle of Waterberg in August 1904 and then issued his extermination order: every Herero found in German territory was to be killed. Survivors were driven into the Omaheke Desert, where waterholes were sealed or poisoned; those who surrendered were shipped to concentration camps on Shark Island and at Swakopmund, where disease, overwork, and abuse finished them — and where the eugenicist Eugen Fischer conducted experiments on the prisoners. About 80,000 Herero — 80 percent of the people — and 10,000 Nama, half their population, died. Germany acknowledged the genocide in 2015 and in 2021 agreed to pay €1.1 billion in development aid over 30 years, while rejecting legal liability. [Herero and Nama genocide]

3. Mahdist War (1881–1899)

The longest war on this list began with a cleric's prophecy. In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi — the promised redeemer of Islam — and raised Sudan against Turco-Egyptian rule. His Ansar annihilated an Egyptian army at El Obeid in November 1883, then besieged Khartoum, where Britain had sent the celebrated General Charles Gordon to organize an evacuation. Gordon chose to stay and fight. After a 317-day siege, the city fell on the night of 25–26 January 1885; Gordon was killed — against the Mahdi's order to take him alive — and his 7,000-man garrison and some 4,000 residents were massacred. The news brought down Gladstone's government in London. The Mahdi himself died of typhus six months later, and his successor, the Khalifa Abdallahi, ruled Sudan for thirteen years — until Herbert Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army met the Mahdist host at Omdurman on 2 September 1898. It was a Maxim-gun massacre: 48 British and Egyptian dead against some 11,000 Mahdists, with the wounded bayoneted afterward. The war ended with the Khalifa's death at Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899. [Siege of Khartoum]

4. First Italo-Ethiopian War (1894–1896)

The one outright African victory over a European colonial army. The war's root was a translation trick: the 1889 Treaty of Wuchale, in its Italian text, made Ethiopia an Italian protectorate; the Amharic version merely offered Italy's good offices in foreign affairs. When Emperor Menelik II discovered the fraud, he mobilized. On 1 March 1896, between 73,000 and 100,000 Ethiopians — armed with modern French and Russian rifles, and including forces commanded by Empress Taytu Betul — met some 14,000–18,000 Italians under General Oreste Baratieri at Adwa. The Italian columns, advancing over broken ground with poor maps, were isolated and destroyed: about 6,000 Italians killed and 3,865 captured, against 4,000–7,000 Ethiopian dead. The Treaty of Addis Ababa (October 1896) forced Italy to recognize Ethiopian independence, and the Crispi government collapsed amid riots in Italian cities. Ethiopia remained the only African country to owe its independence to a battlefield victory — and Mussolini's 1935 invasion was, in part, revenge for Adwa. [Battle of Adwa]

5. Rif War (1921–1926)

The war that invented modern guerrilla warfare — and humiliated a European army. Abd el-Krim, a Berber judge and journalist turned rebel, founded the Republic of the Rif in September 1921 after annihilating a Spanish army at the Battle of Annual that July: an estimated 10,000–16,000 Spanish dead against roughly 800 Rifians, with more than 130 Spanish posts overrun and their captured Mausers arming the new Rifian state. Spain answered with mustard gas — manufactured in Melilla from 1922 and dropped on villages, markets, and water sources — and, after Abd el-Krim pushed into the French zone, France joined the war with 160,000 men under Marshal Pétain. The joint Alhucemas landing of September 1925, the first great amphibious operation of the twentieth century, finally broke the Rif; Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French in May 1926. His hit-and-run tactics were studied by Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. The International Committee of the Red Cross calls it one of the most important — and most forgotten — colonial wars of the twentieth century. [The Rif War: a forgotten war?]

6. Somali Dervish Resistance (1899–1920)

For 21 years, one man defied three empires. The Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan — the "Mad Mullah," a sneer coined by the British — built the Dervish movement into a state with its own forts at Taleh, repulsing four British expeditions while fighting the Italians and Ethiopians too. His opening blow came at Jigjiga in March 1900 against an Ethiopian garrison. The British spent two decades chasing him through the Nugaal Valley; the Dervish simply melted into the desert and struck back. The end came from the sky: in January and February 1920, the RAF's "Z Force" bombed the Taleh forts in one of history's first independent air campaigns, and ground columns took the capital on 9 February. The whole operation cost £77,000 — the "cheapest war in history," London boasted. Hassan escaped, dying of illness on 21 December 1920. The war's true cost was Somali: an estimated one-third of northern Somalia's population died, and the region's economy was left in ruins. [Dervish War]

7. Samori Touré's Resistance (1882–1898)

They called him the Napoleon of the Sudan. Samori Touré, a Malinke cleric turned empire-builder, forged the Wassoulou Empire across what is now Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire, fielding a 35,000-man professional army of sofa infantry and cavalry, with local blacksmiths repairing — and even manufacturing — Gras rifles. He fought the French for sixteen years, repeatedly relocating his entire empire eastward in a scorched-earth retreat that denied the French supplies while preserving his army: a strategy of depth with no parallel in the colonial wars. Bissandougou, his capital, fell in 1892, but Touré fought on until French intelligence from deserters pinpointed him. He was captured without a fight at Guélémou on 29 September 1898 by Captain Henri Gouraud, and died in exile in Gabon on 2 June 1900. His great-grandson, Ahmed Sékou Touré, became independent Guinea's first president — the empire-builder's bloodline outlasting the empire that destroyed him. [Samori Ture]

8. War of the Golden Stool (1900)

It started with a chair. In March 1900, the British governor Sir Frederick Hodgson stood before the chiefs of Ashanti and demanded the Golden Stool — the Sika Dwa Kofi, the sacred embodiment of the Ashanti nation's soul — declaring "the Queen is entitled to the stool; she must receive it." The chiefs answered with war. Yaa Asantewaa, the Queen Mother of Ejisu, took supreme command of an army some 20,000 strong — a role no woman had held — and besieged the British in their Kumasi fort, cutting telegraph wires, blockading food, and setting improvised land mines. Hodgson fled in a breakout on 23 June; a 1,000-man relief column under Major James Willcocks, with Maxim guns, broke the siege on 15 July, and the last Ashanti stockades fell in September. Britain annexed Ashanti in 1902. Yaa Asantewaa was exiled to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921 — but the Golden Stool was never captured. It had been hidden deep in the forest, and the Ashanti kept their soul. [War of the Golden Stool]

9. First Chimurenga (1896–1897)

Zimbabwe's first war of liberation was preached by spirit mediums. In March 1896, the Ndebele rose against Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, inspired by the Mlimo, who promised that settler bullets would turn to water and blamed the whites for the drought, locusts, and rinderpest devastating the land. In June the Shona joined, led by the mediums Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana and Sekuru Kaguvi. Within a week, 141 settlers were dead in Matabeleland and 103 in Mashonaland, with hundreds of homes, ranches, and mines burned. The uprising was possible because Jameson's Raid had stripped the colony of troops — but the Maxim gun still decided it: company forces blasted the rebels out of their granite kopje fortresses. The American scout Frederick Russell Burnham assassinated the Mlimo in his Matobo Hills shrine. Nehanda and Kaguvi were captured and hanged in 1898; her reported last words — "My bones will rise" — became the prophecy of the Second Chimurenga, the liberation war of the 1960s and 70s. [First Chimurenga]

10. Omar Mukhtar's Resistance (1923–1931)

The Lion of the Desert fought Mussolini's Italy for nearly twenty years. Omar al-Mukhtar, a 53-year-old Quranic teacher when Italy invaded Libya in 1911, became the Senussi resistance's strategist in Cyrenaica: small, fast columns that ambushed Italian outposts, cut supply lines, and vanished into the Jebel Akhdar. When General Rodolfo Graziani took command in 1930, he answered with deportation: some 100,000 Bedouins — half of Cyrenaica's population — were herded into 16 coastal concentration camps, while a 300-kilometre barbed-wire fence sealed the Egyptian border. By the camps' closure in 1933, some 40,000 internees had died of typhus, starvation, and overcrowding, and the region's livestock was annihilated. Mukhtar, wounded, was captured near Slonta on 11 September 1931 and hanged at the Suluq camp on 16 September, aged 73, before 20,000 Libyans forced to watch. His last words were from the Quran: "To God we belong and to Him we return." Italy kept Libya — but Mukhtar's face went onto the ten-dinar note, and Anthony Quinn played him in the 1981 film Lion of the Desert. [Omar al-Mukhtar]

Quick Answers to Commonly Asked Questions About Anti-Colonial Wars

Why don't most schools teach these wars?

Because the curricula were written by the winners. Colonial school systems taught the history of the empire, not of the resistance to it — and post-independence syllabi in many African countries inherited those frameworks, or foregrounded the later nationalist movements instead. The result is a strange gap: millions of schoolchildren learn the dates of the Berlin Conference but never hear of Maji Maji, the Rif, or the Dervish state. The wars on this list were also inconvenient for everyone: too brutal for colonial nostalgia, too religious or "tribal" for some nationalist narratives, and too poorly documented in European languages for easy teaching.

Which anti-colonial war in Africa was the deadliest?

By the raw numbers, the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905–1907: between 75,000 and 300,000 dead, the overwhelming majority killed not by bullets but by the famine that followed Germany's scorched-earth campaign. The Herero and Nama war of 1904–1908 killed around 75,000 people — some 80 percent of the Herero and half the Nama — and is recognized as a genocide. The Mahdist War's toll is harder to pin down, but Sudan's population is estimated to have fallen by more than half during the Mahdist period. For comparison, all of these dwarf the death tolls of the better-known settler rebellions.

Did an African army ever beat a European colonial power in a pitched battle?

Yes — and it is the most famous battle on this list. At Adwa on 1 March 1896, Emperor Menelik II's Ethiopian army destroyed an Italian invasion force in a set-piece battle, killing some 6,000 Italians and capturing nearly 4,000 more. The Disaster of Annual in 1921 was nearly as complete: Abd el-Krim's Rifians annihilated a Spanish army of over 20,000 men. Both victories had consequences far beyond the battlefield: Adwa toppled Italy's Crispi government and secured Ethiopian independence, while Annual helped bring down the Spanish monarchy.

Why did so many uprisings fail even when the rebels vastly outnumbered the colonizers?

Industrial firepower. The Maxim gun — and later artillery, aircraft, and poison gas — let a few hundred Europeans hold off tens of thousands of fighters, as the battles of Omdurman, Mahenge, and the Chimurenga sieges all showed. The colonizers also fought dirty: scorched earth, engineered famine, concentration camps, and sealed waterholes turned civilian populations into targets. And they divided their enemies: at Adwa the Ethiopians were united, but in most of these wars the colonial powers recruited African auxiliaries, exploited rivalries between peoples, and negotiated separate peaces — the classic machinery of empire.

How are these wars remembered in Africa today?

As founding myths. Maji Maji is taught in Tanzania as the first stirring of national identity. Nehanda's reported last words — "My bones will rise" — became the spiritual charter of Zimbabwe's liberation war. Omar al-Mukhtar is Libya's national hero, on the ten-dinar note. Yaa Asantewaa is a Ghanaian feminist icon who appeared on the 20-cedi note. Adwa is still celebrated in Ethiopia every March. And the Herero and Nama genocide, formally acknowledged by Germany in 2015, remains at the center of live politics around reparations and remembrance. These wars lost on the battlefield; they are winning in memory.

Key Sources

Other sources are named in brackets in the text. All pages pulled October 7, 2026.

• Maji Maji Rebellion — Wikipedia
• Herero and Nama genocide — Wikipedia
• Battle of Adwa — Wikipedia
• Mahdist War — Wikipedia
• Mahdist War and the Siege of Khartoum — ThoughtCo
• Rif War — Wikipedia
• The Rif War: A forgotten war? — International Review of the Red Cross
• Dervish War (Somaliland campaign) — Wikipedia
• Samori Ture — Wikipedia
• War of the Golden Stool — Wikipedia
• First Chimurenga — Wikipedia
• Omar al-Mukhtar — Wikipedia