When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it spilled immediately into Africa. German East Africa (now Tanzania) bordered British East Africa (Kenya), and the two colonial forces clashed across the border for four years.
Over a million African soldiers and porters served in the East African campaign. Hundreds of thousands died, many of disease and starvation rather than bullets.
Entire communities in southern Kenya were stripped of their food supplies, their livestock and their men. The war that Europe called the Great War was experienced by Kenyans as an alien catastrophe visited upon them without their consent.