ABSTRACT
On 20 June 1916, during Britain’s First World War conquest of German East Africa, a force of about one hundred men climbed into the Usambara Mountains to lay claim to the Amani Institute for Biological and Agricultural Sciences. 1 From 1902, scientific work at Amani had focused on botanical research and its application to the needs of the German coffee, sisal, and rubber plantations sprinkled throughout the colony’s northern mountains and plains. However, the British force found Amani’s highly trained scientists reduced to wartime camp warders for German refugees, and station conditions were such that the botanical lab served as a milk distribution center, while the experimental rice fields had degenerated into a “pestilential swamp.” 2 Science had taken a backseat to survival. The station’s ramshackle condition notwithstanding, British scientists, impressed both with Amani’s international reputation and the quality of research conducted there, argued subsequently for its rehabilitation and continued operating it as a research institute under the British postwar government. Amani therefore continued to function as an important center of botanical research and became a flash point for arguments over the value of pure versus applied research in Britain’s East African colonies.
