co-ordinate. The first attack was met with gunfire from 1000 m; the tribesmen stood firm for about fifteen minutes, then they broke and retreated. After the first attack, a second column of 1,200 men advanced from the east. Some of these attackers were able to get within three paces of the firing line before they were killed. The Qadiriyya Brotherhood declared a Jihad against the Germans, with Sufi Muslims now playing a major role in the rebellion. While this was the apex of the uprising, the Ngoni people decided to join in the revolt with a force of 5,000. The Muslim Gwangara Ngoni were relatively recent arrivals in the region, descendants of a remnant of the Ndwandwe confederation defeated by the Zulus in 1818 (other Ngoni states were formed in Malawi, Zambia, and north-central Tanzania). German troops, armed with machine guns, departed from Mahenge to the Ngoni camp, which they attacked on 21 October. The Ngoni soldiers retreated, throwing away their bottles of war medicine and crying, "The maji is a lie!" Upon the outbreak of the fighting, Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen, governor of German East Africa, had requested reinforcements from the German government. Kaiser Wilhelm immediately ordered two cruisers with their Marine complements to the troubled colony. Reinforcements also arrived from as far away as New Guinea. When 1,000 regular soldiers from Germany arrived in October, Götzen felt he could go on the offensive and restore order in the south. Imperial German forces genocidally suppressed the revolt. Three columns moved into the rebellious South. They destroyed villages, crops, and other food sources used by the rebels. They made effective use of their firepower to break up rebel attacks. A successful ambush of a German column crossing the Rufiji River by the Bena kept the rebellion alive in the southwest, but the Germans were not denied for long. By April 1906, the southwest had been pacified. However, elsewhere the fighting was bitter. A column under Lt. Gustav von Blumenthal (1879–1913, buried at Lindi) consisting of himself, one other European and 46 Askaris fell under continuous attack as it marched in early May 1906, from Songea to Mahenge. The Germans decided to concentrate at Kitanda, where Major Johannes, Lt. von Blumenthal and Lt. von Lindeiner-Wildau eventually gathered. Von Blumenthal was then sent along the Luwegu River, partly by boat. The southeast campaign degenerated into a guerrilla war that brought with