"Your Excellency the Count, you flatter me. Submarine technology was still unstable and could not contend with powerful battleships. At most, it played an auxiliary role in the navy, and in this respect, our East African Navy was far inferior to Germany's," Tirpitz said modestly.
Tirpitz paid little mind to Tirpitz's modest attitude. Before coming to East Africa, Tirpitz had learned that East Africans were not as flamboyant as Europeans, though neither were they as excessively humble as the people of the current Far East Empire.
This was actually easy enough to understand. When one's strength was lacking, lowering one's head first was not necessarily a bad thing. Before the fifties, the Far East Empire's descriptions of foreigners had in fact been extremely contemptuous.
Even the Self-Strengthening Movement had at its core the idea of "Learn from the barbarians to control the barbarians," and in the Far East Empire, "barbarian" was hardly a complimentary word.
Ignoring Tirpitz's deliberate self-deprecation, Tirpitz said, "It seems that during this visit to East Africa, we must not only strengthen cooperation in naval strategy and tactics. The East African Navy's unique skills, especially in technology, should also become areas where our two countries reach cooperation."
Before coming to East Africa, Tirpitz had originally looked down on some of the technologies mastered by the East African Navy. After all, the East African Navy had been born from the Austro-Hungarian Navy, and even its early officers had come from the Austro-Hungarian Navy. Its Commander-in-Chief was Archduke Ferdinand, the former helmsman of the Austrian Navy.
Thus, Tirpitz had previously believed that the East African Navy might not even match the Austro-Hungarian Empire in technology and shipbuilding.
In truth, there was nothing wrong with that assessment. In terms of shipbuilding, East Africa had now surpassed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in