In 1935, when the novella The African Queen by C. S. Forester was published, many British people believed that World War I was a grievous mistake that could have been avoided. In the novella, the Germans are the antagonists, not the villains, and are depicted as noble and chivalrous opponents of the British, who are likewise equally noble and honorable.[39] The overall message of the novella was that the war was a tragedy in which decent people killed one another for unfathomable reasons and that both sides suffered equally.[39] The British historian Antony Barker wrote in the book there is a strong sense of the shared suffering of the European characters in Africa during the war including the Germans who are presented as having only a "limited responsibility" for the war.[40] By contrast, when the film version of The African Queen came out in 1951, memories of the Second World War were still fresh and the German characters were far more villainous and disagreeable than in the novella.[41] Unlike the memory of the First World War, the Second World War was remembered as a crusade against evil, which influenced the script of The African Queen.[41] In the novella, the Germans capture Rose and Charlie, but release them in a magnanimous gesture, unaware of the failed plot.[39] Likewise, in the film they capture Rose and Charlie, but are on the verge of hanging them when the Königin Luise is sunk by the wreck of The African Queen.[41]
In the novella, Charlie and Rose fail in their attempt to sink the Königin Luise as the message in the book is: "What appears to be an impossible mission for a private citizen is shown to be just that--it remains a job best left for the professionals".[39] The Königin Luise is instead sunk in a lake battle by a Royal Navy gunboat as Rose and Charlie watch from the shore.[39] The film presented the efforts of Charlie and Rose in a more favorable light as their struggle to bring The African Queen to the lake does causes the sinking of the Königin Luise, and the Royal Navy gunboat does not appear in the film.[41] In the novella, the character of Charlie was British; in the film, he becomes Canadian to accommodate Bogart's American accent.[41] In 1915, there was a successful expedition commanded by Geoffrey Spicer-Simson where the British dragged two Royal Navy gunboats across the African wilderness to Lake Tanganyika to challenge German naval mastery of the lake, which served as the inspiration for the novella.[39] C. S. Forester, the author of The African Queen did not focus on the story of the real life expedition, which he incorporated into his novella as the Royal Navy gunboat in the book is clearly supposed to be one of the two real life gunboats, largely because of the tremendous suffering endured by the African porters who had to drag the two gunboats across the wilderness, an aspect of the expedition that Forester did not wish to dwell upon.[39]
During the campaign in East Africa, the German forces were quite ruthless in forcibly conscripting Africans to work as porters; seizing animals and food for themselves; and in carrying out a scorched earth strategy meant to deny the pursuing British forces the use of the countryside.[40] Barker wrote that the heroic way that the crew of the Königin Luise go down fighting in the book "cancelled" out the brutal behavior of the German forces earlier while in the film the sinking of the Königin Luise is the just punishment of the German characters.[39] Both the book and the film accurately depict the scorched earth tactics of the German Schutztruppe, which had a devastating effect on the African peoples as thousands of Africans starved to death as a result of the destruction of crops and farm animals.[42] However, the focus in both the film and the book are on the white characters and both the film and book treats the Africans as mere extras in the story.[40] Despite the fact that both the book and the novella are set in the Great Lakes region of Africa, there are no important African characters in either the book or the film.[40] Both the book and the film present Africa as a exotic and dangerous locale where white people have adventures and romances, with the Africans themselves just in the background.[40]
Both the book and the film treat Africa as a place where it is possible to find happiness in a way that would be impossible in Europe. In both the book and the film, Rose is a prim, proper missionary from a middle class English family who is dominated by her bossy older brother Samuel, and it is during the voyage of the African Queen that she finds romance and happiness with Charlie along with the courage to assert herself.[40] In the book, Charlie is a coarse and somewhat disreputable working class Cockney who marries a middle class woman that he would be unlikely to marry in England.[39] The film changes Charlie into a Canadian, but has the same message that a working class man is able to marry a middle class woman that he would be unlikely to marry in a place other than Africa.[41] In the book, it is strongly implied that Rose and Charlie are engaged in a sexual relationship before marriage, an aspect of the book that was toned down in the film because of the Hayes Code, which forbade any depiction of a pre-marital sexual relationship. Unlike the book which was a straight adventure story, the film borrows much from American romantic comedies of the 1930s-1940s which portray a "battle of the sexes" that ends with a man and a woman finding love on the basis of "equality and symmetry".[43] The book is set in a thinly disguised version of Lake Tanganyika, on whose eastern shores was the colony of German East Africa (modern Tanzania), but the parts of the film shot on location were filmed in the Belgian Congo (modern Democratic Republic of the Congo) because director Huston had heard that the Belgian Congo was better for hunting elephants.[44]
