African Conscripts In WW1 - One Million Dead

There couldn’t be a more appropriate text from which to embark on an on-the-spot reminder to the world of the role of Africa and Africans in the intra-European World war of 1914-1918 or the Great War or the First World War than Unbowed: One Woman’s Story, the inimitable memoirs of Wangari Maathai, the award-winning celebrated environmental activist and biologist. In those poignant passages memorialising on uncle Thumbi, conscripted by the British occupation regime in Kenya in 1914 to fight the Germans in neighbouring Italian-occupied Somalia and German-occupied Tanganyika (contemporary Tanzania), Maathai notes (2008: 27-28):

‘In my family there was a missing member, someone I did not find out about until I was well into adulthood. During the First World War, Africans in the colonies were conscripted to fight or serve as porters. In Kenya, if parents had an able-bodied son old enough to go to war, they were … expected to surrender him to the authorities. My grandparents had such a son, Thumbi. My grandmother did not want her son, who was more than twenty at the time, to join the war. She was in despair. So she advised him to hide in the dense vegetation near a high waterfall in the Tucha River … [but Thumbi was eventually caught … and the British] went and seized him … ‘He will never come back,’ my grandmother … cr[ied]. And he never did. He became one of the more than one hundred thousand Kikuyus who died on the battlefield or from starvation or influenza during the First World War … My grandmother cried for her son for the rest of her life…’

CATACLYSM

All of Africa lost one million of its peoples fighting in this intra-European World war in battle fronts in East Africa, Cameroon (West Africa) and in Europe itself – for Britain, France, Belgian and their allies against Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Czarist Russia, the Ottomans and their allies and for Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Czarist Russia, the Ottomans and their allies against Britain, France, Belgian and their allies.

Essentially, this was a war, in addition to the follow-up 1939-1945 confrontation, that Africa and Africans had no business, whatsoever, fighting in. The two principal protagonists in each conflict, Britain and Germany, were lead powers in the pan-European World conqueror-states that had formally occupied Africa since 1885. Britain was indeed the foremost conqueror of Africa from the group, having occupied the continent’s prized lands – lands with major population centres and vast and multiple natural resource emplacements in south, central, east and west regions: South Africa, Namibia (proxy control, post-1918 – after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918 war), Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918 war), the Sudan, Nigeria, south Cameroons (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918 war), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia. Britain is also the lead beneficiary of this same pan-European World states’ 500 years of enslavement of African peoples, mostly in the Americas, since the 15th century CE (Ekwe-Ekwe 2011).

As for Germany, beginning in 1904 and ending in 1911, i.e., prior to the 1914-1918 war, it had carried out the genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples in its occupied Namibia in southwest Africa with the following catastrophic outcome during the period: wiped out 80 per cent of Herero, 51 per cent of Nama, 30 per cent of Berg Damara (Ekwe-Ekwe 2001: 37-38). The Anglo-French ally in the 1914-1918 war, Belgium, whose initial attack by Germany triggered this conflict, entered the intra-European war in 1914 in the wake of committing a 30-year trail (1878-1908) of genocide against Africans in the Congo basin in which it annihilated 13 million constituent peoples (see, especially, multiple research by historian and linguist Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem).

PERVERSE

It is against this cataclysmic background of history that Africans found themselves conscripted by both sides of the confrontation line in 1914-1918: clearly, the double- jeopardy of conquered and occupied peoples at once fighting wars for and against ruthless aggressors. In commemorations of a century of this war that have been underway across Europe recently, a recurring theme in the media (and academia) that has been used to articulate African role in the war is hidden’ or ‘silent’, even ‘unknown’. There was indeed an academic who appeared in one of the BBC frontline current affairs newsmagazine programmes who used the bizarre phrase ‘not really well known’ in describing ‘African involvement’. ‘Hidden’, ‘silent’, ‘unknown’, ‘not really well known’ – by whom?!


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