Demobilization in British and French Africa at the End of the First World War

It has been customary for quite some time to refer to the armed conflicts around the years 1914–18 as a ‘world war'. Germans called it ‘Der Weltkrieg' from the beginning, and of course the term First World War came into wide use once events after 1939 made clear that the Great War (another of its common names) was only the first of the century’s two great worldwide conflagrations. ¹ Yet even though the recognition of the global nature of the war is not new, this has only relatively recently become a dominant theme of historical scholarship on the war. ² The 1968 special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History devoted to the transition from war to peace in 1918–19, which this special issue seeks to update, included some articles on the global (Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire) and even imperial (India) dimensions of the war, but the major belligerents’ vast African colonial empires received no attention. ³ Nonetheless, these empires played a key role in rendering the First World War truly global. For regions of Africa, most notably east and central tropical Africa, it was a disastrously ‘Great War’. Across Africa the war provided opportunity for continuing and resurgent resistance and revolt which temporarily threatened colonial rule and its extension. ⁴ As such the First World War in Africa can also be regarded as the end of the colonial wars of conquest. ⁵ Here, then, we consider important aspects of African participation in the war, both in Europe and in Africa, as part of the British and French empires. More specifically, we explore demobilization at the end of the war in comparison with that process in Europe, paying close attention to the particularities of the colonial context.

This article, then, offers a comparative, colonial African perspective to complement other contributions to this volume that examine the unrest and turmoil that accompanied demobilization in Europe and elsewhere after 1918. As do the other articles, it directly engages with George Mosse’s ‘brutalization’ thesis, which has influenced the historiographical analysis of postwar events in parts of Europe. Although Mosse argued that it was especially in Germany that the aftermath of the war saw a new ruthlessness in political action and vocabulary, increases in violence and crime, indifference to mass death, expressions of aggressive masculinity, binary thinking and hatred of ‘the enemy’ (internal and external), and surges in racism and ethnic tension, he noted that these phenomena were not absent even in victor societies. ⁶ Many scholars have made use of Mosse’s concept to understand the political and social unrest and relentless crises of the interwar period. This article, one of synthesis, argues that even though French and British Africa were integrated significantly into their metropole’s war efforts between 1914 and 1918, the experience of demobilization in these colonies was not accompanied by the trauma of brutalization. Africans who participated in the British and French war efforts did not emerge from their experiences to roil the political landscape with discontent and violence, as happened in many places in Europe. The effects of the war were certainly important, and even destabilizing, in many areas of the continent. But if it is true that the ‘brutalizing moment’ was the transition from war to peace, rather than the war itself (as the editors of this special issue suggest in their introduction), this transition cannot be viewed as part of a general brutalization of combatant societies.

This finding also makes a larger historiographical point more directly germane to the study of empire. Treating the metropole and colonies within ‘a single analytic field’, an imperative most cogently articulated by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, has proved salutary and productive of a great deal of innovative scholarship. ⁷ This perspective is particularly important when examining interactions between metropoles and colonies during a global conflict such as the Great War. Yet, as the story of demobilization in Africa demonstrates, it remains important to attend to the specific context of the colonial ‘peripheries’, even as we recognize the important links that connect them to the metropolitan ‘centres’. If we do not, we will miss what is distinctive about the experience of Africans during and after the First World War, and will be unable to account for the relative quiescence and absence of serious political violence and upheaval stemming from demobilization in this region.

Nearly every aspect of colonial Africa’s politics, economics and social circumstances was vastly different from those of Europe, and it is those differences, and how they influenced the conditions of demobilization, that are addressed in this article. War is always violent, brutal and disruptive, and the regional conflicts in tropical Africa during 1914–18 led to accompanying political unrest and rebellion. The war fought in Africa was similar to the earlier and continuing wars of conquest. It bore no resemblance to the industrialised and total warfare waged in Europe. The economies of tropical Africa were overwhelmingly peasant based. Peasants did rebel, and more likely so in a period when land and food resources became scarce, but generally they lacked the organization or wider geographical aims of the peasantries of eastern Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa, other than South Africa, had no large urban centres, few wage labourers, and consequently no mass unemployment. As a result there were few major vacuums of authority and reservoirs of discontent in which irregular forces could play a decisive role, in the way paramilitary forces and veterans influenced events in other postwar societies. Certainly Islamic and millennial politics challenged the colonial order, but tropical Africa lacked ideologies of right and left, and popular sentiments were not inflamed, as in Europe, by demands for revolutionary change and rival radical nationalisms. Although the combatant colonial states were in many respects weak structures of authority, they had by 1914 built strategic railways, largely secured a monopoly of modern firepower, and enjoyed a high degree of international legitimacy. The new colonial frontiers were fluid, invariably disregarded by indigenous peoples, but until the outbreak of war boundary contests were decided, overtly and covertly, in the chancelleries of Europe. During and after the war Germany’s conquered colonies became spoils of the European victors in the second ‘scramble’ and ‘partition of Africa’, frontiers and mandated territories subsequently given international endorsement by the newly created League of Nations.

The particularities of Europe at the end of the First World War cannot readily be transferred to colonial Africa. In a global context the military campaigns in tropical Africa were marginal to the war. They were fought predominantly by African troops on terrains very different from Europe, and often were wars of movement that sometimes involved guerrilla activity. The campaign in Sinai against the Ottoman forces was different, initially a static line heavily reliant for logistic support upon a large conscripted Egyptian labour force. In sub-Saharan Africa, the Togo campaign was speedily concluded in 1914; in Kamerun, German forces were defeated by combined French, British and Belgian forces by mid 1916; the predominantly white South African Defence Force completed its conquest of German South West Africa in the same year. The longest and most punishing campaign was fought in East Africa where the Germans, under Lettow-Vorbeck, waged a guerrilla war with the purpose of tying down as many Allied troops as possible, and surrendered only after the Armistice. ⁸ That campaign laid waste large areas of East Africa which were looted for their crops and livestock and their people forcibly enlisted. Devastated African villages may not have looked like shelled European towns, but the demand for military labour and the carnage and destructive power of marauding colonial armies left serious social disruption and lingering death in their path. As Terence Ranger writes: ‘The First World War was the most awe-inspiring, destructive, and capricious demonstration of European “absolute power” that eastern Africa ever experienced … Famine, epidemic, upheaval of population – all these were produced almost casually, as side-effects of European power.’ ⁹ And John McCracken, writing of colonial Nyasaland, argues that:

for millions of Africans (and many thousands of Malawians) the war marked the high point of colonial violence: a period in which the compromises of the colonial state fell away to reveal a naked demand for manpower, both as soldiers and even more as porters, and for supplies of grain and cattle. ¹⁰

Britain’s peacetime African colonial armies were small forces, little more than ‘armed gendarmeries’, primarily employed to secure colonial frontiers, uphold internal law and order and to aid neighbouring colonies in an emergency. ¹¹ Recruits were drawn from supposedly ‘martial races’, for the most part non-literate peasants, many of whom came as migrants from adjoining foreign colonies. Unlike the French tirailleurs, the British did not intend African troops to be employed outside the Continent. Wartime armies such as the West African Frontier Force, the King's African Rifles and the other smaller territorial forces, continued to draw volunteers from the traditional recruiting grounds increasingly supplemented by conscripts provided by chiefs or secured by force of one kind or another. By contemporary European military standards the number of soldiers involved during the war was relatively small. For example, at the height of the East African campaign the combined Allied force numbered 100,000 men, who were drawn from India, East and West Africa, South Africa and the Portuguese and Belgian colonies, opposed by Lettow-Vorbeck’s force of no more than 15,000 troops. However, a vital component in all tropical military campaigns was porters to work supply lines, taking the place of draught animals in tsetse fly infected areas. Accurate statistics are wanting, but possibly up to one million men, women and children were recruited by the combatants, often by force, for the long drawn out campaign in East Africa. ¹² In Nyasaland as many as 83 per cent of all able-bodied men served as porters in a system long remembered as ‘thangata, labour without profit’. ¹³ The white government of the Union of South Africa opposed arming Africans and employed them only as labourers in uniform, 20,000 serving in France as the South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC) from 1916–18. On the Western Front black South African labourers were closely controlled by the white military authorities, living in segregated camps not unlike the compounds that housed migrant mineworkers in South Africa. ¹⁴ Only in mid 1918, when the manpower crisis bit deep in Britain, did officials and military commanders think of recruiting African troops for employment outside the Continent. This did not happen, but the idea was resurrected in the immediate post-war years when Britain’s Imperial military commitments were over-stretched. ¹⁵

The number of African soldiers killed in combat was relatively low. Disaggregating the often faulty statistics is difficult. Overall certainly more men died of disease. For example, of the 19,000 soldiers recruited in Nyasaland for the war, 1740 died on active service and 2200 were wounded, but the records do not indicate the causes of each death. Statistics are a bit better for the more than 13,000 Gold Coast soldiers recruited during the war: 640 died as a result of military action and 678 from disease, while 1886 were wounded and 1290 were ‘invalided’. ¹⁶ The largest military death rate was among non-combatant carriers. Despite unreliable statistics, it is clear that carrier deaths were much higher than those of combatants. These unfortunates suffered from disease and they endured starvation, the cold and flogging. Probably 100,000 died in the East African campaign. And invariably, as with all wars, there were collateral deaths of civilians, which were markedly high in East Africa.

Demobilization at the end of the war was often a slow process. In most British colonies it was carried out for soldiers with relative ease, but carriers were dealt with in a more peremptory way with less care. All too often these unfortunate people were arbitrarily drafted and that attitude also attended their dismissal. The majority of African soldiers returned to their rural home areas, a pattern of movement already widespread over a large part of southern and central Africa among contract migrant labour that came to work in mines and on farms. In a very few cases returning soldiers posed a political challenge to indigenous rulers, but rarely to colonial rule. ¹⁷ Some ex-servicemen found employment with the colonial State as soldiers, policemen and in other uniformed and disciplined forces, under close European supervision, invariably to be deployed in areas far from their own homes. Whatever military skills had been learned by soldiers were of little use in postwar civil society in rural areas. Relatively few recruits had come from urban areas, and most colonial towns in tropical Africa north of the Limpopo rarely exceeded 20,000 people.

A few colonial officials expressed concern at the possible disruptive impact of ex-servicemen, especially men who had served overseas, but such fears were largely misplaced. White prestige was never seriously challenged. In Britain an alliance of officials, imperialists and labour leaders argued that the resources of Empire should be further exploited to benefit Britain’s postwar economy and the working classes. In Africa the immediate but short-lived economic boom of 1919–20 helped pick up any slack labour and made the process of re-absorption easier despite the dual pressures of wartime inflation and postwar material shortages. Most ex-servicemen’s organizations formed after the war were creations of the colonial State, sustained by official patronage and limited to a small number of veterans living in the towns. Attempts by veterans in the towns to establish bodies free of State control were short-lived. ¹⁸ Military service, even in wartime, brought soldiers into the ambit of the colonial State and gave them a new set of identities and loyalties.

Most arms issued to soldiers were collected in by the military or colonial authorities at the end of the war. This was common practice and with a firm purpose, to maintain a monopoly of coercive power for the colonial State and to uphold the terms of the Brussels Conference of 1890, which restricted Africans from possessing firearms of precision. This inter-colonial agreement was supported by legislation in individual colonies which regulated the importation of gunpowder and African possession of arms other than muzzle loaders. However, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa had weak administrations and porous boundaries which were difficult to control; it was an area of constant conflict where modern firearms were readily available and could easily be imported covertly across the Red Sea from the Arabian peninsula. ¹⁹ Armed revolts in various colonies occurred during and after the war, most seriously in French West Africa, often influenced by the impact of the war and Islamic ideas.

After the war incipient hostility lingered among Africans dispossessed of land by new white settlers or stimulated by millennial ideas in east and central Africa. However, in the interwar years there were few serious challenges to colonial rule throughout Britain’s large African colonial empire. The indigenous elites, which effectively governed most areas of colonies, had their accommodating roles strengthened by the policy of indirect rule. The small educated elites, mainly Christian, hoped that their displays of wartime loyalty as British subjects would receive postwar political rewards. It was a vain hope but they lacked an effective metropolitan platform to support their claims; their few lobbying ventures to London were as weak-voiced supplicants who could be politely received and easily ignored. The African rank-and-file in the colonial military and police forces, directed by white officers, continued to be loyal agents of alien rule. Some demobilized soldiers became policemen, and if they resorted to violence it was more likely as the employees of indigenous rulers rather than as uniformed officials of the better regulated colonial State. The wartime use in Africa of artillery, aircraft and warships further demonstrated the enormous military firepower available to the colonial powers; and within each colony there were many white men (and some women) who had gained military experience and who owned rifles. Europeans organized in local defence forces and rifle clubs served as an armed bastion against any African threats to colonial law and order. It is not surprising then that the colonial rulers were confident of their hegemony.

In the decades between the 1870s and the 1920s many Europeans perceived Africans as ‘savages’. Colonial wars were commonly described as ‘savage wars’ while those fought between ‘modern’ powers were termed ‘civilized wars’, meaning that certain rules existed on conflict and the treatment of captives. Certainly, conflicts between African armies could involve captives being killed, mutilated or enslaved. However, colonial warfare conducted with European-led African armies also involved savage means and methods; modern firearms, including dum-dum bullets, and artillery wreaked havoc on poorly armed opponents, wounded enemies were killed on battlefields, and prisoners occasionally sold into slavery. Before 1914 African resistance and revolts had been suppressed with considerable violence, particularly by the Germans in the campaign against the Herero of South West Africa 1904–6, and in crushing the Maji-Maji rebellion of 1905–7 in German East Africa. The subjugation of Africans across the Continent was barely completed by the time the First World War broke out, and continued resistance to the imposition of colonial rule and revolts during the war years were suppressed with great severity by both military and civil authorities.

The fighting and destructive effects of the First World War, especially in East Africa, meant that many soldiers returned home bearing physical and mental scars; their long absence clearly led to social alienation, marital breakdown, adultery and domestic violence, subjects which, long after the event, are difficult for historians to investigate and compute. The military dead were mourned in annual corporate rituals of memory, mainly organized by the colonial powers. The possible one exception to this was in South Africa where African initiated mourning remembered the death of 607 men of the SANLC, lost when the troopship ‘Mendi’ carrying them was sunk in the English Channel in November 1917. ‘Mendi Day’ remained important for many black urban dwellers in South Africa during the interwar years. ²⁰

The harsh fist of racial colonialism was exacerbated by the war of 1914–18. This was most pronounced in the prolonged campaign in East Africa where heavy military demands for hundreds of thousands of carriers were imposed on populations steadily being weakened by the accompanying silent violence of drought, famine and disease. Soldiers and carriers actually died of starvation due to negligence, a crisis only belatedly acknowledged as a ‘scandal’ by British officials in the 1930s. The crisis was heightened with the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, the virus carried along the conduits of war by demobilizing soldiers and carriers; in certain areas of East Africa total war-related death rates exceeded 10 per cent of the population.

In spite of these disasters there was relatively little serious postwar colonial unrest. As Reid has recently written:

the experience of war left an indelible impression on societies and communities across the continent. Those Africans who had been privy to the sight of Europeans killing one another would not easily forget it, nor would those who had experienced the hardship wrought by the conflict; they had been witness not only to the brutal ambiguity of colonial rule, but also to the weakness and deeply flawed ‘humanity' of European civilization. ²¹

He goes on to say that the experience of war gave rise to ‘quasi-political associations and organisations among Africans’ which he calls ‘protest identities’, but there is little evidence to suggest, as he does, that military veterans were involved in any way in such activities. Rarely was this so in British colonial Africa. A topic little researched, and now difficult to pursue, is the impact of returning war veterans in their home villages. To what extent did these men, their lives and mental maps reshaped by the experience of war, act as critical grit in challenging indigenous rulers and the patterns of rural order?

And a further question is on popular reactions to the war across the sub-Saharan continent. A sense of ‘nationalism’, of a future national identity within the artificially drawn colonies of British Africa, if it existed at all, had few supporters. Modern educated elites might argue for ‘self-determination’ but they were imperial integrationists who demanded rights as British subjects. Formally educated elites and their small ‘patriot’ parties had a narrow political vision. Their parties were little more than urban talking shops; they knew of Wilsonian rhetoric and Bolshevik revolution, applauding the former as a possible path to racial equity, but rejecting the latter for its extremism, atheism and violence. Trade unions were also small and weak, and, as with the ‘patriot’ parties, had very few members who were war veterans. The exception was in South Africa where the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union was formed in 1919 and grew to number a notional 100,000 members by the mid 1920s. However, with a fractious leadership, a fragile organization and few funds, the ICU was inherently weak and unlikely to succeed. Political power lay with a firmly entrenched white regime set on maintaining and extending racial segregation, a policy and practice overwhelmingly endorsed by a watchful and well-organized white working class. African populist hostility was directed against white settlers (which included ex-servicemen) who alienated further land in Kenya, and also at ‘alien’ minorities, especially Levantine traders in West Africa and Indian merchants in South Africa, who were seen as profiteers and exploiters. One form of pre-colonial cultural expression that drew additionally on wartime experiences was the Beni dance societies formed by ex-servicemen in East Africa which, as a response to the crisis of war, imitated, mocked and parodied European colonial military activities. ²² Observed with care by the white rulers, these postwar African politics and cultural activities posed little real threat to the political order. A more potent albeit distant threat came from the United States of America in the form of the uniformed black legions of Garvey’s pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). However, the pretensions and ambitions of the UNIA to penetrate Africa were thwarted at nearly every turn by the colonial authorities, and found limited support from Africans who, if they had political agendas, were rarely those articulated by alien African Americans.

Ironically the most serious challenge to the existing order in postwar sub-Saharan Africa came from white South African workers on the Rand. ²³ During the pre-war period white working class militancy and hostility to the growing use of cheaper black labour had succeeded in securing legislation to exclude Africans from many skilled and semi-skilled jobs. The economic and social changes of the war years led mine owners in particular to ignore the job colour bar. Restrictions were relaxed and black proletarianization and unionization had increased since 1915 with black labour competing for jobs once reserved for whites. In early 1922, during a period of economic depression, white coal and gold miners, with the support of many women, went on strike against the mine owners. Under the slogan ‘Workers of the world unite and fight for a White South Africa’, white workers were strongly influenced by the example of recent European socialist revolutions. White resistance also drew on wartime military experience, with workers organized in military ‘commandos’ and chains of command. During the rising a small minority of whites were involved in racial killings. The Rand rebellion posed a serious threat to the future of the South African state, and the government crushed the rising with considerable military force. ²⁴

The First World War, despite its uneven destructiveness in parts of British Africa, did not shake the foundations of colonial power. Such a blow, it was argued by scholars writing from the 1950s onwards, came after the Second World War when several hundred thousand African soldiers returned from overseas service charged with new ideas and experiences and ready to challenge colonial rule. However, closer investigation has not shown this to be the case. Although there was ‘panic’ among some white officials in London and the colonies, demobilization from 1944–7 was carefully planned and executed to avoid any trouble from veterans. Most ex-servicemen were returned to their homes, the vast majority to the rural areas from where they had been recruited. Ex-servicemen’s organizations had ‘political’ aims, but these reflected members’ grievances over employment, pensions, and conditions of service. ²⁵ It was the Gold Coast administration’s mangled attempt to ban an ex-servicemen’s demonstration in Accra in February 1948 that gave opportunity and oxygen to a new type of populist politics in the colony which altered West African history.

Unlike the story of British Africa’s participation in the First World War, which took place predominantly in Africa, a significant part of the story of French Africa’s involvement in the war was set in Europe. Because of dire manpower needs, but also because of distinctive aspects of French republican colonial policy, France proved more willing than other combatant nations to deploy colonial subjects in Europe as soldiers to fight against white European enemies. France deployed some 500,000 colonial subjects as soldiers (known as troupes indigènes) in Europe during the war. Of these, 450,000 were Africans: from the French North African possessions of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco; from the vast territory of French West Africa; and from Madagascar. ²⁶ Another roughly 135,000 Africans from these areas came to France as laborers between 1914 and 1918. ²⁷ This recruitment, along with the financial and material demands of the metropole, caused significant disruption and placed unprecedented strains on the French colonial edifice in Africa. Nonetheless, as in British Africa, the political and military structures of colonial control ultimately proved able to contain and withstand these stresses, and neither the war itself nor the demobilization of its veterans were as destabilizing as these events were in many places in Europe.

Bruno Cabanes has masterfully and seemingly thoroughly chronicled demobilization in France after 1918 – military, political, and above all cultural – in his La victoire endeuillée: la sortie de guerre des soldats francais, 1918–1920. ²⁸ Yet one striking omission in his account is a discussion of imperial demobilization, particularly the demobilization of more than a half-million colonial subjects who served in the French army during the war. These too were soldats français, but they make an appearance only during a discussion of the infamous Rhineland occupation after the war, and we learn nothing of their return to their homes in the colonies. One can observe a similar lacuna in Antoine Prost’s justly famous investigation of the ‘limits of brutalization’ in helping us understand the experience of war in France. George Mosse’s famous invocation of ‘brutalization’ among men scarred by war to help explain the postwar violence and radical politics that disturbed so much of the European landscape after 1918 may help us understand events in nations like Germany, but Prost’s extensive investigations into the wartime experiences and postwar activities of French veterans do not show industrialized slaughter to have effected a ‘profound transformation of personalities'. ²⁹ But can we say the same for colonial subjects in uniform, who made a longer spatial and cultural journey to the Western Front than their native French comrades? Would it not stand to reason that their demobilization might be more difficult, and fraught with peril as colonial authorities sought to reinsert them into a repressive political order despite their status as battle-hardened defenders of the patrie? Would not their new experiences and the widened horizons of life in the army and in the metropole render them more likely to challenge in new ways, perhaps even with force, the racist colonial order? In other words, should we not expect to find heightened demands for equality, anti-colonial rhetoric, and even violence in Africa after the disruptions and social and economic strains of a conflict that was not only the world’s first industrialized war but its first global war as well?

Perhaps surprisingly, demobilization in French Africa was a ‘success’, at least compared to the violence that attended the process in some places in Europe. This was in part because France emerged from the war victorious, and so avoided violence in the metropole as well. The war was deeply traumatic for French society – physically so for more than any of the major belligerent powers since France suffered proportionately more casualties and vastly more physical destruction of its territory. Nonetheless, even their Pyrrhic victory reassured enough people in France that they did not turn to political radicalism and violence to work through their grief, pain, and frustration. Rather than a ‘culture of defeat’, then, France enjoyed the luxury of a sort of culture of victory, even if, again, that victory cost the nation dearly. ³⁰ The exit of the French from the war may have been marked by an almost overwhelming mourning, in some ways, and even a ‘refusal to mourn’ in others, but one does not find the same kind of brutalization Mosse proposed as characteristic of postwar societies in other belligerents. ³¹

But in Africa, the absence of significant postwar violence attributable to a wartime process of ‘brutalization’ also resulted from factors specific to the colonial context. It certainly was not because the war was not costly to Africans as well. Although estimating losses during the First World War in general is no easy task, and losses among colonial populations are even more difficult to quantify with precision, it is likely that at least 70,000 Africans soldiers died in combat. Counting those who died of disease or illness would bring this total nearer six figures. The number of wounded is probably impossible to calculate with any accuracy, but in general during this war the number of wounded stood at between two and four times the number killed. ³² Thus, it is probable that at least half of the soldiers from Africa who came to fight in Europe suffered some sort of physical damage or death. This may not be a very large number in demographic terms, since these territories contained many millions of inhabitants, and the mobilization and human cost pales in comparison to the effects of the war on many European societies (although it was, after all, primarily their war). Yet the effects on populations particularly hard hit could be dramatic, and overall social dislocation caused by the demands and costs of war was in some areas significant. ³³ In the end, many of the men lucky enough to return home, and their families, must have wondered, like Pyrrhus at Asculum, whether the victory of 1918 had been worth it.

Official policy, both military and colonial, sought to pre-empt or soothe such concerns. During recruitment drives in the colonies, the French state attempted to enhance the attractiveness of service in the army by offering enticements such as bonuses, higher pay, family allowances, increased educational and vocational training opportunities, preferential treatment in official employment, and other material benefits. ³⁴ Even conscripted soldiers often received an enlistment bonus, a way of buying compliance from local populations, but also a tacit recognition that even though these men were shouldering one of the most sacred responsibilities of republican citizenship – defence of the nation in arms – they would remain subjects with limited rights. ³⁵ The French state and colonial administration did not always live up fully to their promises to soldiers and their families, and some veterans returned home to find more disappointment than opportunity for material and social advancement, but some veterans did benefit from official solicitude, preferential treatment, and enhanced status.

The very terms under which colonial subjects served also helped to ease the potential social and political disruption of demobilization. In most cases, the terms of service for African colonial subjects incorporated into the French army either as conscripts or volunteers stipulated they would remain under the colours for ‘the duration plus six months'. This allowed French authorities more time to manage carefully the demobilization of these troupes indigènes, as well as to demobilize native French soldiers more quickly. No doubt all soldiers who served to the end of the war were eager to go home, but citizens in uniform, and their families, were far more likely to make political trouble if authorities delayed their departure from the army. In short, their political rights and status as voters gave them leverage over the speed and timing of their demobilization that colonial subjects simply did not have. So demobilization came more speedily for native Frenchmen, which explains in part the heavy reliance of the French army on troupes indigènes to occupy the Rhineland after the Armistice.

This occupation turned out to be the most famous and controversial of French wartime military-colonial policies. ³⁶ Many at the time and since have seen this use of non-whites to occupy the defeated enemy’s territory as a deliberate attempt to humiliate the Germans by insulting their racial pride. Other factors, however, provoked French authorities to take this step. For one, sending troupes indigènes was a way to avoid maintaining too many native French soldiers in the army for occupation duty. But perhaps even more importantly, Clemenceau and other officials, in collaboration with Blaise Diagne, the black African who represented the Four Communes of Senegal in the French parliament and who by the end of the war also served as Commissaire général des troupes coloniales, hatched the policy as a way to serve the interests of colonial politics. Occupying the Rhineland would be a just reward for Africans’ service during the war, and would also make clear to these colonial subjects that France was still a great, and now triumphant, power. As one official put it, it was

of major interest, from the point of view of our indigenous policy, to give to the Senegalese a concrete idea of French Victory and Power. This result will be achieved only if they are stationed in German territory. It is there, on the spot, that the tirailleurs sénégalais, in their simplistic mentality, will acquire the intimate conviction that France has conquered the enormous military power of Germany. They will take this sentiment back to the various regions of our West Africa; the turbulent populations impressed by the power of France will no longer be tempted to cause disturbances … .  ³⁷

So a delayed demobilization and continued service in Europe, along with the exhaustion of populations in Africa that had endured four years of wartime economic and manpower exactions, may help explain the postwar quiescence of French Africa. Occupation duty may have limited or at least delayed opportunities for demobilized veterans to introduce disruptions into their home communities. On the other hand, it would be difficult to determine if the Rhineland occupation functioned as officials hoped, solidifying a sense of French superiority and power among the colonized. The decision to deploy colonial subjects as soldiers in Europe was a fraught one for many officials, particularly colonial administrators worried about undermining white prestige and imperial control. These fears were effective in preventing Great Britain from deploying African soldiers in Europe, and in limiting the use of Indian soldiers on the Western Front to the first year of the war. ³⁸ But, ultimately, manpower needs and the confidence of many French officials in the genius of the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ in the colonies justified taking the risk. Before and during the First World War, the view prevailed that colonial subjects owed a debt of gratitude, a ‘blood tax’, for the benefits of enlightened French rule; that France’s republican ideals of egalitarianism and universalism rendered the nation truly colour-blind; and thus that colonial subjects could serve willingly and enthusiastically alongside their white French compatriots to defend their common patrie. This confidence in the stability of French colonial control was inseparable from, indeed stemmed from, faith in the power of assimilation. In the case of West Africa, as Alice Conklin has noted, there was general agreement among the colonial administration, metropolitan officials and the French public that, ‘France’s African subjects would welcome the chance to serve the country that was bringing civilization into their midst’. ³⁹

The war itself would shake confidence in the ideal of assimilation, as it shook French confidence in so many other areas of national life, and the post-war period witnessed a move toward a more conservative vision of the colonial relationship known as association. ⁴⁰ But assimilation, as the orthodox republican justification for empire, never entirely disappeared as a theoretical goal of French colonialism. Colonial subjects in French uniform provided, for some, reassuring evidence that the policy could bear fruit, even as it obscured the very real racism that ordered both the colonial project in general and the place of troupes indigènes in the army and nation more specifically.

In the short term, the confidence of some in France in the power of the assimilationist ideal seemed justified by the absence of significant challenges to colonial rule from veterans or from movements with clear connections to the disruptions of the war years. Resistance in French Africa did flare up in some places during the war, and sometimes this was linked to the wartime demands of the colonial administration. Yet in many cases the real grievances at the root of rebellion predated 1914. In West Africa, ‘revolt did not necessarily occur where recruitment had been most intense or abusive’, but often broke out in places where pre-war policies had bred particular resentment. ⁴¹ Nonetheless, as Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer have shown, resistance to conscription that erupted in the Volta-Bani region eventually became quite significant indeed, involving nearly a million Africans and necessitating an extensive and brutal French repression to restore colonial control. Yet these authors also show how these events left very little imprint on European consciousness at the time or since, so it is not surprising that French observers could remain complacent about the effects of wartime recruitment in Africa. ⁴² Other wartime revolts did occur across French colonies in Africa, but seem to have made even less of an impression on French officials. ⁴³

This complacency could endure into the years after the war in the absence of significant unrest tied directly to the war or the demobilization of African soldiers. Although anti-colonial violence did erupt in the French empire after 1918, the most serious manifestations occurred well after paramilitary violence linked to demobilization in Europe died down in 1923, and neither the grievances nor the skills of ex-soldiers figured especially prominently in these colonial revolts (with the exception of the Yen Bay mutiny in Indochina, 1930–1, but here soldiers were led by an anti-colonial nationalist party formed well after 1918 by civilian journalists, teachers, and clerks). ⁴⁴ In fact, in many cases, the French army deployed troupes indigènes, often from outside the areas in revolt, to reinstate and reinforce colonial rule.

Yet are we to take the relative quiescence of indigenous veterans in the colonies as proof of French claims about indigènes’ gratitude and the power of French republican ideals and assimilation? Did colour-blindness, the promises of universalism, and the rhetoric of egalitarianism render ex-tirailleurs more satisfied and docile than the often disaffected and militarized, perhaps brutalized, veterans who filled the ranks of the paramilitary organizations that roiled the political landscape of Europe with violence and instability from 1917–23?

Evidence suggests that African veterans defied the expectation that they would constitute a perhaps militant, militarized, and mobilized constituency for national independence movements after the war. In interviews with historian Joe Lunn well after the Second World War, West African veterans present themselves as returning home with a heightened consciousness of the inequities of colonial rule, but it is not clear these men would have presented their experiences in the same light during the immediate postwar years. What Lunn’s and others’ work shows for certain is that many veterans did benefit from enhanced prestige in their communities, often acting as cultural intermediaries in dealings with the French administration. Through veterans’ associations, these men could influence postwar politics in important ways. ⁴⁵ In Guinea, returning veterans engaged in labour militancy, agitation for their rights as soldiers, and even (as happened elsewhere in French Africa) caused some disruption to the traditional social order by standing as rivals to traditional sources power such as village notables and chiefs. ⁴⁶ Such fears of challenges to the traditional social hierarchies and the racial prestige upon which colonial rule rested loomed large for French officials, but in Guinea and elsewhere veterans might have been somewhat ‘alienated from the colonial situation’, yet they still did not organize into particularly effective or disruptive groupings. ⁴⁷

Gregory Mann has shown, in his study of ex-tirailleurs in Mali, that veterans could in fact behave in ways that could be destabilizing at both the local and the broader colonial administrative levels. Men demobilized quickly with too little provision wandered through the countryside on their way home, sometimes stealing to eat, sometimes even forming gangs to extort supplies and services from villages along the way. Some veterans were angry and violent with friends, relations, strangers, and even colonial officials. Their newfound status and demands sometimes upset traditional and colonial lines of authority and disrupted local economies. Some veterans continued to wear their threadbare uniforms for years to assert their authority. Some even organized to press their political demands, when the full promise of their service was not realized (in the form of preferential treatment, employment, pensions, and even citizenship). Yet they often framed their demands to colonial authorities in a language of reciprocity that did not always or necessarily call into question the colonial order. Veterans could certainly be ‘unruly clients’ of the French state, but could also be rather conservative, since they themselves had invested so much in that order, and thereby hoped to gain from it. ⁴⁸ In the end, though their presence and demands were disruptive, they did not organize to present a violent challenge to the postwar political order. The war had not ‘brutalized' them and propelled them to make maximal demands for change, nor certainly to intervene violently in politics.

Yet it is too much to say that the French colonies were relatively free of paramilitary violence by demobilized troupes indigènes because they had been treated so well and equitably when in uniform, and because they expected such treatment to continue into the postwar period. In fact, their experiences in uniform during the war made glaringly obvious the importance of racial and colonial hierarchies in this supposedly colour-blind society. Republican rhetoric and practice opened up some spaces for relatively egalitarian and meritocratic treatment of colonial subjects in the French army and French society. French soldiers of colour served in combat, even sometimes in integrated units, unlike African Americans, for example. French tirailleurs could obtain an officer’s commission, unlike Indians serving the British. Some men from the colonies found, to their astonishment, that French women, and even their families, welcomed them into the intimate spaces of their homes, and even into intimacy. ⁴⁹ Yet these same men found that racial stereotypes and discrimination marked the use of troupes indigènes from recruitment to demobilization, and everything in between.

When colonial subjects took off their uniforms and returned to their homes, they may indeed have encountered metropolitan attitudes that were relatively liberal in comparison to those that prevailed in the empire. However, they also encountered the limits that racism placed upon republican promises of equality and fraternity. They were told that they were worthy of joining the fraternity of arms defending the patrie, but only according to aptitudes inherent in their racial identity. They were told, in best Revolutionary and Napoleonic tradition, that they could rise as far as their talents would take them, even to an officer’s commission, but their talents were limited by their race and so they could only rise so far. They were told they were worthy of wearing a French uniform and interacting with other French people, but military policy deliberately denied them adequate language instruction, since the French language was allegedly too sophisticated for racial inferiors. They were trusted to fight France’s enemies, unless of course they themselves were Muslim and the enemy was Muslim Turkey. They were allowed to defend the homes of native French men and women, but not officially encouraged to enter into the intimate spaces of those homes, particularly if white women occupied these spaces. They were asked to perform the ultimate duties of citizenship – to defend the nation and perhaps die doing so – but not allowed to enjoy the rights and privileges of real citizenship. ⁵⁰ These men could not help but take note of these inequalities, and many must have shared only in the most limited way the satisfaction of victory that often rendered metropolitan French veterans poor candidates for recruitment to the cause of paramilitary violence.

So if troupes indigènes did not provide a constituency for the organization of anti-colonial paramilitary violence, as some contemporary observers might have expected and feared, it was not because these men were satisfied in the happy enjoyment of increasing rights and acceptance under a progressive and humanitarian French republican colonialism. First of all, there were practical obstacles to paramilitary mobilization. Once demobilized and thrust back into colonial societies, these men resumed their places in a racist and rigid social and political hierarchy, where the mechanisms of social and political control were more or less well-developed and deployed by vigilant and suspicious colonial governments assiduous in the use of racial and legal regimes to uphold European control. ⁵¹ It is also important to remember that rebellions, though they did occur, invariably met a ruthless response. The French army and colonial authorities deployed overwhelming force against the four major rebellions of the interwar period, making use of the latest military technology, such as air power, gas and tanks, as well as superior numbers, firepower, communications and logistics. Even a thoroughly humiliated and much weaker France made clear at least its short-term advantages in these respects right after the Second World War, killing tens of thousands putting down uprisings in eastern Algeria (Sétif and Guelma, in 1945) and Madagascar (the MDRM uprising, in 1947, which cost as many as 100,000 lives). In this context, it is not surprising that veterans of the First World War in the colonies failed to translate their war experience into anti-colonial paramilitary activity.

But it is also true that many of the conditions in Europe conducive to paramilitary violence did not, in general, prevail in the French colonies. First of all, though the aftermath of the war saw the weakening or demise of several empires (the German, Austro–Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian), the French empire seemed to emerge stronger: it was larger and more populous than ever, and the League of Nations had mandated to France two new territories, in Syria and Lebanon. This was, in many ways, a ‘climax’ of French imperialism, and the postwar years did see a corresponding apogee of displays of imperial confidence. ⁵² Nonetheless, such terms imply a falling off after such a high point, and Martin Thomas has shown how deeply unstable the French colonial empire was between the wars, and how it slid irrevocably into decline during precisely this period. ⁵³ Still, the immediate postwar years in French Africa did not see the kind of vacuum of state authority that characterized areas of Europe where paramilitary violence flourished.

Second, the ending of the war for France and its empire was clearer than in these more unstable regions of Europe. When the Armistice took effect in 1918, colonial subjects in uniform did, it is true, remain under arms to occupy the Rhineland and allow for the quicker demobilization of native French soldiers. However, these troupes indigènes remained in the army, with little opportunity to engage in paramilitary activity or political resistance outside of it. Once their occupation duties were over, they joined other already-demobilized troupes indigènes and 200,000 colonial workers who were shipped back to the colonies as quickly as possible. ⁵⁴ As a victor in the war, moreover, the French state did not need to make use of paramilitary formations, colonial or otherwise, to prop up government authority after it (with the minor exception of hiring veterans to protect public order during the general strike of May 1920 – see below).

Third, although some colonial workers and troupes indigènes did encounter new ideas in the form of Europe’s competing political, social, and economic ideologies (socialism, syndicalism and communism among them), these had greater effect in the colonies later in the interwar period. Wilson’s call for national self-determination famously inspired Ho Chi Minh to inquire about the concept’s applicability to colonial possessions outside Europe, but veteran tirailleurs seem to have been eager to return to their local communities and begin the difficult job of reintegrating (even if many hoped to take advantage of veterans’ enhanced status). In Africa, prominent political figures like Blaise Diagne were far more concerned to exploit the rhetoric and ideals of French universalism and egalitarianism to carve out an enhanced role for people of colour within the French empire than they were to embrace Wilson’s or Lenin’s ideals as a lever to pry the colonies loose from France’s grip. ⁵⁵ Even in relatively restive North Africa, Messali Hadj’s nationalist organization formed only later in the 1920s and was not significantly linked to the interests or activities of colonial veterans. ⁵⁶ Bolshevism, and the fear of Bolshevism, both of which did so much to propel violence and instability in Europe, did not disturb the political and social landscape of French Africa in the immediate aftermath of the war.

In short, colonial subjects in Africa returning from the war behaved in some ways like their metropolitan colleagues. A few French veterans of the Great War did form paramilitary groups known as Unions Civiques to break a general strike called by the CGT in May 1920, while during the same time the French government gave the Union Nationale des Combattants 100,000 francs to cover its members’ expenses while they helped keep public order. ⁵⁷ Nonetheless, as Antoine Prost has shown, French veterans and the groups they formed were primarily pacifist in political orientation, and far more concerned about pensions and acknowledgement of their sacrifices than in either protecting or overturning a particular political order. ⁵⁸ A major exception to this trend, Great War veteran Georges Valois’ fascist Faisceau movement, originated only in 1925 and had fizzled out by 1928. ⁵⁹ In the colonies, the Fascist Croix de Feu sought to attract Muslim anciens combattants to its ranks in Algeria in the 1930s, but without great success. ⁶⁰

In 1923, French Minister of the Colonies Albert Sarraut declared that the experience of the First World War had shown that empire ‘paid’. ⁶¹ France had collected on the supposed debt that prompted Minister of War Adolphe Messimy to declare before the war, ‘Africa has cost us heaps of gold, thousands of soldiers, and streams of blood. We do not dream of demanding the gold from her. But the men and the blood, she must repay them with interest’. ⁶² If Great Britain proved not so eager to rely on its empire to wage war within Europe, it still turned to Africa to aid the war effort in important ways, and British officials might also conclude that the lesson they could most clearly draw from the war was that empire had, indeed, ‘paid’. As Hew Strachan has observed, ‘the European powers advanced rather than retarded the cause of colonialism between 1914 and 1918’. ⁶³ British and French colonial administrations did not promote, and Africans did not manifest the kind of ‘empire nationalism’ that Stephen Garton argues helped smooth reintegration of veterans into Australian society. The racial divide was critical here, but officials saw no real need to placate or co-opt African cooperation and submission to the colonial order. They had sometimes, in order to enhance recruitment in the colonies, made promises to veterans, and in some cases even kept some of these promises, but the pressure to extend benefits to veterans was never as central to political life as Garton shows it was in Australia and Jennifer Keen shows it was in the United States of America (or, indeed, as central as this pressure was in the French and British metropoles). ⁶⁴ Colonial states desired the cooperation of the colonized, and sometimes acquired this cooperation by making use of veterans to help with administration at the local level. But European administrators could obtain this cooperation and aid much more cheaply in a colonial context where veterans and other colonial subjects lacked the leverage, the political weight of organized constituents in the metropole.

Thus, it is not all that surprising that demobilization was not as disruptive in much of Africa as it was in some parts of Europe and beyond. French and British colonial officials may have in some cases feared the operation of three of the factors that led to violence in the demobilization process elsewhere – pre-existing class and ethnic conflicts, the threat of Bolshevik revolution, and difficulties with reintegrating veterans into civilian life – but the fourth critical factor – the strength of the (colonial) state – never came into serious, sustained question. ⁶⁵ Neither the ‘war cultures’ that developed in Africa and among Africans, nor the experience of wartime violence exercised the same kind of traumatic or politically mobilizing influence one can see elsewhere.

So indigenous veterans in the colonies did not provide fertile ground for the recruitment of paramilitary forces as happed in some areas of Europe, nor did veterans mount a serious challenge to the colonial order. This demonstrates both the limited applicability of Mosse’s concept of brutalization to the African context, and more broadly the importance of keeping in view the specificities of the colonial environment, even as we recognize the integration of imperial histories with those of the metropole, and the integration of empires into the global conflicts of the twentieth century. We must also keep in mind the specificities of the different empires. The British and French empires were similar in that they saw relatively little trouble related to demobilization, despite the war’s importance for many Africans. But the nature of the experience was different in the two empires, not least because French Africans were far more likely to add the novelty of travel to the metropole to the novelty of the experience of war. French colonial troops who served in Europe were exposed to sights, ideas and influences not experienced by the vast majority of African soldiers who fought in campaigns in Africa.

It is here that we may discover some links to the decolonization that followed the Second World War in the French empire, links we do not see to the same degree in the British empire. The real effects of the First World War on the French colonial edifice probably had more to do with both native French people and indigènes of the colonies being made more aware than ever of the racism at the heart of empire and the gulf that separated colonizers and colonized. Time in the French army in France itself made this more glaring than ever, though no colonial subject needed a trip to the metropole to understand the importance of racism in the colonial order of things. Still, experiences in Europe would have rendered these realities more glaring. As Lépold Sédar Senghor, poet and first president of an independent Senegal, said of his and other Africans’ political and cultural awakening in the interwar years, they realized that,

Assimilation was a failure; we could assimilate mathematics or the French language, but we could never strip off our black skins or root out black souls. And so we set out on a fervent quest for the ‘holy grail’: our collective soul. And we came upon it … .  ⁶⁶

Nonetheless, the Second World War proved far more decisive in bringing on serious moves toward decolonization by African peoples. And even then, the weakness of the French and British states after 1945, combined with events in the colonies – such as the massacres of thousands of protesters on 8 May 1945 in Sétif and Guelma in Algeria, or the massacre of West African soldiers at the Camp de Thiaroye in December 1944 – probably had more to do with the accelerating pace of anti-colonial political activity than Africans’ military service in that second conflict.

Ultimately, it is difficult to assess the degree to which African soldiers employed in tropical campaigns identified with the colony in whose army they fought. If they came from beyond its vaguely perceived borders, as many wartime recruits did, then their first allegiance was probably to an immediate local political authority and certainly not to a distant colonial regime. Even less likely is it that Africans who travelled to Europe felt any more part of the foreign nation for which they fought than they had before donning its uniform and fighting under its flag. It is difficult to imagine that the average non-literate African soldier from a rural area on his return home was imbued either with a strong sense of colonial identity, or a firm notion that he was among the ‘victors’ in a great global war. Across sub-Saharan Africa, wartime enlistment involved a degree of coercion involving the colonial state pressuring indigenous rulers. Many men caught up in the war were reluctant soldiers, a few perhaps mercenaries, whose desire was to survive the war and to return home with something to show for their pains and enforced absence. Such men were hardly the carriers of passions and ideas that resonated in the hearts of fellow soldiers in the Great War who came from Reutlingen, Tonbridge or Evreux.