Summary

The First World War was likely the most destructive war in African history prior to the comparable catastrophe of 1935 to 1945. It was also not the African peoples’ war to fight. Instead, it was a by-product of the recent subjugation and subdivision of the continent by a handful of West and Central European industrial powers, their internal nationalist rivalries, and their exploitation of their African colonial subjects for imperial ends, and, in the case of France, for national defense.

The war’s impact on West and Central Africans may be assessed from two different vantage points. On the continent, French and British colonial armies, comprised largely of African troops accompanied by supporting carriers (noncombatant laborers), invaded the German colonies of Togoland (Togo) and Kamerun (Cameroon), before the British West Africans were redeployed in 1916 to fight and labor during the Allied conquest German East Africa (Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda). Meanwhile, the French also introduced West African combat troops into Europe on a massive scale. This uniquely French policy, little more than a controversial contingency plan until heavy losses prompted its implementation in 1915, provoked widespread resistance and rebellion in West Africa. Thereafter, deployed as “shock troops” on the Western Front and in the Balkans, African combatants interpreted their wartime experience in various ways. A few believed it to be personally transformative and in retrospect, a harbinger of the political quest for equality with Europeans to come; most, who received little in recompense for their sacrifice and suffering, returned to their homelands and resumed their former lives much as before.

Though varied and often incomplete, casualty assessments for soldiers, carriers, and civilians during the conflict suggest grievous losses by West and Central Africans between 1914 and 1918. Indeed, while very modest changes in postwar colonial society occurred because of Africans’ participation in the war, they were incommensurate with the scale of violence endured. Moreover, the territorial changes occurring in Africa because of the conflict would likely have taken place even if the destructive campaigns on the continent and abroad had never been waged. Largely forgotten by European authorities immediately after the conflict, the memory of the veterans’ wartime ordeal and contribution to the nation nevertheless endures and is cited, especially by African immigrants, as justification for their civic inclusion in European societies, particularly in France. Unfortunately, so too do the centuries-old racist stereotypes about Africans’ being invariably subordinate to Europeans persist in contemporary societies, denying their acceptance.