Head-line source"The Christian Science Monitor"


By November 1944, with newspapers reporting that the first Allied units were shoving their way into Germany, thousands of these African troops were suddenly returned home. The ostensible reason was that the French high command had concerns about the soldiers' ability to operate in cold weather. Some military historians have theorized in a recent article that France, at the last stages of its European war, wanted to "whiten" its army to show that the final blows had been delivered by regular French troops. Other historians speculate that a certain uneasiness had seized the free French military command because of reports of fraternizing between black American G.I.s and African troops with the Africans then showing even more pronounced sentiments about equality and independence. That coupled with the sight of a battered, ruined France could harm African dependence and regard for the "mother country."

Some 400,000 African troops served in the French army during World War II. A number of them became politically active after the war. Many paid a heavy price for their post-war activism. In 1958, when President Sekou Toure of Guinea chose immediate independence and spurned De Gaulle's offer of autonomy as a separate "republic" within the French "community," De Gaulle severed the Guinean veterans already meager pensions. All the other countries of French West and Equatorial Africa took that as an object lesson and voted to stay within the French community.

In early August 1994, with the 50th anniversary of the war's end looming, the French government decided to avoid negative publicity about the years of complaints by their African veterans over the small size of their pension. The government raised the pension by 20 percent for those without service connected injuries and 30 percent for those who had been injured in the line of duty.

FELIX EBOUE' AND CHARLIE MAIGUMERI

Felix Eboue' was the most influential black man of the Second World War. Born in 1884 in French Guiana, he was educated in France and entered the French colonial service. He was soon posted to French Equatorial Africa as an administrator. Unlike many of his colleagues, he immersed himself in African culture and customs, mastered the local languages, travelled extensively throughout the territory, and proved to be a hard working, adroit politician and governmental functionary.

In 1930, he was appointed chief secretary in Martinique, a large island in the French West Indies. After six years, Eboue' was promoted and made governor of Guadeloupe, a collection of islands between the British Leewards and Windward Islands in the eastern Caribbean. His rise in the colonial service was the cause of envy from many of his white colleagues. Some actively worked to undermine his tour of duty in Guadeloupe despite the fact that the blacks of the islands were generally pleased with his performance. He was sent back to Africa.

It was as Governor of Chad that Eboue' would make his mark on the history of the war. His territory lay strategically in the heart of north central Africa and was nearly 500,000 square miles in size. On the north it bordered Libya; on the east by the Sudan; on the south by what is now the central African Republic and on the west by the Cameroons, Niger, and Nigeria. He toured the vast land, supervised the construction of roads and hospitals, and improved agricultural methods. As he had done on his earlier tour in Africa, he visited local leaders, respected indigenous traditions, if they did not conflict with French colonial policy, and increased the number of local blacks in the colonial service.

In 1940, with a defeated France governed by a group of collaborationists headed by Petain and Leval and headquartered in the town of Vichy, Eboue' was faced with the choice of joining with them or joining with the free French forces who had combined with the Allied nations to fight the Nazis. Eboue' chose the latter and committed the resources at his command to De Gaulle, and he was the first major colonial official to do so. De Gualle's government in exile was deeply grateful. At a critical hour, Eboue' had made an historic choice and his logic and oratory helped push the other French possessions in Africa over to the Allies.

In 1941, De Gaulle appointed Eboue' Governor - General of French Equatorial Africa. The wartime significance of Eboue's actions was explained by General Sice of France:

If Eboue' had followed the example of Petain, Laval, and Weygand, disaster would have followed. Because he did not do so, British and American planes were landed and assembled in Nigeria, flown eastward through Fort Lamy to Khartoum in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, thence northward to the Middle East. Had there been a day's delay, nothing could have stopped hitler.

Eboue' helped bring the substantial manpower and materiels of France's African possessions -- its harbors, fields, muscle, and manpower -- to the Allies. His role in saving Africa, his reforms in colonial policy, and thoroughly pro-French assimilationism made him a hero of those times. He died in 1944.

Charley Maigumeri never met Felix Eboue', Maigumeri, a Fulani, born in Nigeria, was an ordinary soldier like the hundreds of thousands of other Africans who served in the British army in World War II. Although his long military career was hardly typical. He had always wanted to be a soldier. At the age of 16 he had enlisted in the German army during the First World War. For bravery in battle, he was awarded the Iron Cross, a German military decoration, and promoted to sergeant. Captured by the British, he enlisted in the 5th Battalion, Nigerian Regiment, a unit his father had served in for 26 years.

In his forties when World War II erupted, Maigumeri was among the oldest men in his regiment. His unit fought Italians in Somalia and Ethiopia. With his regiment assigned to the 81st West Africa Division, he joined thousands of men from Nigeria and Ghana whom the British shipped to Burma to fight the Japanese. Waging a tough campaign against dogged Japanese resistance in Burma, the British 14th Army used two African divisions and 700,000 Indian troops. These units fought with distinction in the hard won engagements in the Naga Hills.

Over 60,000 men from the Gold Coast (Ghana) served in the British army during the war. After several more medals and promotions, the end of the war found him back in Nigeria. Promoted to captain, Maigumeri began training a new generation of African soldiers.

In May 1942, units of the Kings African Rifles joined white South African soldiers to help bring the curtain down on the Battle of Madagascar. As Japanese forces had begun to approach Africa from the east, the Allies felt that the huge island 230 miles off its eastern coast had to be secured. The Texas-sized island's deepwater ports and its nearness to India and the Persian Gulf made it an attractive Axis objective. Held by pro-Nazi French, the island's military forces were made up of Malagasy conscripts and Senegalese. During the final two months of the campaign, the King's African Rifles (units from British East Africa) blasted their way through "500 miles of dense island jungle and over 3,000 enemy roadblocks." About 100,000 East Africans served in the British Army.

Small numbers of black troops were sent from other British colonies or dominions such as the West Indies, Canada, and South Africa to participate*in the war effort. In the case of black units from South Africa, however, most were unarmed. They served primarily as truckers and laborers.

A handful of individual Africans served in African American units. A 1945 clipping from the "Washington Afro-American"newspaper reports that three black soldiers became naturalized American citizens. One was a Panamanian. Another soldier was from Trinidad. And the third was Diata P. Campine from Senegal. All of the soldiers were former residents of Brooklyn, New York.

One assessment of the use of African troops during World War II described their service this way:

Most of the thousands of Africans who became soldiers had never been out of their native lands. On active service, despite the dangers and hardships, they were well fed and clothed, and comparatively well paid. Many of them learned to read newspapers lsiten to wireless bulletins and to take an interest in world affairs. They learned to see their own countries in perspective, from the outside. On their return home, many of them became dissatisfied with conditions which were not so attractive as army life in countries more developed than their own.

As the Watson Commission pointed out during the Gold Coast riots in 1948, the developing awareness and rising expectations of many of these veterans had unintended consequences, particularly in Britain's African colonies:
Such Africans, by reason of their contacts with other peoples, including Europeans, had developed a political and national consciousness. The fact that they were dissappointed at conditions on their return, either from specious promises made before demobilization or a general expectancy of a golden age for heroes, made them the natural focal point for any general movement against authority.
A major change had occurred in the attitudes of most of these soldiers. It was best described by an African from what is now Zimbabwe:
The girls of England, France and Italy who went out with African soldiers, did not help the preservation of the white myth. The African soldiers found themselves at the front line of war with one purpose in view; to kill every white enemy soldier they could get hold of. African soldiers saw white soldiers wounded, dying and dead. The bullet had the same effect on black and white alike. After spending four years hunting white enemy soldiers, the African never again regarded them as gods.


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