Lost in this month’s Armistice Day Centenary Celebrations in Paris was the fact that the First World War involved a significant number of indigenous Africans, as a major theatre of military operations with the African forces critical to the success of Anglo-French forces in Europe and the Middle East between 1914-1918 which is widely acknowledged as the continents most blood soaked period history.
“For the British army the war both began and ended in Africa, starting with the 7th August 1914 invasion of Togo and finishing with the 25th November 1918 surrender of German forces in Zambia,” said Dr Jeff Ramsay at a public lecture sponsored by the Botswana Society at the UB Conference Centre.
He said, “In the absence of the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of African troops, including Batswana, it seems unlikely that the Anglo-French alliance would have ultimately prevailed on the Western Front, much less elsewhere.”
According to Ramsay over half of the British forces engaged in the conflict came from outside the United Kingdom, including Africa, while the French became independent on the basis of contributions of troops mobilized from throughout their African territories, collectively known as ‘Force Noire.’
Whilst black troops from USA and the Caribbean as well as Africa played a significant role in the allied victory, in the aftermath of the conflict there was a widespread racist backlash stoked by heightened demands for equality coupled with the growth of white supremacist fears of black power.
“It is thus a shame that, after four years of centenary events, the role of Africans, along with Asians, is still being relatively neglected in Euro-American discourse about the conflict, despite the good efforts of some, eg. The BBC, too present a more global view of the conflict,” said Ramsay.
Despite the contributions of blacks and Africa to World War 1 there was an upsurge of racial repression in USA and South Africa, as well as the conflation of anti – Semitic and anti-black views in Germany, which formed the basis of the Aryan Master Race ideology of the Third Reich.
It is aptly captured in the cognitive dissonance of German wartime propaganda with the polarizing racist depiction France’s Black’ Beasts,’ versus loyal service of Lettow-Vorbeck’s nearly all-Black East African Army.’ Botswana’s experience was very much part of the wider South African civil conflict, that culminated in the post-war political consolidation of militant Afrikaaner and brutal repression of black worker, as well as intelligentsia.
