African Military Systems After 1900 - Impact of World War I and World War II - World War I

World War I

Unlike the African troops of Britain, who saw very little action on European battfields during World War I or World War II, France deployed hundreds of thousands of African fighting men to aid its cause, including some 300,000 North Africans, some 250,000 West Africans and thousands more from other regions. Over 140,000 African soldiers for example, fought on the Western Front during World War I and thousands of others fought at Gallipoli and in the Balkans. French West African troops fought and died in all the major battles of the Western Front, from Verdun (where they were instrumental in recapturing a fort) to the Armistice. Some writers (Lunn 1999) argue that towards the end of World War I, the black soldiers were increasingly been used as shock troops, and were absorbing three times as many casualties as white French troops. The French did offer such incentives as citizenship for those who fought, and French leader Clemeanceau pushed for continued recruitment of West Africans to fight for France, maintaining that it was better blacks were killed than long-suffering white Frenchmen. One in five West African combat soldiers who fought in WWI died in the war, compared to less than 17% for the French. Colonial troops such as Indian regiments in British employ suffered less.

During the conflict, African soldiers were not simply local enforcers of colonial hegemony, but also served as a major combat reserve for use in European conflicts. The case of the British Indian Army, including its elite Gurkha regiments is well known in this role, but the Senegalese and other African regiments of France demonstrate a similar pattern from Africa. Based on a variety of contemporary accounts, the performance of many African units was excellent, and both their German enemies and American allies accord them respect in a wide range of commentary, particularly fighting units from Morocco and regiments of Tirailleurs Senegalais from France's Armee coloniale. One French commander, commander of the 58th Regiment on the Western Front favored the dmployment of blacks as shock troops to save white lives: "finally and above all superb attack troops permitting the saving of the lives of whites, who behind them exploit their success and organize the positions they conquer."

The impact of the European war was substantial in Senegal and other French African colonies. Many of the soldiers had volunteered, but the French also resorted to extensive conscription in its territories. Many of the African soldiers found army life in Europe comparatively more egalitarian than civilian life under the colonial regimes of their homelands. The mixing of African troops with troops and civilians from other races however often made colonial regimes nervous. In 1918 for example, South Africa, forced to earlier deploy armed Africans to cover manpower shortages, removed its black troops from France, because "blacks in the French front were contaminated with foreign notions about race relations and other social grievances." Unlike the British, the French employed a number of high ranking black soldiers, such as Sosthene Mortenol, Commander of the Air Defenses of Paris. The exigencies and shared dangers of war also seemed to have created, in measure, more mutual understanding and freer communication between Africans and Europeans, although this did not translate immediately into a more just order in their homeland territories. Ironically, the last troops to surrender in World War I were the black soldiers fighting for Germany in East Africa.

The British made use of Africans primarily as labor and transport troops. Almost all of one such group of Africans, the South African Native Labour Corps (SANLC), met a sudden end in a famous 1917 incident, that sparked sympathy throughout South Africa. Their transport, the SS Mendi was struck by another ship, the Darro, which was sailing without warning lights or signals, and made no attempt to pick up the survivors. Their chaplain, Reverend Isaac Dyobha, is reported to have rallied the doomed black troops on deck for one final muster, referencing old warrior traditions as the waves closed in:

Be quiet and calm, my countrymen. What is happening now is what you came to do...you are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers, we are drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers...Swazis, Pondos, Basotho...so let us die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war-cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our assegais in the kraal, our voices are left with our bodies. —Isaac Dyobha, Mike Boon (2008). The African Way: The Power of Interactive Leadership. Struik Publishers, 2007. pp. 91–96