George Robb - White War, Black Soldiers

Bakary Diallo & Lamine Senghor

White War, Black Soldiers

Two African Accounts
of World War I

Bakary Diallo & Lamine Senghor

White War, Black Soldiers

Two African Accounts
of World War I

Translated by

Nancy Erber and William Peniston

Edited, with an Introduction and Annotations, by

George Robb

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Indianapolis/Cambridge

Copyright 2021 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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For further information, please address

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

P.O. Box 44937

Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937

www.hackettpublishing.com

Cover design by E. L. Wilson

Interior design by Elana Rosenthal

Composition by Aptara, Inc.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943575

ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-952-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-951-4 (pbk.)

ePub3 ISBN: 978-1-62466-976-7

Kindle ISBN: 978-1-62466-977-4

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Contents

The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.

This book project has been a few years in the making, and the editor and translators would like to thank the many people who have helped us along the way. First, and foremost, we are indebted to Rick Todhunter at Hackett Publishing for his unswerving support and patience. The two anonymous reviewers for Hackett provided numerous valuable suggestions from which the book has benefited. Bonnie Smiths enthusiasm for this project early on helped sustain us, and her advice was crucial in keeping us going. Christa Clarke and Molly ODonnell provided valuable referrals regarding African history and culture. Delia Dunlap and Oumar Ba were especially helpful in clarifying many aspects of West African culture and languages. Lastly, Antoinette Burton and Ellen Ross read sections of this book in draft form and offered astute suggestions for revisions. To all these people, who generously gave their time and expertise, we express our gratitude.

Bakary Diallo in France in 1928, shortly before his return to Senegal. From Dorothy S. Blair, African Literature in French: A History of Creative Writing in French from West and Equatorial Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear.

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Strength and Goodness ( Force-Bont ) by Bakary Diallo is one of the only memoirs of World War I ever written or published by an African. It remains a pioneering work of African literature as well as a unique and invaluable historical document about colonialism and Africas role in the Great War. The book recounts in very personal terms Diallos childhood in rural Senegal, his recruitment into the French Army of West Africa, and his combat experiences in Morocco and later in France, where he was seriously wounded at the Battle of the Marne in 1914. Diallo shares his first impressions of France and the French people, his relations with other African soldiers from different ethnicities and social ranks, his war experience as the leader of a segregated squad, and, after his injury, his interactions with the military bureaucracy and an informal support system of French civilians. Interspersed among Diallos wartime recollections are his eloquent pleas for racial equality and the brotherhood of all nations. More controversially, Diallo also praises Frances civilizing mission in Africa.

Lamine Senghors The Rape of a Country ( La Violation dun pays ) is another pioneering French work by a Senegalese veteran of World War I, but one that offers a stark contrast to Strength and Goodness . Senghors short story is a dystopian fable about the evils of French imperialism and the exploitative nature of the Great War. Senghor wrote The Rape of a Country as a propaganda pamphlet for the Communist Party, and he hoped that his work would incite rebellion against French colonial rule in Africa.

Diallos memoir was much celebrated as the first book in French by a black African author upon its publication in 1926, and it complemented the many war books written by European and American veterans at this time, such as Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Robert Gravess Good-bye to All That (1929), and Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms (1929). Unfortunately, Strength and Goodness has been out of print for decades and no English translation has ever been published. Senghors The Rape of a Country never circulated widely at the time of its publication, and the French {2} government prevented its export to Africa. Although a new French language edition recently has been published, the work has still never been translated into English.

Lamine Senghor in 1927, speaking at the League against Imperialism in Brussels.

The centennial of World War I is an ideal moment to present Strength and Goodness and The Rape of a Country to a wider, English-reading public. Until recently, Africas role in the war has been neglected by historians and largely forgotten by the general public. Eurocentric versions of the war still predominate in popular culture, including Peter Jacksons recent compilation of wartime film footage, They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), which includes no images of colonial troops.

Even as historians are reintegrating Africa into narratives of the Great War, they struggle to include African voices. Most African soldiers were drawn from rural, nonliterate backgrounds and few firsthand accounts of the war by Africans have survived. Some historians have begun recovering the lost voices of African soldiers through letters and oral histories. During the 1980s, Joe Lunn interviewed dozens of surviving African veterans of World War I as the basis for his 1999 book, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War . In 1985, another researcher, Guy Thilmans, found a cache of letters written during World War I by four Senegalese soldiers stationed in France to a friend of theirs back home. A collection of these letters was published in 2014. Given the scarcity of firsthand accounts of the war by Africans, Strength and Goodness is a pivotal addition to our knowledge of the war. While over one thousand European, North American, and Australian soldiers published memoirs about World War I, only one African, Bakary Diallo, did so.

Diallo was an unlikely chronicler of the war, as he was illiterate when he first joined the military. Born in 1892 in MBala in the Futa Toro region of northwest Senegal, Bakary Diallo spent his childhood as a shepherd among the Fula people. Dissatisfied with his monotonous pastoral life, he left his village for the city of Saint-Louis, where he joined the French Colonial Army on February 4, {4} 1911. After a whirlwind training session with a diverse group of African recruits, Diallo and his comrades were sent to Morocco in May 1911 to suppress an Arab rebellion against French rule. When World War I broke out in August 1914, Diallos unit was rushed to France, where it participated in the Battle of the Marne, halting the German advance on Paris. Having been promoted to corporal, Diallo volunteered to lead a night patrol of twelve men in a forest held by the Germans. He was seriously wounded on November 3, 1914, his jaw shattered by German gunfire. Bakary Diallo spent the next several years in a series of military hospitals and rest homes, where he endured thirteen separate operations to reconstruct his face. Awarded military honors, Diallo was able to obtain French citizenship in 1920, but he quit the army that same year, when the authorities refused to grant him equal pay with French soldiers. He remained in France for several years, working a series of menial jobs, including as doorman of the Hotel National in Monte Carlo. During these years of hardship, he was befriended and assisted by a number of French people, including the artist Lucie Cousturier, who helped him publish his memoirs, Strength and Goodness , in 1926. When he finally returned to Senegal in 1928, Bakary Diallo worked for the French colonial government as a messenger, interpreter, and finally, chef de canton . In 1953, he retired to his native village where he died in 1979 at age eighty-seven. Before his death, the French government awarded him the Lgion dhonneur (Legion of Honor) for his service to the state.