To browse Academia. Article highlighting possibly the only black African commissioned to serve as a British officer in the First World War. In the last thirty years, in reaction to a predominantly white, Western and metropole-biased discourse of the Second World War based solely on the 'official' record, there have emerged a growing number of historians who have sought to redress this imbalance by documenting the experiences of colonial men and women in that conflict, utilising oral history in an attempt to give voices to these 'voiceless' individuals whose contribution has been disproportionately sidelined.
At the forefront of this movement have been studies of African soldiers serving the British Empire, and an important distinction that has been argued is that for Africans the war did not in fact begin in but in , when Italy invaded Abyssinia p. It is no coincidence that the timely emergence of this historiographical revisionism has dovetailed with the period post-decolonisation. The Second World War was a watershed which marked a hegemonic reordering of the world, seeing the decline of the old European colonial powers left financially-crippled by the conflict and struggling to find relevancy in the emerging bi-polar international system of the Cold War.
Consequently, one of the major points of debate has been the extent to which colonial ex-servicemen were active participants in anti-colonial movements and nationalist politics, and the degree that these are depictions born retrospectively out of nationalist mythologies. The probability appears to be that he was allowed to assume that of an officer by whom he was brought to this country.
The death of his son, a fine tawny boy, at the age of thirteen years, in , sadly distressed the old soldier, and he did not long survive his loss". The article examines the ways in which French offi cers manipulated the image of the "savage and violent" African colonial soldier.
While the background for the development of this image was the general European perception of Africa as a violent space, during World War I, offi cers, as well as parts of the French public, began to see Africans as "grown children" rather than savages. However, as this image served French military purposes and made the soldiers useful on the battlefi elds, it was not rejected outright. I look at the debate around recruiting Africans to serve in Europe on the eve of World War I, and the French attempts to refute the German accusations around the deployment of African soldiers in the Rhineland during the s.
