In 2022, the film Tirailleurs premiered to rave reviews in France. Starring the highly regarded actor Omar Sy, the film follows a father and son from the Senegalese interior who are forcibly enrolled in the French Army in 1917 and sent to fight on the Western Front. The film’s portrayal of linguistic and cultural diversity among West African troops, the coercion that was often involved in their recruitment and their distinct experiences of and attitudes towards their service in the French military was representative of a broader shift in the cultural narrative around the ‘colonial contribution’ to the First World War during the Centenary period. The experiences of colonial soldiers were increasingly foregrounded in both cultural engagement with the conflict and official commemorative discourses. If old tropes of imperial loyalty and martial masculinity persisted, particularly in commemoration, there was a much greater focus on how the war impacted the lives of colonial subjects who participated in it and how their experiences were shaped by their position within the racial hierarchies of empire.
While this new approach to the cultural narration of colonial histories of the First World War enhanced popular understandings of the conflict’s global reach, it has yet to really challenge the dominant imagined chronologies and geographies of the Great War. In the case of the French Empire, the cultural dominance of the tirailleur sénégalais has persisted, perhaps at the expense of a deeper engagement with the story of the hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects who participated in the war from North Africa, Indochina, Madagascar, the Pacific and other colonial territories.[1] Narratives of the service of the tirallieurs sénégalais have focused primarily, even almost solely, on the Western Front, despite the deployment of troops from West Africa across a whole range of battlefields and in conflict zones where violent clashes either predated or outlasted the traditional timeline of what is problematically referred to in French documents as the ‘war of 14-18’. These colonial subjects’ experiences are much better understood through the lens of what many historians of conflict in this period have come to call the ‘Greater War’, that is a ‘struggle for imperial survival and expansion’ with a much broader chronology and geography than that of the traditional narratives of the Frist World War focused on Western Europe.[2]
A perusal of the records of West African veterans in the interwar period underlines how many of their experiences both reflected and constituted these broader chronologies and geographies. These files, thousands of which have been recently catalogued by archivists and are currently available at the French National Archives in Pierrefitte, pertain to the applications for new or replacement veterans’ cards by West Africans in the interwar period. The veteran’s card was instituted by legislation in December 1926 as part of the expanding welfare provision for those who had served France in the Great War. Any soldier who had served a minimum of three months in a combat zone and/or who had been injured in service was entitled to a card. Initially, the card carried with it a series of social and fiscal advantages, few of which translated to the context of the colonies but, when, in 1930, the French state introduced a general veteran’s pension for card-holders, the potential reward of a successful application increased significantly. Even though West Africans were to receive half the amount paid to French and North African veterans, the financial incentive to apply, coupled with the symbolic capital afforded by the card, motivated at least some veterans to brave the considerable bureaucratic barriers to try to secure their just reward.[3] While the files testify to the infrastructural inadequacies and embedded inequalities that defined veteran provision in West Africa as well as the evolving modes of colonial governmentality it reproduced, here I am interested in what they tell us about West African experiences of the Global Greater War.
Through these applications we can trace the individual stories of West Africans whose experiences of conflict in this period are not necessarily represented in the dominant narratives centred on the Western Front. This is not to dismiss the significance of the stories of the thousands of West African men who fought at the Somme, Verdun, the Chemin des Dames, the Marne and the other major clashes on the French front. Or indeed those represented in the files like Aly Cissé from Senegal who fought on all four of these battlefields before being incapacitated in a gas attack on the Aisne in 1917. It is simply to highlight the ways in which these files and the individual stories they represent testify to the importance of colonial troops to the French empire’s broader struggle for survival and expansion throughout the period, one that extended far beyond the spaces and temporalities of the Western Front.
A photo of Aly Cissé from his veteran’s card application, Archives Nationales de Pierrefitte, AN 19900206/2
The French Empire’s Greater War involved the mass mobilisation of colonial troops, including around 200000 West Africans, across a broad range of contexts of conflict. This included the ill-fated expeditionary corps to the Dardanelles, the Armée d’Orient that fought in the Balkans, and the French force that participated in the Cameroon Campaign.[4] It also included those mobilised to reinforce the colonial state’s security and sovereignty in areas like Morocco, where conquest was an ongoing process that predated and outlasted war on the Western Front and in zones like the Bani-Volta rivers basins or the Aurès mountains in Algeria, where the pressure of recruitment and the tenuous authority of the colonial state led to wartime insurrections. In the wake of the Armistice, West African troops were deployed to secure French authority in the now expanded empire, most notably in the Levant, where French rule was much contested. The Centenary period saw renewed focus on these contexts in scholarship, even if this has yet to break through to public discourses about the war and the role of colonial troops within it. Moreover, the deeper engagement with these contexts as discrete expressions of a broader global conflict have not always shown how colonial soldiers often found themselves fighting across a number of different zones of conflict in ways that both call into question the narrow metropole-colony framework and underline the extent to which their experiences embody the global nature of the Greater War.
I will now provide short biographies and some images garnered from the veteran card application files of ten West African soldiers that illustrate the way their individual trajectories were shaped by and helped to constitute the French Empire’s Greater War. These are taken from the collection AN 19900206/1-2 at the Archives Nationales in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine constituted from files archived by the Office National des Anciens Combattants. The potential of a critical engagement with this source base is incredibly rich and we are only scratching the surface here. We should also bear in mind that these files are frequently riddled with the inaccuracies, approximations and sanitizations that defined the generation of the archive in a colonial order defined by the bureaucracy’s limited reach and its obfuscation of state violence. For example, the assertion that these soldiers were volunteers must be considered through the prism of the extensive coercion that accompanied recruitment in West Africa.
Ali Fall
Ali Fall was born in 1895 in Maka Fall in Senegal. He joined the French army as a volunteer for two years in 1915 and was one of thousands of West Africans sent to serve on the Macedonian Front. In March 1917 he suffered from frostbite in his feet and was sent to an auxiliary hospital in Marseille. Once he was recovered, he returned to Senegal and re-enlisted in the port city of Saint-Louis for another four years. He was sent to France and subsequently mobilised to Morocco where he completed a further six months in active service in a combat zone. Ali Fall remained in the Army until he had completed the minimum 15 years required for a professional service pension. On retirement, he did not return to his home village, instead taking up a position as a security guard for the postal service in Saint-Louis.
Ahmad Hamadou
At the time of the declaration of war against Germany in August 1914, Ahmad Hamadou from near Podor in northern Senegal had already served for well over two years in Morocco in the campaign to repress resistance to the expansion of French rule. He would subsequently fight and sustain an injury to his left ankle at Gallipoli from where he was evacuated to the Military Hospital in Algiers. On recovery, he returned to the 70 Battalion of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, which saw action at the Chemin-des-Dames. He finished the war as a sergeant and lived in Dakar when he first applied for a veteran’s card in 1937.
Abdoulaye Bari
Abdoulaye Bari was born in Satadougou in modern-day Mali in 1888. He joined the French Army in 1912 and began his service in Morocco in 1913. He was involved in the bloody clashes with the troops of the Zaian Confederation in the Central Atlas mountains in late 1914. In 1915 he was transferred to a unit in Mauritania where he served until returning to active combat in Morocco from 19124-1927, contributing to the effort to solidify and expand French sovereignty in Northwest Africa. His experience of the Greater War was confined to the region of Northwest Africa. After he left service he, like many veterans, did not return home to his village on the banks of the Falémé river in western Mali and instead moved to Saint-Louis, a major port city in Northern Senegal. It is not clear from the file when the photo was submitted but he successfully applied for a veteran’s card (with his signature) in 1933.
Abdou Doucouré
Abdou Doucouré was born in the village of Diawara in Eastern Senegal in 1891 to Fodé Abdou and Khoudiedia Bakbayoukho. He joined the French Army in August 1914 and was part of the Expeditionary Corps sent to the Dardanelles in March 1915. After the defeat at Gallipoli, he was sent to the Western Front where he fought on the Somme, at Verdun and was injured by a bullet through the left hand at the Chemin des Dames. He ultimately finished the war in the service of the Armée d’Orient on the Balkan Front. He returned Diawara after the war. The above image is from an application for the renewal of his veteran’s card submitted in 1953. He would have been 62 years old at the time.
Abdoul Satigny
Abdoul Satigny was born in Ndioum in Northern Senegal in 1891. He joined the French Army at the age of 20 in 1911. When the war broke out he was stationed in Gabon in Equatorial Africa and was mobilised as part of the French invasion of German-ruled Cameroon. He served for the duration of the Cameroon campaign as was injured on October 08 1915. After the war, he moved to the city of Kaolack in central Senegal where he served in the colonial auxiliary police force (garde de cercle). The photo comes from his application for a veteran’s card in 1939.
Abou Arponka
Abou Arponka was born in 1891 in the Conakry region of Guinea to Mamo Camara and Massiré Bouafouna. He joined the French Army in 1911 and was stationed in Gabon when the war broke out. He served for the duration of the Cameroon campaign before being shipped off to Europe to fight on the Balkan front. After the war he returned to his village of Koléa near Conakry and applied for a veteran’s card in 1941.
Amadou Yattam
Born in 1895 in a small village near Tombouctou in what is now Mali, Amadou Yattam joined the French Army in November 1915. He was immediately deployed to help repress the insurrection that had just broken out in the main recruiting grounds of the French military in West Africa that lay between the Bani and Black Volta rivers in what are now the borderlands of Burkina Faso and Mali. Once the resistance to the authority of the French colonial state was crushed, he was redeployed to Algeria, where he was part of the large contingent of West African troops charged with maintaining the colony’s “internal security”. By the time he applied for his veteran’s card in 1941, he was living in the city of Gao and working as an auxiliary policeman in the colonial police force (garde de cercle).
Amadou Camara
Amadou Camara was born in 1898 in a village in the region of Boffa in Western Guinea. He signed up to the French Army in 1917 and was deployed in the Casamance region of neighbouring Senegal until after the Armistice of 1918. He was subsequently deployed in a bataillon de marche, a support unit, in the Levant as part of the French effort to enforce its authority over the newly granted mandate territories in Lebanon and Syria. After a spell in Tunisia, he returned to the Levant and engaged in military operations suppressing the Great Syrian Revolt. The first photo is from his application for a veteran’s card in 1937 while the second image and signature are from an application for a renewal in 1956.
Aly Touré
Born in 1892 in the town of Siné-Saloum in Senegal, Aly Touré joined the French Army in 1912. At the outbreak of the war, he was sent to Oubangui (Bangui) in what is now the Central African Republic from where he was subsequently deployed to the Cameroon campaign. He served in an active unit that saw combat in Cameroon for eleven months before being redeployed to the North of France. He fought at the Marne and the Aisne, before finally being demobilised in June 1919. After the war he took up a post as a head security guard at the local colonial administration offices in the city of Kaolack in his region of origin in Senegal. He applied for a veteran’s card in 1931 and the photo is from his application for a renewal ten years later, by which time he would have been 49 years old.
Abdoluaye Bâ
Abdoluaye Bâ was born in a village in southern Guinea in 1894 to Amadou and Mariame. He enrolled in the French military following the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914. He was part of the ill-fated expeditionary corps in the Dardanelles, disembarking with the Second Division in May 1915 (and not 1916 as his veteran’s card application suggests). After the collapse of the Gallipoli front he was returned to Dakar via Saint-Raphael, a key centre for the training, wintering, and accommodation of West African troops in wartime France. He would serve out the rest of the war in Niger, where an insurgency waged by the Tuaregs threatened French sovereignty over the Sahelian and Saharan peripheries of French West Africa. He notably saw combat action during the campaign to lift the siege of Agadez and defeat Tuareg forces in northern Niger from February to July 1917 and remained in service in the broader campaign of repression in the region into 1918. After the war, he returned to his home village in Guinea and applied for a veteran’s card in 1931.
References
[1] See Meryem Belkaïd’s critique of this in relation to the film Tirailleurs. ‘“Vous ne serez plus des Indigènes, vous serez des Français”: A Reading of Mathieu Vadepied’s Tirailleurs’, The Journal of the Western Society for French History, 49:6, (2024), 50-55.
[2] Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ‘Introduction’ in Empires at War, 1911-1923 (Oxford University Press, 2014) 1-16, 4.
[3] For details of how veterans themselves engaged with the bureaucratic processes and the value attached to these cards see: Joe Lunn, Memories of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Heinemann, 1999) and Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2006).
[4] For broader discussions of the mobilization of colonial troops and West Africans in particular in the French imperial war effort see: Jacques Frémeaux, Les Colonies dans la Grande Guerre : Combats et Epreuves des Peuples d’Outre-Mer (SOTECA, 2006), Marc Michel, Les Africains et la Grande Guerre: L’Appel à l’Afrique (Karthala, 2003) and Richard S Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (Hopkins Press 2012).