The Colour of War Memory: Cultural Representations of Tirailleurs Sénégalais

Abstract

This article examines French and francophone cultural representations of the roles played by tirailleurs sénégalais during the First and Second World Wars. It analyses how such representations (produced by authors from both within and outside this group) can be considered as examples of what Max Silverman has defined as ‘palimpsestic memory’, containing traces of the present and the past. Key myths and stereotypes of French African troops have reappeared with relative frequency in images, texts, and films. This article explores the ideological and political purposes to which these representations have been put at different historical moments up to the present.

KEYWORDS:

• colonial soldiers
• tirailleurs
• First World War
• Second World War
• commemoration

Notes on contributors

Alison S. Fell is Professor of French Cultural History at the University of Leeds (UK). Her research focuses on the First World War. She is currently completing a monograph on French and British women as female veterans in the 1920s, and is a Co-Director of the AHRC-funded Gateways to the First World War engagement centre based at the University of Kent.

Nina Wardleworth is a Teaching Fellow in French at the University of Leeds (UK). Her research focuses on narratives of empire during the Second World War in France. As a postdoctoral researcher she worked on the FRAME database project on Narratives of War and Occupation in France (1939–1945) — www.frame.leeds.ac.uk/database. She has also published on cultural depictions of and by the second generation of Harkis, the subject of her PhD. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Tirailleurs sénégalais were initially recruited from West Africa, but were subsequently recruited from Central and Eastern French African colonies, despite the retention of the reference to Senegal in their name.

2 It is said that these massacres were in retaliation for the supposed rape of German women by French African soldiers during the occupation of the Rhineland following the Versailles Peace Accords of 1918 (Le Naour, 2004).

3 No colonial troops were held in POW camps outside of France. These colonial POW camps were run by Vichy officials on behalf of the German occupying force (Mabon, 2006).

4 Eric T. Jennings believes that the figure of 30 000 colonial subjects in the Free French Army in 1943 ‘certainly needs to be revised upwards’ (Jennings, 2015: 4).

5 For an overview of published scholarship on French colonial troops see Deroo and Champeaux (2013).

6 The only major historical study into the African Free French Army is Jennings (2015).

7 For analyses of the cultural representation of the tirailleur sénégalais, see Berliner (2002), Blanchard et al. (1993), Ezra (2000), Hale (2008), Little (2009), Riesz and Schultz (1989), Riesz and Bjornson (1996).

8 It is also noteworthy that the dead are not named, and therefore individually sacralized, as is the case on the majority of French war memorials. Rather, the names of the principle battles in which the Armée noire fought are inscribed, offering a collective vision of a ‘unified’ Empire rather than focusing on the ‘blood tax’ paid by individual citizens.

9 The other work was the collection of poems by Leopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties Noires (1948).

10 François Hollande attended commemorations of the massacre in Dakar in December 2014. See ‘Sénégal: Hollande rend hommage aux tirailleurs massacrés à Thiaroye’, RFI, 1 December 2014. http://www.rfi.fr/afrique/20141201-hollande-senegal-hommage-tirailleurs-tiarroye-guerre-histoire-1944-massacre-soldats-senegalais/ [accessed 19 May 2016].

11 http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/histoire-de-l-immigration/dossiers/les-etrangers-dans-les-guerres-en-france [accessed 29 February 2016].

12 See www.seriefreresdarmes.com [accessed 23 May 2016]. Eleven are North Africans (three of whom are Pieds-Noirs, seven are from the French Caribbean, six are West African, two are from Indochina and one from France's territories in the Pacific).

13 See http://www.rfi.fr/emission/20140712-1-bakary-diallo-tirailleur-senegal-1914; http://centenaire.org/fr/dans-le-monde/afrique/senegal/tirailleurs-senegalais-temoignages-epistolaires-1914-1919; http://www.tv5mondeplus.com/evenement/3944-freres-darmes [accessed 23 May 2016].

14 http://centenaire.org/fr [accessed 23 May 2016].

15 See http://www.thiernodiallo.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=18 [accessed 23 May 2016].

16 http://www.lemonde.fr/musiques/article/2016/05/13/le-rappeur-black-m-et-la-bataille-de-verdun-retour-sur-une-polemique_4919120_1654986.html [consulted 21 May 2016].