KS4 / GCSE History: World War One - West African troops in the French army

All over France you can find memorials and statues erected to remember the contributions made by French officers and soldiers in World War One.

What’s unusual about this statue is that the soldiers it commemorates are Africans.

Men brought over from the French colonies in North Africa and West Africa to fight and to die for France, the nation that had taken over their own countries by military force in the 19th century.

They were part of what was called La Force Noir, the black army and their story is one of the least known in the whole of the first World War.

Amadou Sar was one of over 120,000 West Africans recruited by France during the war.

One of the country’s great enthusiasts for African recruitment was General Mangin.

In 1910 Charles Mangin published this book, La Force Noire, the black army. It’s basically a manifesto calling for the mass recruitment for Africans into the French army.

Mangin didn’t just believe that France’s African colonies offered a vast source of fighting men.

He believed Africans had primitive natures and under developed nervous systems. He thought they didn’t feel pain like Europeans and so would make excellent soldiers.

But he also believed that some African tribes were more naturally aggressive than others.

This is a photograph of Amadou Sar and one of the reasons that he in particular is here on the western front is because his people, the Wolof tribe of West Africa, were one of those peoples that the French colonial theorists had decided were a naturally warrior people the Race Guerrre.

Troops who should lead an assault and that was their great skill that is how they should be used. Of course what that means is that Wolofs were about 3 times more likely to die in combat than white soldiers fighting in the same campaigns.

This mosque, here in the south of France, commemorates the West Africans who fought and died for France.

But not all of the men who found themselves fighting for the French Republic volunteered.

Recruitment in West Africa was outsourced to agents, to intermediaries, to men who worked to a quota system and were paid by results.

Now what this means in practice was that men were forced, coerced into the French army were in effect slaves.

Now to me it’s really difficult to think of a more bitter, more uncomfortable irony than that. That men taken from the homes, bound in chains and sent to Europe to fight for liberty and civilisation.

The monument of Le Constellation de la Doleur, the Constellation of Pain, was constructed in memory of the West African riflemen known as Tirailleur Senegalese who suffered catastrophic losses fighting for this ridge at the height of the war.

In April 1917, 20 battalions of Tiralleur Senegale were assembled here,15,000 men on the battlefield of Chemin des Dames on the Western Front.

They were deployed as shock troops in full accordance with the theories of General Mangin. This is where the idea that some Africans were natural warriors, naturally suited to the attack reached it’s conclusion with African soldiers being used as canon fodder.

But there was still another 18 months of hard fighting left until the war was finally over, did Amadou make it?

I’d like to think so. But because of who he was and where he came from because of his tribe and his race, the odds were stacked against him.