KS4 / GCSE History: World War One - The Imperial racial diversity of a European War

We think that we know the first World War, the trenches, the barbed wire, the shell holes, the machine guns, the gas, the high explosives, the mud and the blood of the Western Front.

But the first shot fired by a soldier in the British army was fired here in Africa, by an African just three days after war was declared.That soldiers name was Alhaji Grunshi.

He’d been born in the British colony of the Gold Coast, modern day Ghana and in 1914 he was in the British West African frontier force.

In 1914 they were attacking the Germans in their colony of Togoland.

Now from the moment that Grunshi fired that first shot the Great War became the World War.

Santanu:
More than four million non-white people from the various colonial empires fought in the first World War. Yet the colour of first World War memory still remains largely white.

It was an extraordinarily diverse war because we have: one and a half million Indians, two million Africans, four hundred thousand African Americans, one hundred thousand Chinese labourers and yet more seems to have been written on the four British first World War poets than these four million people taken together.

David:
When the colonies of Germany, Britain and Belgium went to war in German East Africa, present day Tanzania, millions of Africans paid the price as soldiers sucked into an imperial fight and as civilians caught in it’s terrible wake.

Unlike in Europe the war here wasn’t restricted to a narrow killing zone. It roamed over vast areas. Millions of men were press ganged as porters by both sides to carry equipment, food and ammunition.

They were overworked and underfed and about 20% of them died. Now that’s a casualty rate that compares to anything on the Western Front. One British official had no doubt that their treatment would have been considered a scandal, had they not been merely Africans, after all he said, who cares about native carriers.

With no supply chain the armies descended on villages like a plague of locusts, requisitioning and plundering corn, cattle and supplies.

Up to a third of a million civilians are believed to have perished in the famines that followed.

A war that began was a war between white men thousands of miles away pulled in Africans from all over the continent to fight against other Africans.

One of those men was Alhaji Grunshi.

Against all the odds, the veteran of four years of conflict, survived the war.

But a history was constructed which quietly eclipsed his and the millions of other colonial soldiers contributions and left a collective memory of a war fought in Europe between white men.

Santanu:
It’s a very exciting history but it’s also a difficult one.

It’s a painful one, it’s a history of discrimination.

But only when we work through these difficulties can we understand the fullness of the imperial character of the war.

David:
One way to understand the truly global nature of the war is to travel to a place in present day Zambia, deep in the bush, near the Chambesi river.

It was here, in the middle of Africa, that three days after the last shot was fired in Europe, African soldiers put down their weapons.

And the World’s War ended.