Black Shame

African Soldiers in Europe, 1914-1922

Dick van Galen Last, Ralf Futselaar, Marjolijn de Jager

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781350002036
• eBook ISBN: 9781472525918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Black Shame offers a detailed analysis of the recruitment and deployment of – and reactions to – African soldiers in the WWI European theatre of war. In so doing, the book paints a vivid picture of the wider debates of race and national identity provoked by the use of African troops within the main actors on the WWI scene: France, Britain, Germany and even the US. Drawing on war-time attitudes, Dick van Galen Last explores the reality and long-term consequences of the participation of African regiments in the post-war occupation of the German territories. Wide-ranging, both geographically and thematically, the first publication of its kind, Black Shame adds a fresh, truly comparative perspective to the scholarship in the fields of imperial and military history, as well as war studies and postcolonial studies, and will appeal to academics and postgraduate students alike.

1

From Barbarian to Soldier

The colonial powers began the systematic recruitment of professional soldiers in Africa around the middle of the nineteenth century: the British had established the Gold Coast Corps in 1851 and the French formed the tirailleurs algériens in 1856 and the tirailleurs sénégalais in 1857. Germany did not join in the scramble for Africa until later, but in the 1890s she also instituted local Schutztruppen, albeit solely with policing powers, in Togo, Cameroon, south-west Africa and German East Africa. They were primarily deployed to keep order locally and were always under the command of white officers. The indigenous troops recruited by the Belgians in the Congo Free State, and established as the Force Publique in 1886, subsequently fought for the Belgian state on several African fronts during the First World War. Initially these recruits were mostly Hausa, but gradually they began to be augmented by increasing numbers of mercenaries from other West- and East African regions. However, the Portuguese who had transported African soldiers to their Asian colonies continued to deploy European troops in Africa as much as possible. Italian colonial army units, recruited among the Eritreans, fought for Italy against the troops of the Ethiopian emperor Menelik. They repressed insurgencies in the Horn of Africa and, just before the First World War, distinguished themselves in fighting aganst the Turks in Libya. They later developed into a dreaded elite in Eritrea.¹

From the beginning of the colonial wars of conquest, fear of insurgency had inspired every imperial power to adopt a policy of divide and conquer, which necessitated the recruitment of local soldiers. In Asia the British looked for their soldiers among the peoples believed to be more warlike, who lived far from the populated centres of India, such as the muscular Gurkhas from Nepal. In West Africa the French supported the Bambara against the Tukulor and thus used Africans to subjugate other Africans. The indigenous East African auxiliary forces of the British, Germans, Belgians, Italians and Portuguese were known as askari, the Arabic and Swahili word for soldier, and also fought against other indigenous peoples. In order to prevent local alliances the colonial authorities would quarter their soldiers as far away from their native soil as possible.

In short, the inclusion of black soldiers in colonial armies was neither exceptional nor controversial. But could these troops also be deployed to fight against white European soldiers? In his De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625) Hugo de Groot had argued that cultivated Christian states should only bond with barbarians, to him synonymous with non-believers, in the most urgent case of emergency. This did not mean that everyone necessarily adhered to such regulations; as early as the Eighty Years’ War, William of Orange had accused the Spanish of having deployed North African slaves, in 1688 the stadhouder (governor) William III landed in England with, among many others, two hundred black soldiers, while in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries small groups of soldiers of colour were recruited by the French. Louis XVI had two Bataillons d’Afrique at his disposal and in 1803 Napoleon formed a battalion of more than five hundred black soldiers from Guadeloupe. As long as it involved such small numbers, the deployment of coloured troops appears to have caused little or no controversy.²

However, in the course of the nineteenth century these numbers became far more significant, especially in colonial armies. Perhaps because the increase in the number of coloured troops coincided with growing political tensions in Europe and mounting racism, by the end of the nineteenth century an international legal debate began about the deployment of ‘barbarian’ troops in European wars. The immediate cause was the appearance of units of North African troops on European battlefields during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Second Italian War of Independence (1859). Furthermore, France deployed North African soldiers during the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–1871. The German papers, in particular the satirical Kladderadatsch, then derided the French ‘standard bearers of civilization’ and Carl Georg Bruns, the chancellor of the University of Berlin, exclaimed: ‘What kind of an army is this that places all its hopes on the savagery of its Africans!’³

Jurists considered the deployment of barbarians justified only if these soldiers were under the strict command of European officers. In 1877 the Congress of the Institut de Droit International in Zurich declared that a government that gained a victory through the deployment of ‘wild hordes’ who were deemed unable to fight a regular war set itself outside of international law. A warring state employing the services of coloured troops was thus required to ensure that they waged war like ‘reasonable human beings’. The question of whether that was a possibility formed the crux of the debate. In 1860 the German political reformer Robert von Mohl expressed serious concerns about the arrival of ‘barbarian auxiliaries’ because these ‘uncivilized troops’ were bound to misbehave. ‘Barbarian’ stood not only for ‘non-Christian’ but for ‘inhuman’ as well.⁴

The colonial wars in Africa had themselves demonstrated the extent to which Africans were systematically placed beyond the human order. Although they were prohibited in Europe, the notorious soft-nosed bullets, which caused large wounds that could not be healed, were commonly used in Africa. As a war correspondent in 1898, Winston Churchill witnessed how Kitchener with his Krupp cannons and Maxim rifles mowed down a far superior force of tens of thousands of Mahdi warriors armed with spears and swords at Omdurman. In wars with peoples considered to be uncivilized the rules of civilized warfare were no longer thought to be applicable. The discussion about the differences between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ wars was to reach a climax after the ‘civilized’ First World War. The positions taken in that discussion stemmed from the ever more diverse ideas about black people, and especially black men.⁵

Even before the first African soldier appeared in Europe, he already embodied several stereotypes: the child-like Negro, the attractive lover and the fearless warrior. In Europe, however, there were major differences in the extent to which each of these ideas caught on. The French were very keen to emphasize that under French tutelage the African could be led to become highly civilized and that the army was the obvious means of achieving this. For example, the French soldier Alfred Guignard effortlessly incorporated the attachment of black soldiers under Maurits of Saksen, Marshal of France in the eighteenth century, into the republican repertory of France as the terre de liberté.⁶ Such arguments were not entirely altruistic: when Guignard wrote his article in 1912, France had an obvious interest in the picture of the ‘nice tirailleurs’ while, on the other hand, the Germans who were opposed to the deployment of black soldiers in Europe had a great interest in demonstrating the depravity of the Africans. In this period of increased international tension, the counterimage of the barbarous African was one of the tools used to mobilize the German population, by emphasizing the contrast between civilized, cultured Germans and black savages. The fact that the latter group was to be deployed by the French helped to demonize the European enemy as well.

The black individual, the black man

Both through the identification of black Africans with the descendants of the biblical Ham and through the practice of the transatlantic slave trade, a simplistic way of thinking had taken hold in Europe: black Africans were slaves because they were inferior and they were inferior because they were slaves. However, from the eighteenth century onwards, and influenced by the Enlightenment, scholars had also made serious attempts at explaining the differences in development between the races. A large-scale encyclopaedic inventory of the world was initiated in which every organism had a place, with the white European at the top of the hierarchy. Political motives could not fail to emerge and the first impetus to what was to become scientific racism was actually Henri de Boulainvilliers’ claim, in 1732, that the aristocracy deriving from the Germanic Franks with their large skulls was superior to the lower classes that came from the round-skulled Mediterranean Gauls. This was how Boulainvilliers sought to legitimize the privileges of the aristocracy.⁷ Not surprisingly, his theory was never very popular in France.

During the subsequent two centuries, theories were developed about a hierarchical zoological order based on such diverse disciplines as comparative anatomy, phrenology, craniology, anthropometry, physiology, environmental theory and genetics, as well as on Egyptology and theology. However, the foundation of ethnology had been laid at the end of the eighteenth century primarily by biologists. They had introduced a hierarchy within the human species, roughly based on contemporary perceptions of taxonomy. The skulls of Africans were compared to those of apes in order to explain the animal nature of the black people. In 1839 the American anatomist Samuel Morton, for example, made a connection between intelligence and the circumference of the skull, and on this basis he placed the Africans as physical and mental inferiors on the bottom rung of the cultural ladder. Previously, the French physician Jules Virey had already relegated blacks to a ‘chronically imperfect civilization’.⁸

The British physician James Hunt was the first physical anthropologist to place the blacks in nature, that is to say closer to the ape than to the European. He did so in 1863 in a lecture to the Anthropological Society, which he had just established to distinguish the physical anthropologists from the Ethnological Society’s ethnologists. He sought to be allied with the French Société d’Anthropologie, which Paul Broca had founded in Paris in 1859. Thanks to Broca’s efforts, physical anthropology established itself between 1860 and 1880 as an autonomous discipline with its own institutes, education, and journals that studied the biological differences between races.⁹ Hunt was a student of Robert Knox, the Scottish anatomist who in 1850 had published the book Races of Men, in which he linked physical characteristics with psychological ones in order to explain the superiority of the white race. Three years later, Arthur de Gobineau did the very same thing in France as did his translator, the physician Josiah Nott, in the United States. De Gobineau claimed that miscegenation would inevitably lead to racial degeneration because the value of a people was subverted by the ‘adulteration’ of the blood.¹⁰ While for de Gobineau the white race was bound to come to grief in any case, Knox was convinced that in the impending bloody racial struggle the strong white races would subjugate, and even destroy, the weaker dark races.

Scientific racism was clearly connected to the emergence of the nation state and, especially after the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–1871, began to focus more strongly on the relationships between the European white ‘races’ than on the differences between white and black. Science was brought in to clarify which groups inside the state belonged to ‘the populace’ or ‘the nation’ and which ‘abnormal’ groups fell outside its scope. The acceptance of exclusion and elimination arose from the social-Darwinist view that the weak would be eliminated by those who were stronger. Colonialism – the subjugation of other, ‘weak’ peoples – was an acceptable process for many social-Darwinists because it was deemed inevitable. However, it does not yet imply that in the drama of survival they were keen to stigmatize Africans as the victims. Initially Africans were barely considered in social-Darwinist representations. Similarly, it would be too simplistic to reduce the racial theories to nothing more than a justification for burgeoning imperialism. Racial theorists like Knox and de Gobineau were extremely sceptical about the blessings of imperialism and were certainly highly critical of the white race.¹¹

Moreover, calling Knox, Hunt and de Gobineau’s extremist racial theories representative of the opinions of their time would paint a distorted picture. Rather, they are illustrative of the most extreme elements in racial science around 1850. In French scientific circles a liberal tradition dominated and the notion of race was always controversial. The prominent physical anthropologist Broca criticized radical racial theories as too simplistic and, indeed, saw the genius of France in a felicitous mixture of different races. However, with that viewpoint he and the French academic world generally found themselves in a somewhat unique position.¹² Elsewhere in Europe other scholars had a greater influence, particularly the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. His Welträtsel (1898) (English title The Riddle of the Universe) was disseminated in a print run of 400,000 and translated into 28 languages. According to Haeckel, who was a firm believer in the principle of the heredity of acquired characteristics, the ‘woolly-haired Negroes’ were incapable of a higher spiritual development.¹³ It was because of him that heredity became the foundation of the concept of race. By their use of biological metaphors such as Herbert Spencer’s ‘the survival of the fittest’, the selectionist and hereditarian school of Francis Galton in Great Britain and, above all, Haeckel in Germany, played an important role in vulgarizing the idea of white superiority and the inferiority of coloured peoples.¹⁴ When ‘race’ became increasingly acceptable as a biological concept in Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world and blacks had been classified in the racial hierarchy as an irredeemable inferior kind, the pursuit of segregation increased as did the fear of miscegenation. In the 1860s racial scientists such as Knox and Hunt claimed that the mulatto was a ‘monstrosity of nature’ who combined the evils of both races within himself. Initially a certain amount of miscegenation was allowed both in Great Britain and the United States, but this changed towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1864 the English term miscegenation (a contraction of the Latin miscere – to mix – and generare – to give birth to) was popularized by two anti-abolitionist journalists. During the American Civil War they had accused Lincoln’s Republican Party in a satirical pamphlet of wanting to free the slaves because they desired them sexually and wanted to see the two races mix. Subsequently, miscegenation developed into a collective concept of interracial sexuality, interracial marriage, and the possibility of a racially mixed progeny.¹⁵

In the course of the nineteenth century, negative racial stereotyping of black people became solidly anchored in the collective consciousness. It is doubtful, however, whether scientific racism was the cause of popular racism. It is far more likely that the rapidly growing prosperity and revolutionary progress in science and technology of the second half of the nineteenth century reinforced the feelings of superiority of white Europeans rather than the theories of a handful of cranial researchers. In the nineteenth century, Western European civilization had become a model for large parts of the world, certainly in its own eyes, and Europe’s technological edge increasingly determined its attitude towards other peoples. The unfamiliar was found to be inferior and the earlier, eighteenth-century speculations and presuppositions became fixed stereotypes. Furthermore, Western science had brought diseases such as malaria, typhoid and yellow fever under control around 1900: shortly before these diseases had decimated entire garrisons of French and British soldiers in Africa, now the Western physician had turned into the embodiment of omniscient Western science. With their steamships and modern firearms the military superiority of the European armies was perceived as an intellectual and even a biological superiority. Scientific racism did not cause these feelings of superiority, but it did provide them with both a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 From Barbarian to Soldier
• 2 Recruitment, Deployment and Controversy: 1914–1917
• 3 Mass Recruitment: 1918
• 4 At and Behind the Front
• 5 The Road Back
• 6 Black Atlantic
• 7 The ‘Black Shame’: Africans in the Rhineland
• 8 Germany: Humiliation and Outrage
• 9 The World Beyond Germany: Amazement and Indignation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright