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Dutch Crossing
Journal of Low Countries Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ydtc20

White … or Not Quite: The Representation of

African Soldiers of the First World War

Dominiek Dendooven

To cite this article: Dominiek Dendooven (2022) White or Not Quite:

… The Representation
of African Soldiers of the First World War, Dutch Crossing, 46:3, 214-229, DOI:
10.1080/03096564.2022.2144601

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03096564.2022.2144601

Published online: 17 Nov 2022.

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DUTCH CROSSING
2022, VOL. 46, NO. 3, 214–229
https://doi.org/10.1080/03096564.2022.2144601

White . . . or Not Quite: The Representation of African Soldiers of the First World War

Dominiek Dendooven

In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper, Belgium

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The ‘cultural archive’ is a concept that is central to Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence: First World War; racism;
Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. In my contribu tion, I apply the concept to the colonialism; representation;
study of the First World War. After outlining the various discourses within the colonial memory
empires on the deployment of African troops in the war, I take a closer look at how
the African soldier was portrayed in the press and propaganda of the various
belligerents. What was the impact of the deployment of African soldiers on the
creation of the cultural archive, both among the colonized and the colonizers, and
how is this reflected in the way the First World War is studied, remembered and
commemo rated, both within and outside academia?

The King’s Order to Dance

Drummed, spoken
War

Drummed, spoken, whistled

Water

Drummed, spoken, whistled

Come to attend the chieftain’s council
Drummed, spoken
Those people have hit my innocent friend
Drummed, spoken, whistled
I will offer those people twenty goats as compensation
Drummed, spoken, whistled
Start of the talking drum
Call to alert people to the talking drum
Talking drum, whistled
End of tele-messaging
Drummed, spoken, whistled

These are the words Albert Kudjabo spoke and sung into the recording horn of the Prussian Phonographic Commission on
25 March 1917.1 Kudjabo was born in Kilo Moto, in the Northeast of the then Congo Free State in 1896, and expressed
himself in his native Bira, a Bantu language. Kudjabo had come to Belgium as a manservant

CONTACT Dominiek Dendooven dominiek.dendooven@ieper.be In Flanders Fields Museum, Sint-Maartensplein

3, 8900 Ypres, Belgium
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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DUTCH CROSSING 215

and joined the Corps des Volontaires Congolais when war broke out in 1914. The
corps was a volunteer unit mainly composed of white (former) colonists. In contrast
to the many thousands of Africans who served in the Force Publique in Congo,
Kudjabo was one of the very few Congolese who served in the Belgian army on the
Western Front. In late August 1914, he was taken prisoner of war and eventually
spent more than four years in a German camp. Throughout his life, but particularly
during the war, Kudjabo was treated as an exotic curiosity, confronted with racism
and made to serve in a subordinate position. Such treatment was meted out to all non-
white military personnel who were brought from all corners of the five con tinents to
Europe to be deployed on the Western Front in the First World War.
Although in the context of the First World War, the colour bar applied to a greater
or lesser extent to everyone whose whiteness was not absolute, whether they were
African, Asian or Oceanian, I will here focus on Africans who participated in the war.
I will argue that the way these African soldiers in Europe were depicted during and
immediately after the First World War became part of the cultural archive of white
Europeans as understood by Gloria Wekker, and that the ‘ritualized degradation’ to
which they were subjected in representations continued to live on well into the twenty-
first century. The historical examples that illustrate my argument relate mainly to
Belgium, where the front zone cut through the south of the province of West Flanders
from October 1914 to October 1918. Because Belgium was to a large extent influenced
by French culture, and since France was the belligerent which most often used
African soldiers – also in Belgium – I will include examples from that country too. I will
begin by outlining the various attitudes of the colonial empires towards the deployment
of African troops on the Western Front, followed by an assessment of the way in
which the colonial rank and file were represented in allied and German propaganda
and how they were perceived by local populations. I will pay particular attention to the
dominant and enduring image of the African soldier as a good natured child, which
contrasts sharply with the fact that the deployment of Africans was largely overlooked
by historiographers and official commemorations of the First World War.

Deployment and Politics

While all inherently racist, each European empire had different policies concerning
the recruitment, and the subsequent deployment and treatment of their non-white
colonial troops. As the allied naval blockade had all but cut off Germany’s access to
its African colonies, the German Empire did not have to decide whether or not to
deploy its African subjects on the European fronts (and that it did so on the African
continent is beyond the scope of this article). Portugal, which became involved in the
war against the German Reich precisely as a result of skirmishes in its African
colonies of Angola and Mozambique, sent only white soldiers from the imperial centre
to the European front; it considered its African possessions too important to reduce
the number of troops stationed there.
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216 D. DENDOOVEN

Ill.1: Senegalese riflemen passing through a Belgian village (In Flanders Fields Museum)

France possessed the highest number of black troops. More importantly, it was the only colonial
empire to actively recruit and train African soldiers, as a black army was France’s solution to its
demographic deficit in this regard. In other words, Africa served as a convenient resource of man-
power and supplied the French nation with the mass army it needed to confront the Germans. From
1914 to 1918 France recruited, either by coercion or through voluntary enlistment, no fewer than
450,000 men from its colonies, especially from North and West-Africa, the large majority of whom
served on the Western Front. It is important to stress that these men fought and died as soldiers for
France, their service seen as an ‘impôt de sang’ or blood tax. In Belgium, so-called tirailleurs
sénégalais – a sweeping term for all West African soldiers in French service – fought in the Battle of
the Yser in 1914 and took part in the Liberation Offensive of 1918.2 Nevertheless, no African soldier
was ever allowed to become an officer, as the idea of black men giving orders to white men remained
a taboo. Whether one was white or ‘not quite’ made all the difference.

The armies of the British Empire maintained a strict colour bar. Besides smaller indigenous groups
from the dominions and colonies, the British army included nearly 140,000 Indians and 140,000
Chinese labourers but also 15,000 African Caribbeans and a South African Native Labour Corps of
38,000. However, unlike the French, the British never allowed their non-white personnel – whether
African or Asian – to fight in Europe.
The sole exception was the Indian Army Corps in the first year of the war, but only because the British
were in dire straits at the time.3 That the British did not allow African and Asian soldiers to fight in
Europe was not just out of fear that these men would one day use their fighting experience against
their imperial overlords, but also because they felt the sight of white men killing other white men
would undermine the perceived
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DUTCH CROSSING 217

superiority of the white race.4 The contrast with the decision of the French to ‘allow’
Africans to fight for them was particularly felt by soldiers from the British colonies in the
Caribbean. In 1915 a separate British West Indian Regiment was established to accom
modate the many African Caribbeans volunteering for the British Army. The regiment
had formed against the wishes of the British military authorities, who had conceded only
when none other than King George V had urged them to do so in response to petitions
from his non-white subjects to be permitted to join the British army. However, when the
first contingents of these trained and often educated soldiers arrived in Europe, they
were told to surrender their guns, given shovels and ordered to perform menial tasks
behind the frontline. Treated as lowly labourers, these men were put in billets that were
often worse than the camps set up to accommodate German prisoners of war. Again,
whether one was white or ‘not quite’ made all the difference.
The official British attitude was not unlike that in the heavily segregated US Army,
where black soldiers were also given menial tasks. The few African American regiments
that did see military action were reluctantly ‘lent’ by the Americans to the French army
and therefore were under French command and even wore partly French uniforms. The
fact that they were allowed to fight and treated with greater respect in the French army
was heavily resented by the American military authorities (culminating in official protests
to the French government that blacks should not be on equal terms with whites). In
African American circles this marked difference in treatment gave rise to the erroneous
belief that France was a colour-blind republic.
What was the situation in a Belgian context, bearing in mind the country’s vast
African colony of Congo? The Belgian government strongly opposed the idea of recruit
ing African troops for the battlefields in Europe. The thirty-two Congolese men who had
signed up for the Belgian Army when the war broke out, among them Albert Kudjabo,
remained the only black soldiers to be stationed in Belgium. This is in sharp contrast
with the Belgian Congo, where many thousands served in the Force Publique’s
successful military campaign. The rationale behind the decision of the Belgian
government not to recruit any Congolese for the Western Front was formulated clearly
enough by the Minister of Colonies Jules Renkin: ‘I am loath to associate our blacks
with the struggles between Europeans. This can only be fatal to the civilization and to
the prestige of the white race in Africa’.5
Renkin’s fears were confirmed in the First World War, when for the first time tens of
thousands of people were brought to what always had been presented to them as the
cradle of civilization. Reversing the title of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel, Santanu Das
notes how hundreds of thousands of non-white men travelled to the heart of whiteness to
witness ‘The horror! The horror!’ of Western warfare.6 They not only saw how white
men were killing white men in large numbers, but also how the white man needed the
black man to win this war. One of the important and long-lasting consequences of the
temporary migration to a Europe at war was the contestation of white hegemony, around
the world. Asian and African combatants and labourers were deployed in a war for
freedom and democracy, which they themselves were denied.
In May 1919 W.E.B. DuBois proclaimed in The Crisis, the journal of the National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP): ‘We return. We return
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218 D. DENDOOVEN

from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and
by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the
reason why’.7 His rival Marcus Garvey, who in 1914 had seen the war as an opportunity
for black Britons and had expressed his loyalty to King George V, now declared that in
future blacks would no longer die for whites. In 1919 DuBois’ NAACP and Garvey’s
UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association) saw their following rise from several
hundred thousand to several million.
Another expression of this enhanced black consciousness were the Pan-African
Congresses that were held between 1919 and 1929. Seeking to end racial discrimination
and promote self-determination, they are now generally regarded as trailblazers for
decolonization. While DuBois was the initiator of the 1919 Pan-African Congress in
Paris, the second post-war Pan-African Congress of 1921 had sessions in London,
Brussels and Paris. One of the Congelese representatives at this second congress was
the earlier-mentioned Albert Kudjabo. Barely two years after his release from a Prisoner
of War camp, he attended with his veteran friend Paul Panda Farnana, who had also
participated in DuBois’ earlier Pan-African Congress in Paris. Together with a third
Congolese veteran, Antoine Manglunki, Kudjabo and Farnana had founded the Union
Congolaise in August 1919. Apart from offering assistance to its members, the first
association of Congolese in Belgium had mainly cultural and political goals, namely
greater equality for those of Congolese descent. After a contributor to the Journal des
Combattants, a widely-read veterans’ newspaper, had argued that all Congolese
residing in Belgium should be ‘sent home’, the Union Congolaise expressed their
agreement but on the condition that, likewise, all whites would be repatriated from
Africa.8 Apart from Farnana, Manglunki and Kudjabo, the first membership list of the
Union Congolaise featured another six Congolese veterans who had served in the
Belgian Army during the war.9 This is a remarkable figure: from the thirty-two known
Congolese soldiers, eleven had died during the war and two had returned to Congo.
Therefore, of the nineteen Congolese veterans still resident in Belgium in 1919, half
were founding members of the Union Congolaise, with two also attending the high-profile Pan-African
While the deployment of black troops in Europe during the First World War enhanced
political and cultural awareness among the (former) rank and file and their home
societies, the war’s legacy for white Europeans was very different: their denial of the
African contribution to the war effort would be accompanied by the reinforcement of
racial stereotypes.

The Representation of the Colonial Rank and File

Before the First World War, the encounter of white Europeans with colonial subjects
had been limited largely to those who were active in the colonies. Yet, during the war
and in its immediate aftermath, a sizable part of the European population was
confronted with the temporary mass immigration of soldiers and workers from different
races and cultural backgrounds. This situation, which was explained and ‘justified’ by
the propa gandists of the various belligerents as voluntary support of the subordinate
peoples of the western colonial powers in their struggle against evil, also gave rise to a flood of image
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DUTCH CROSSING 219

and stereotypical representations. These found their way into the cultural archive as
understood by Edward Said, Ann Laura Stoler and also Gloria Wekker, namely as a
‘repository of memory’.10
The images that were created, propagated and to a large extent internalized by
Europeans were marked by exoticism, which was enhanced by the unfamiliarity of the
appearance of the colonial troops and often reinforced by their strikingly colourful
uniforms or culturally specific weaponry, such as the ‘coupe-coupe’ (machete) of the
tirailleurs sénégalais. This framing by the military authorities of the colonial rank and
file as exotic, and therefore as different from white soldiers, aroused the curiosity,
latent or otherwise, of many Europeans, not least in artistic circles. Not only official
war painters and illustrators such as Paul Jouve and Lucien Jonas, but also numerous
other artists – professional and amateur – made countless images of what they
considered the exotic element at and behind the war front.11
In war propaganda, however, colonial troops, especially sub-Saharan Africans,
were much more often depicted as fierce and savage warriors, as soldiers without
mercy who not only brought their primitive fighting methods to the Western arena, but
who, as alleged cannibals or fetishists, also had the habit of wantonly maiming the
enemy. One of the most common depictions of a tirailleur sénégalais showed him
clenching a knife between the teeth. A widely distributed cartoon post card showed six
tirailleurs sénégalais, knife and fork at the ready, roasting the German emperor on a
spit.
Such representations, together with the general unfamiliarity with Africans, frigh
tened the population of Flanders. Some months after the Armistice, in March 1919,
when large groups of Allied military personnel still remained in formerly German
occupied Belgium, the famous Flemish author Cyriel Buysse had a memorable
encoun ter. On his way home during a bicycle ride late in the evening, he fell into the
water when he failed to notice that a bridge over the River Scheldt had been blown up.
Luckily, a local farmer came to the rescue. Buysse is intrigued when the visibly
distressed farmer tells him of strange goings-on on his farm and he decides to
accompany the man and investigate:

Through a small window a wondrous spectacle of an inner courtyard unfolds before my

eyes.
A group of men with brown faces, in khaki uniforms and with red chéchias [fezzes] on their heads,
milling around a flickering wood fire. They are humming and smiling: some of them are dancing in a
strange manner while others are playing small musical instruments. Their white teeth and the whites
of their eyes are brightly illuminated by the moon: it’s an encampment of Moroccan tirailleurs12
stranded in the heart of Flanders. The old farmer and his wife are standing next to me, shaking and
trembling, and telling me how terrified they are of these brown men whom they believe to be devils,
imploring me to deliver them from that horrendous rabble.

– Are they doing any harm? I ask, highly interested in the spectacle.
– No Sir, but we are terribly afraid of them. And they don’t understand us. When we ask them when
they intend to leave, they laugh at us. We do not even dare go to bed, Sir!
The farmer closes the hatch with trembling fingers; and through a rear door I approach the soldiers.
Without too much trouble they inform me they will stay just for two more days and I hasten to bring
these glad tidings to the farmer and his wife. They bless me, grasping both my hands, unwilling to let
go of them.
13
– We were scared of the Germans, Sir, stammered the woman, but at least they were human . . . .
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220 D. DENDOOVEN

Stories of ‘savage soldiers cutting off the ears of the Germans’, usually with West African
protagonists but also with North Africans or Nepalese Gurkhas as the perpetrators, were
eagerly spread by the inhabitants of the front region in Flanders: ‘Spahis . . . They were
howling when they went to the frontline; they were savages. . . . . They were passing by and
looking at me. One took out his arm from under that red cloak. He was holding a wire. He
showed it to me and there were human ears on it, about four or five. He put his arm back
again and he looked at me again and smiled . . . ’,14 Marie Beck told an interviewer in 1978,
while towards the end of the last century a very elderly Achille Neels explained: ‘That’s when
I saw black negro troops for the first time, the Senegalese . . . . The story went that they
brought back the ears of the Germans as a souvenir’.15 That similar accounts were
(re)published in books aimed at a wide audi ence in respectively 2016 and 2001 is proof that
such stories continue to circulate as part of the (West) Flemish cultural archive.

While in allied propaganda and lore these soldiers were at least regarded as ‘our savages’
fighting for ‘our good cause’ and therefore treated with some sympathy, this was not the case
in Germany. The German propaganda that focused on the African and Asian troops present
in Europe contained the most virulently racist images. German public opinion had already
been outraged in 1914 when the allied press had started to label the military of the Reich as
barbarians and ‘Huns’, after atrocities against civilians and the destruction of cultural sites
and heritage in France and Belgium during the first months of the war. Seeing themselves as
a pre-eminently cultured people, the Germans found it highly ironic that the Allies were using
‘real barbarians’ against them. As a consequence, the deployment of colonial troops by their
European adversaries became a central theme in German propaganda. In 1915, the Liller
Kriegszeitung, arguably the most widely distributed newspaper for German soldiers in
occupied Belgium and Northern France, published a cartoon by the illustrator Karl Arnold,
showing stereotypically depicted African children being admonished by their equally
stereotypically depicted half-naked mother with pendulous breasts: ‘Daddy has gone to
Europe to protect the good Englishmen against the barbarians. If you are very good, he will
bring you a German steak’.

The Lasting Image of the African Soldier as a Big Child

While the image of the colonial soldier as a savage barbarian would live on for a long time, it
would do so within a relatively narrow context, such as commemorations of the First World
War in the former front region or in Germany. However, it is another representation of the
African soldier in particular that would be perpetuated for much longer in the broader cultural
archive of the former allied countries, an image that also confirmed and reinforced already
common stereotypes, namely that of the African as a child for whom military service was part
of his education to become a ‘more or less civilized’ human being. That Africans were seen
as adult children is also evident in the wording to which officers and white patrons resorted
when describing the men in their charge. Father Horner, who had accompanied an African-
Caribbean contingent from the Bahamas to Europe and who served as a chaplain in the 6th
and 9th battalions of the British West Indies Regiment, published a book in which he sought
to highlight for a domestic public the war efforts of his ‘boys’. The following observation is
typical of
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DUTCH CROSSING 221

Horner’s British paternalist view: ‘As long as soldiering meant bands and uniform and a
certain element of mild heroism all was well; but when it meant smartness, neatness
and, above all, punctuality – a thing the West Indian knows but slightly – and, again “not
answering back” – for he loves to argue, things were not so well’.16 With relish and an
obvious air of superiority Horner remarked how the West Indian soldiers, when bringing
ammunition to the heavy artillery, had an ‘insatiable desire’ to pull the cord which fires
the gun and how, sometimes after some bargaining, they would often be allowed to do
so: ‘The fact that he is in a peculiar sense the author of the devastating noise which
follows seems to create in le soldat noir a certain sense of satisfaction’.17
In France the military authorities presumed that proper French was too difficult for
West Africans, and a simplified French supposedly adapted to African speaking modes
was introduced. That this pidgin French became generally known as petit nègre
highlights the inherent racism associated with this pseudo language invented by white
people. This wholly artificial variety of French that Africans in the service of the French
army were taught to speak sounded extremely childish and funny to French and Belgian
ears, and thus greatly reinforced the demeaning image of the African as a farcical child.
This was something the African soldiers realized themselves, as is confirmed by Lucie
Cousturier, who wrote in 1917: ‘The tirailleurs have understood from the laughter [that
their utterances evoke] that their language ridicules them: “It’s French for tirailleurs”,
they sadly admit’.18
What their use of language, not least in France through the institutionalized use of
the Français tirailleur, already hinted at, was also confirmed by many (propagandist)
images: the African was a good-humoured, not too bright child who had to be treated as
such by the whites. Above all it is the image of the broadly smiling African that recurs
time and again in press photos, magazine covers, sheet music, propaganda posters
and cartoons, exploiting the visual contrast between white teeth, dark skin and, in the
case of the soldiers in French service, the red chechia (fez). The most famous example
combined stereotypical speech and image, and came to define the (predominant)
depiction of an African for several generations, in particular in France, but to a certain
extent also in Belgium. I am referring to the advertisement designed in 1915 by Giacomo
de Andreis for the popular chocolate and banana drink Banania: a broadly smiling West
African soldier exclaiming ‘Y’a bon’ (‘is good’) when tasting a cup of Banania. In the
eyes of Eric Deroo and Antoine Champeaux the advertisements and packaging of the
drink, which was also on sale in France’s neighbouring countries, including Belgium,
has ‘forever reduced the tirailleur to a tenacious stereotype’.19 The popularity of l’Ami
Y’a Bon, as the happy West African came to be known, gave rise to a whole range of
merchandise from the 1930s onwards: the stereotypical image with the accompanying
slogan appeared on boxes, jugs, cups, toy cars, thermometers, wall clocks and bistro
tables. Through l’Ami Y’a Bon and many other representations as a ‘big child’, the
African soldiers were subjected to ‘ritualized degradation’, as defined by Stuart Hall and
later adopted by Gloria Wekker: a representation that requires no explanation.20 The
similarities between Black Pete and l’Ami Y’a Bon or other representations of the African
soldier as a happy child are obvious: both are colourful, exotic characters, generally
cheerful, funny and a bit silly (in the eyes of white Europeans), but both also have a cruel side: while th
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222 D. DENDOOVEN

lll. 2: l'Ami Y'a Bon: the Senegalese tirailleur as a happy child (Image: public domain)

sénégalais was accused of barbarism, Black Pete was the one who wielded the rod by order of St
Nicholas. Both, however, are first and foremost the submissive servant of a white man – a bishop in
the case of Black Pete, an army officer in the case of the African soldier – who educates and guides
them.

The Great Oblivion after the Great War

The familiarity of the stereotypical image of a tirailleur sénégalais from World War I was in stark contrast
to the scant attention given to the African contribution to the war by historians and in official
commemorations. In 1917 the aforementioned Flemish author Cyriel Buysse revealed himself a
visionary during a visit to the frontline as a reporter for the Dutch newspaper De Haagse Post:

Thus you progress between the tombs, so dismally squeezed together, of all those young and
once so strong and healthy men to reach with much emotion and surprise a spot with small,
white tombstones of a very special shape bearing painted or engraved characters that seem so
exotic and movingly out of place here. These are the graves of the fallen Moroccans and
Senegalese. How deeply homesick and lonely they lie amidst all those Flemish boys! What tragic
fate brought them here, so far from their sun-lit lands, to these mostly grey, cold and wet regions!
Which ‘douar’ [village consisting of a group of tents or huts] did they hail from in their distant
country, in the scorching desert or in the cool oasis, those brown and black men, to end up here alongside these
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DUTCH CROSSING 223

unfamiliar white and blond fighting comrades whose language they did not understand? Later,
when everything will be over, the Belgian and French women will come to pray on the graves
of their husbands and sons and cover them in fresh flowers. But who will ever kneel at the
abandoned graves of Muhammad or Ibrahim in Flemish soil?21

Buysse was right. The presence of African soldiers and labourers in Europe during the First World
War would soon be completely forgotten on the Continent. A handful of publications and monuments
saw the light of day towards the end of the war and in the first post-war years but they were small in
number and propagated colonial ideas.
A representative example is the monument nicknamed ‘Demba and Dupont’ in Dakar, which depicts
a white and a black soldier as comrades in arms. Even here the white soldier is leading, with his hand
on the black man’s shoulder. Where it was suggested – however subtly – that African veterans and
their home societies were entitled to equality and better treatment, the wrath of the authorities fell
upon the initiators. The Frenchman Léon Bocquet and the Belgian Ernest Hosten saw the final two
pages of their book Un fragment de l’Epopée sénégalaise (1918, A Fragment of the Senegalese
Epic) censored: the French authorities ordered the publisher to delete more than half of the text and
to replace it with blank lines and the word ‘censored’. From the remaining text fragments, it can be
deduced that the authors had been pleading for a more egalitarian treatment of Africans as a reward
for the blood that African soldiers had shed for the liberation in Europe. Bocquet and Hosten’s was
the first ever book on the deployment and subsequent decimation of a battalion of tirailleurs sénégalais
in Diksmuide (West Flanders) during the last days of the Battle of the Yser, early November 1914. It
remains to this very day the only book with a focus on the deployment of Africans during the Battle of
the Yser.

While the Belgian soldiers who stood their ground during this battle still loom large in the country’s
collective memory through numerous memorials, publications, documen taries, exhibitions or
commemorations, and while the French Brigade of fusiliers marins who assisted the Belgian Army
are commemorated in a large memorial in a public park in Diksmuide, the hundreds of West African
soldiers who were killed defending the town are barely remembered at all; only a handful of
headstones remind us of their involve ment and ultimate sacrifice. The vast majority of the West
Africans who fell on the battlefield by the Yser have simply vanished: they have left no trace in the
commem orative landscape of Flanders Fields or are relegated to a footnote in the extensive
historiographical literature devoted to the First World War.

In the Royal Army Museum in Brussels with its hundreds of mannequins in uniform there is only
one (!) mannequin dedicated to the Force Publique, the mainly black army of Belgian Congo. In the
words of Nicholas Lewis, the museum ‘reduces the Congolese contribution to Belgian military history
to no more than a footnote, and that smacks of deliberate ignorance and a systematic colonialist
attitude’.22 In my own institution, the In Flanders Fields Museum (Ypres), whose collections are much
smaller than those of the Royal Army Museum, the African presence at the Belgian front in the First
World War was until 2011, apart from a handful of photographs, represented by a single object: a
chechia. To this date there is just one memorial in Belgium dedicated to African soldiers, the
‘Monument to the troops of the African campaigns’ (Riga Square, Schaarbeek), erected in 1970 by
the Association of Colonial Veterans. Honouring the black and white soldiers who participated in the
military operations in Africa during both world wars, this imposing monument, which stands three
metres high and measures
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224 D. DENDOOVEN

Ill.3: The monument to the troops of the African campaigns, Schaarbeek (Belgium)

seven metres in length, shows in bas-relief the head of a Belgian and Congolese soldier on either
side of hands joined together.23 While those joined hands gloss over the racist hierarchy of colonial
rule, the heads of the soldiers stand out because of their stereo typical representation, stripped of
individual features: while the European wears a helmet and has a straight nose and angular jawline,
the African is featured with a fez on the head, round cheeks, thick lips and round nose.

Yet, there are signs that at long last changes may be on the way. In the footsteps of that early
exception, Marc Michel’s recently reissued Les Africains et la Grande Guerre (1979), First World
War historians have begun to give due recognition to the Africans (and many other non-Europeans)
involved in that war. Especially Dick Van Galen-Last’s posthu mously published dissertation De
zwarte schande (2012) deserves mention, not just because of the quality of the argument presented
in this rare scholarly work on the transnational and colonial character of the First World War, but
also because it has been translated in several languages (in English as Black Shame, 2015). In
literature too, black soldiers from the First World War have begun to appear – as for instance in
black British writer Andrea Levy’s short story ‘Uriah’s War’ (2014), in white Flemish author Koen
Peeters’ De mensengenezer (2017), and, most famously, in black French novelist David Diop’s 2018
award-winning bestseller Frère d’âme (translated in 2020 as At Night All Blood is Black).

In 2007 a new, modern and evocative memorial to the tirailleurs sénégalais was inaugurated on
the Chemin des Dames at Aisne, France, and ten years later members of the African diaspora in
Britain had a memorial erected in Brixton. This active involvement of black communities in
commemorating the First World War, both in Europe and in other continents, is a new and welcome
development, which we also witness in the annual Armistice Day commemoration organized by the
Congolese
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diaspora in Brussels. In 2008, the In Flanders Fields Museum dedicated a major exhibi tion to
the multicultural presence in Belgium during the First World War, and when the permanent display
of the museum was renewed in 2012, an inclusive approach was taken and colonial troops were
treated on an equal footing with their European counterparts, with a fair share of representative
objects and images. Still, despite all its good intentions, it would be naive to claim that my
institution no longer perpetuates the dominant stereotype of the African soldier, as its visitors are
exposed to the propaganda of the past, and this perhaps without being offered sufficient context.
Self-criticism, constantly questioning one’s own methods and prejudices, while being open to and
responding to critical voices are a daily duty.

Conclusion

For many decades, the African presence in Europe during the First World War was wiped from
official history. Yet, African soldiers continued to be remembered collectively as characters in tales
of savagery and cannibalism and as caricatures in advertisements.
Adopting the ideas propagated by Gloria Wekker in White Innocence, I have shown how these
images, which maintained the process of ritualized degradation to which the African soldiers were
subjected during the war, have found their way into the cultural archive in Belgium and beyond.
Like Black Pete or the much-duplicated little figurine of a black man nodding in gratitude whenever
the generous white man donated a coin to the Catholic missionary work in the colony, the image
of the African soldier propagated in the First World War greatly contributed to the idea of the
African as a good-natured but savage child.
Colonial soldiers and labourers who had been active in the First World War received neither praise
nor gratitude from the motherland and, until the 1970s, at best a passing mention in serious
historiographical works. Whether one was white or ‘not quite’ still made all the difference. It is only
in the most recent decades that we notice a modest redress as attempts are made at a more
inclusive, more balanced and fairer representation of the African rank and file in First World War
Studies and in the public reception of this scholarship.
This brings me back to Albert Kudjabo, with whom I opened this contribution. In the 1920s
Kudjabo married a Belgian with whom he had four children. Although he never saw them grow up
as he died in 1934, the hardships he had suffered during the war having destroyed his lungs, his
memory is kept alive by his grand-daughter Odette, who gives talks about his remarkable life
during commemoration ceremonies organized by the Congolese community in Belgium. In the
summer and autumn of 2021, the recording of Kudjabo’s voice was integrated into two art
installations by Congolese artist Sammy Baloji: the first was on display in Zeebrugge (West
Flanders) as part of the Beaufort ’21 triennial of contemporary art, the second was the result of
Baloji’s residency at In Flanders Fields Museum. The publication that accompanied both
exhibitions, stated poignantly:

The collection of historical recordings of prisoners of war in the Lautarchiv [in Berlin] is both
a collection of historical discs and a historical, military, and colonial archive. While these
recordings evoke many nuances of silence – from structural silence in the archive, technical
silence of the sound recording, the silencing of content to performative silences (breaking
off of speech) – the silence that is raised through Kudjabo’s voice is a political one.24
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226 D. DENDOOVEN

Ill. 4: Sammy Baloji: Albert Kudjabo, c. 1930 (silkscreen print, 2021)

Kudjabo’s voice, speaking to us more than a century after it was recorded, is a call for reflection and
introspection. This is the voice of an African who was considered an exotic curiosity, confronted with
racism and serving in a subordinate position, but who is now demanding, after more than a century of
silence, to be seen as an individual with agency and no longer as a stereotype.

Notes

1. Humboldt University of Berlin, Lautarchiv, PK 794. Unless stated otherwise, in this article
all translations from French and Dutch into English are my own.
2. Chielens, “French Colonial Troops,” 76–80.
3. Dendooven, Asia in Flanders Fields, 12.
4. Koller, “Military Colonialism,”17–18.
5. Quoted in Vangansbeke, “African defenders,” 123–134.
6. Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing, 4.
7. Mjagkij, Loyalty in Time of Trial, 193.
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DUTCH CROSSING 227

8. Journal des Combattants, 14 September 1919, 3 & 21 September 1919, 3.

9. Brosens: Congo aan den Yser, 235–243.
10. Alarm Clock, White Innocence, 19.
11. Examples by these artists and others can be found in Dendooven & Chielens, World War 1.
12. It is uncertain if they really are North African (Moroccan) soldiers. Civilians such as Buysse often used
designations for military units incorrectly. Moreover, tirailleurs sénégalais were already deployed in
Morocco before the war and therefore sometimes referred to as “tirailleurs sénégalais du Maroc”.

13. 'Through a small checkered window I see a wonderful sight in a courtyard. A crowd of men with brown
faces, in khaki uniforms and red chéchias on their heads, around a blazing wood fire. They hum and
smile: some of them dance strangely, while others play on small musical instruments. The white teeth
and the whites of the eyes shine fantastically in the moon: it is an encampment of Moroccan soldiers,
found there in the heart of Flanders; and the old farmer and his wife stand next to me, trembling and
trembling, and tell me that they are terrified of those brown men because they think they are devils,
and beg me if I cannot rid them of that horrible scum .

- Do they do harm? I ask, deeply interested by the spectacle.

- No, sir, but we are not really concerned about it. And they don't understand us. If we asked when
they would laugh at us. We dare not go to our bed, meniere!

The farmer closes the hatch with trembling fingers; and I go to the soldiers through the back door.
Without much difficulty I learn that they will only be staying for two days and I hasten to inform the
farmer and his wife of the good news. They bless me, so to speak. They take both my hands and
would like to hold me.
- Of the Germans we were schouw, meniere, the woman hiccups, - but we were
still meinschen!' Buysse, “In the moonshine II,” 688–689.
14. Demeester, From the Great War, 169–170.
15. Dumoulin, Vansteenkiste and Verdoodt, Witnesses, 174–175.
16. Horner, From the Island, 7.
17. Ibid., p. 32.
18. Quoted in Deroo and Champeaux, La Force noire, 102.
19. Ibid., 104.
20. Alarm, White Innocence, 140–141.
21. 'So one progresses between the tombs of all those young, once strong, healthy men, crowded so
terribly close together, and with emotion and amazement one arrives at a spot where small, white
tombstones of a completely individual shape rise and on which letters and inscriptions are painted or
chiselled, which seem so exotic and movingly strange here. These are the tombs of the fallen
Moroccans and Senegalese. How deeply homesick and lonely they lie there among all those Flemish
boys! What tragic fate brought them here, so far from their sunny land, in these usually gray, chilly,
wet regions! From which 'douar' did they come, far away, in the burning desert or in the fresh oasis,
those tanned ones, those black ones, to live here, next to the white and blond comrades-in-arms,
whom they did not know and whose language they did not understand? end? Later, when everything
is over, the Belgian and French women will come to pray on the freshly flowered graves of their fallen
husbands and sons; but who will ever kneel at the deserted grave of Mohammed or Ibrahim in Flemish
soil?' Buysse, “From a Lost Summer: XI,” 457.

22. Lewis, The Present of the Colonial Past, 130.

23. Ibid., 102.
24. Baloji, Vocabulaire(s). The categories of ‘silences’ are based on Lange, “Archival Silences,”
47–60.
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228 D. DENDOOVEN

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dr Dominiek Dendooven is a researcher and curator at In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium, research
fellow of the Centre for Political History of the University of Antwerp, and an honorary research fellow at the
United Service Institution of India – Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research in Delhi, and the Centre for
the History of War, Media and Society of the University of Kent. His research focus is the presence of non-
European troops on the Western Front during the First World War: war experiences, consequences and
interaction with local people.

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