Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (review)

This book is a detailed study of Malian veterans of the French colonial army (the 'tirailleurs'), their social relationships, their relations with the French and Malian states and the ways in which they are remembered in France and Mali today. As such, it contributes to a burgeoning new literature on the history of the French colonial empire that posits metropole and empire as a single analytic field and then sets out to locate and explore the complex and evolving relationship between French actors and institutions and local actors. In analysing this relationship and the context within which it evolves, Mann explicitly avoids adopting the perspective of either the colonizer or the colonized in order to focus on and capture the dynamics of their interactions. However, this is only one of the stories that Mann tells. Colonial military veterans were often ex-slaves. Thus, while his study of army veterans is set firmly within the racialized context of colonial power relations, he shows how this history is also shaped by an older, pre-colonial history – that of slavery. These two histories are inextricably intertwined and Mann's aim is to demonstrate how, throughout the colonial period, and indeed after independence, 'evolving social forms with pre-colonial roots provided important and evocative resources for understanding and debating politics' (p. 3). Mann's story begins in San, a town in central Mali, from where he follows the fortunes of the sons of soldier families who were recruited into the French army. Many of these men were of slave status, so that the French army represented for them a new world of opportunity and possibility. After the First World War, many of them returned home, where they were regarded by French officials as 'unruly clients'. It was during this period that ex-soldiers, colonial administrators and military officers first elaborated a shared language of demands and counter-demands, claims and accusations, debt and mutual obligation, that was to shape the relationship between France and its African war veterans until the end of the century. The relationship was constantly renegotiated as the local and global context changed. For example, after the Second World War, there was a significant shift in the – still unequal – relationship, as the late colonial state began to court the war veterans as 'friends of France' in the run-up to independence. During this period, Mann also tells a fascinating story of 'military culture on the move', as tirailleurs are sent to France, the Levant, Madagascar, Indochina and North Africa. The unpaid 'blood debt' accrued by France was invoked again in 1996, when a number of African immigrants – the so-called sans-papiers – were expelled by the French government, and even more recently in the controversy over the freezing of African war veterans' pensions. Mann's approach in this work challenges not only the traditional dichotomies between centre and periphery, colonizer and colonized, French and African, but also between colonial and post-colonial, colonization and decolonization, citizen and subject. This has important theoretical implications for the writing of 'colonial' history. But, this is not first and foremost a work of theory. Highly readable, firmly rooted in a precise historical context and solidly based on new empirical research, Mann's work is a testament to, and an outstanding example of, the quality of new historical writing on the French colonial – and post-colonial – empire.