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

During the first six decades of the twentieth century, France recruited from its West African colonies more than 750,000 soldiers, who served in garrisons throughout the French Empire, as combatants in two world wars, and as French auxiliaries in a series of midcentury national liberation struggles, most notably in Indo-China and Algeria. In his provocative, path-breaking and compelling study of the collective fate of these Native Sons, Gregory Mann assesses the evolving character of these veterans' postservice relationship with the French state throughout the twentieth century. In so doing, he explores how the discourse about debt and reciprocal obligation—variously understood in republican France and in postslavery and postcolonial Mali (the point of departure for his study)—has been transmitted and transmuted among veterans and ultimately appropriated by African immigrants (sans papiers) in France over multiple generations.

This ambitious undertaking is grounded in a wide-ranging synthesis of recent scholarship—about tirailleurs, slaves, migrants, French colonialism, postindependence Africa, oral-history methodology, and other topics—discussed in detail in the introduction. Drawing on a combination of archival and oral sources, Mann embarks upon his survey of African veterans from a variety of viewpoints. He commences in the Sahelian town of San, a predominantly Bamana (Bambara) community that has long been a source of military recruits. Recounting the oral histories of two brothers, Kérétigi Traore and Nianson Coulibaly, career soldiers (anciens militaries, as distinguished from short-term anciens combattants) who served in the French Army between 1907 and 1943 and were consecutive presidents of the San veterans' association until the 1960s, he illustrates a salient component of his thesis. Of servile (wolosow) origin, their Bamana forebears unsuccessfully resisted Futaanke conquest before succumbing in turn to the French and being incorporated into the Colonial Army (la colonial), primarily composed of slave soldiers (tonjonw in Bamanankan) in the late nineteenth century. A generation later, these brothers, and Kérétigi's son Sékou, served France in both world wars and extensively overseas, experienced repatriation to Sudanese colonial society after a 25-year absence from San, underwent the turbulent transition to independence during the 1950s and the vicissitudes of the Malian postcolonial order, which in Sékou's case led in 1968 to a sentence of life imprisonment, after Sékou was implicated in an unsuccessful coup. In so doing, such men exemplified a martial mentality, expressed in a continually evolving language of mutual obligation, which traced its etymological roots in large measure to Bamana patron–client historical traditions and corollary French concepts emphasizing duty, fealty, and prowess at arms, articulated in the parlance of many officers of la colonial.

Mann develops these themes more fully in subsequent chapters. Addressing the unruly aftermath of the first mass mobilization of African soldiers in 1914–1918, he discusses the emergence of veterans as a distinct group in interwar colonial society, replete with their own associations, job opportunities for anciens militaires, exemption (at least in theory) from the "native" administrative justice (indigénat), and, perhaps the most potent manifestation of reciprocal obligation, the right to a pension (retraite du combattant), accorded to African combat veterans in conjunction with their French counterparts after 1930. In chapter three, Mann assesses the experiences of the generation of veterans who sustained defeat in 1940 and participated in the liberation of France in 1944. After ordering the massacre of returning African POWs at Thiaroye in 1944, French officialdom reversed course during the postwar years, dispensing patronage to veterans in an effort to create a conservative counterweight to the growing power of African political parties and, when this failed to avert independence, froze veterans' pensions at 1959 levels through the passage of the infamous Article 71. Mann explores the distinctive culture of la coloniale, traversing boundaries of time and space to nodal points of colonial military memory (including, for instance, war memorials in Fréjus, garrison towns such as Kayes, and the interwar military hospital...