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

The Oscar-nominated film Indigenes introduced moviegoers to the story of North African soldiers from the former French empire who helped liberate France from Nazi occupation during World War II. The film gives audiences a sense of the sacrifices made by colonial soldiers, and hints at the debt France owes them for these sacrifices. The film focuses on the North African experience, but West African recruits also fought for France in both world wars. A small but rich historiography on the West African soldiers known collectively as the Tirailleurs Senegalais has illuminated their origins, contributions, and struggles for compensation and fair treatment from an often disinterested France.¹ With the subject having attracted so much attention in the last two decades, one might wonder what remains to be said about it.

Gregory Mann demonstrates in Native Sons that there are still many pressing questions to be answered at this particular intersection of West African and French colonial histories. Native Sons extends and challenges the existing literature, and also analyzes the historical roots of France’s debt to its African veterans, made so visible by Boucharem’s film. He focuses on the experiences of ancien militaire, or career soldiers, from the present-day nation of Mali, tracing them through their far-flung wartime experiences in France, the Mediterranean, and Asia. As Mann himself remarks, “telling a story of mobility wile remaining rooted in a particular place is no simple task” (24). He takes this opportunity to make an original argument about how military culture provided stability for soldiers as they tried to assert economic control over their families back in West Africa, and to keep their relationships alive over great distances and the formidable obstacles of space and time

Mann argues that to truly understand how different groups in contemporary French politics discuss immigration, we must understand that the terms of the debate are products of a contentious political language of mutual if uneven obligation, the sources of which lie deep in West African history and on the very surface of the colonial relationship between France and Mali (2). The French recruited their colonial soldiers from enslaved groups, following on from nineteenth-century local African practices of military vassalage and household slavery. In Malian social and military history, the practice and consequences of soldiering cannot easily be disentangled from the social aftermath of slavery and subordination (29). A specific language of mutual obligation that informed French-African colonial and post-colonial relations throughout the twentieth-century grew out of this regional history of slavery, patronage, and clientship. The recurring theme in this political language is the idea of the blood debt, whereby West African sacrifices in the name of the French empire should have secured the veterans and their families’ long-term tangible benefits in the form of monetary compensation, political power, and prestige. This binding obligation between African soldiers and their French officers was often disappointed by French metropolitan and colonial officials. For example, in 1960 Article 71 of the French Finance Law froze base pension rates for former French nationals, directly affecting the long-term value of veterans’ pensions in newly independent Mali (142). These past injustices continue to animate lively discussion on the fraught relationship between France and its former African colonies. Since at least the late 1990s, West Africans and West African immigrants living as sans-papiers in France have become quite comfortable using the rhetoric of the blood debt in their claim to political belonging in France.

Mann’s five finely textured chapters explore different registers of this political language and how it inflected the lives of Mali veterans over time, informing their political aspirations and decisions at local and supra-local levels. He begins with a fascinating portrait of how two generations of a Malian soldiering family of slave origins used their military service as a route to political power with differing degrees of success, and in different phases of Mali’s colonial and independence-era history. This family...