Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (review)

David Killingray's latest book is sober and judicious but also thrilling and dramatic. The sobriety is revealed in his overall assessments. He states clearly the view of those historians who believe that experience of the war radicalized or modernized African soldiers so that they returned to play a great role in anti-colonial movements. But he himself finds that 'most' Africans had not conceived of Europeans as superhuman before the war and that seeing them afraid, ignorant, captive and dead did not revolutionize African ideas about their rulers. He finds that 'most' of the so-called 'white' women with whom African soldiers remember sleeping were Egyptian or Anglo-Indian. He finds that 'most' African fighting men, while resenting delays in demobilization and only too well aware of ungenerous compensation when they returned home, wanted no more than to regain or better a place in African society. Nationalist orators made much more of their wartime sufferings and bravery than soldiers did themselves.

These are sensible and well-founded assessments and stated with a proper concern to differentiate between different parts of Africa. But if they make it seem that this great upheaval did not, after all, upheave very much, this impression is countered by the many parts of the book in which Killingray quotes African testimony. The overall judgements are, so to speak, sociological propositions based on general experience. The African testimony, by contrast, is intensely individual, taking the form of dramatic narrative. Killingray quotes very extensively, drawing on the research of the very large number of doctoral students who have studied aspects of the war as well as upon his own interviews. This is very much a 'voiced' book and many of the voices are extraordinary in their recall, their colour, their mastery of narrative. The book would make a wonderful radio documentary and provide material for dozens of plays.

The people who are revealed – as Killingray remarks, all except one 'other ranks' and with no women among them – are undoubtedly upheaved men. They were heaved away from their own families and out of their own societies; they were thrown into extreme environments of deserts and forests; they were dumped with hitherto unknown enemies and left to invent scarifying identities, having to answer their fears of unmitigated Japanese ferocity by acting out their own pretend cannibal barbarity; they were relied upon to carry the uncarryable through the impassable and to survive without relief supplies where no other soldier could. Many whites thought that in becoming soldiers Africans were regaining communication with their own feral and savage nature. In fact African soldiers were often confronted with dimensions of human depravity hitherto unimaginable to them. After the war some of them returned like ghosts to families and villages who had not heard of them for years, thought they were dead and could sense they were changed. It is unfortunate, as Killingray remarks, that the one subject about which we know almost nothing is the religious experience of African soldiers. All we can do is to speculate what eschatalogies could match the experience of the Burmese forest; what Protestantisms could engender military self-discipline; what rituals of healing and ancestorhood could reintegrate returning ghosts.

And all the while both Killingray's sensible sociology and his inflamed oral history challenge his title. In what sense were these soldiers 'Fighting for Britain'? On page 214 Killingray quotes Waruhui Itote, later the Mau Mau 'General China'. Itote remembered 1943 'in the Kalewa trenches on the Burma front' where a British soldier told him: 'I don't understand you Africans who are out here fighting. What do you think you are fighting for? … At least if I die in this war … I know it will be for my country. But if you're killed here what will your country have gained?' As Itote wrote, 'What he'd told me never left my mind.' Of course, Killingray's point here – and Itote...