Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance by Eric T. Jennings (review)

A historian at the University of Toronto, Eric Jennings has earlier written on the Vichy regime in the French colonies. This time he lends his talents to the Gaullist war effort in French Equatorial Africa (FEA) and Cameroon. Free French Africa in World War II provides a clear path to understanding both the voluntary and coerced contributions of Africans in the successful resistance of the Free French against Vichy France and its Italian and German mentors. Because the military details have already been examined in the literature, Jennings effectively concentrates on the political — and especially the economic — contribution of FEA. One of the least endowed and developed corners of the French colonial empire before the war, FEA, which Jennings aptly labels a “colonial Cinderella,” provided manpower vital not only to the military effort but also the labour required to extract wild rubber, gold, and rutile, a derivative of titanium dioxide, to Free France and its Allies.

Gaullist Africa was, in Jennings’s view, “dysfunctional,” replete with tensions between pro-Vichy elements and Gaullists. It also had a conservative and largely racist colonial civil service that desperately needed reforms, which, according to Jennings, only began to be articulated at the Brazzaville Conference of 1944. Although the military paid lip service to the principles of a fair recruitment system based on an equitable burden shared throughout the colony, in practice many men were delivered by African chiefs in much the way that they drafted forced labour for corvée work on roads and other infrastructure. Conscription was not permitted in Cameroon, a League of Nations “trusteeship” territory, yet thousands of its youth served as “volunteers.” The Bataillons de Marche preserved the designation of Cameroon, Chad, or Congo, but they were constantly reconfigured, making the paper trail of these units undecipherable.

The military effort can be viewed in two phases, the first from 1940 to 1943, when early campaigns offered up light casualties and surprising victories at Kufra, the Fezzan, and Bir Hakeim. The propaganda value of victory, however small on the larger Allied stage, gave French President Charles de Gaulle the means to restore pride and dignity to France. Casualties were much higher after 1943, during arduous and dangerous fighting of African units in helping defeat the Axis in Italy and liberating parts of France from Corsica all the way to the coast near Royan by April of 1945.

Service conditions for African soldiers were harsh. They endured shortages of equipment, from arms to footwear. Boredom, long stretches of inactivity, and poor or strange diet plagued African troops and, like soldiers everywhere, brawls and disorderly behaviour did occur. Also, bad morale developed through such arbitrary decisions as the “whitening” of troops when African units were suddenly ordered to turn over their uniforms and equipment to new, white youth from the maquis.

The legacy of five years of warfare and economic hardship took its toll. The colonial regime in FEA did not invent coercion but did rely on it. Still, there were limits that the colonial state had to accept. Central Africans could always resort to fleeing across borders to escape the military or labour recruiter. In the post-war period, the impact of militarization in FEA was an important element as military service was valued in both public and political spheres. The most notorious case was that of Jean- Bedel Bokassa. He became general, then president, and finally emperor of Central African Republic after a 1965 coup. Poorly educated and barely literate, his record as a corporal in a campaign at Brazzaville in 1940 received recognition and acclaim by a Free French army anxious to publicize heroism. Later, however, a myth developed that he had played a heroic role in the liberation of Provence. Continued French support for the scandalous and corrupt Bokassa can be directly traced to the promotion of this jumped-up non-commissioned officer.

Jennings concludes his study by arguing persuasively that the...