Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe men of North Africa had no stake in the European war that erupted in August 1914. Over three hundred thousand Berber and Arab men from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia fought in Belgium and France. Many were wounded in some of the bloodiest engagements on the Western Front. Thousands were taken prisoner. As many as forty‐five thousand never returned home, dying for a colonial power that had reduced them to second‐class citizens in their own homelands. One particular aspect this article will focus on addresses the Muslim soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans who were interned in a special camp where they were recruited to the Ottoman army. Thousands joined the Ottoman Jihad effort that German war planners hoped might provoke uprisings among colonial Muslims in the British, French, and Russian Empires to undermine the Entente war effort. Redeployed in Mesopotamia and the Hijaz, these North African soldiers were as ill‐served by the Ottoman Empire as they had been by the French. North African survivors of World War I resumed their lives as colonial subjects in their home countries under the intensified imperial rule of the interwar years.

Described are the activities of African soldiers from French & British colonies as combat troops in Ethiopia, Burma, & France & as support troops in Europe, North Africa, & South Asia during WWII. The recruitment of these troops is described; the opportunity to obtain vocational training was an inducement to enlist, for men from British Africa. There is little evidence of the political awakening of soldiers on a large scale resulting from the war. Rather, the modernizing aspect of the military experience was more important. Effects of the war experience differed in French Africa, British West Africa, & British East Africa. French African soldiers became a strong pro-French force in the postwar political arena in French colonies because of generous demobilization benefits. British veterans, however, were more likely to be proindependence because of their disappointment with the postwar treatment they received. Military histories, wartime periodicals, fiction, & unpublished dissertations form the bulk of the source material. Modified AA.

A history of service -- African Americans during the Revolution -- African Americans bearing arms -- Fighting for freedom -- Henry O. Flipper and other West Point graduates -- Continued exclusion and segregation -- The first African American Commander in Chief

This article focuses on North African soldiers who served in the French army of occupation in western Germany after its liberation in 1945. Taking as its starting point Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 film, Indigènes, the article contrasts claims the film made about the memorial exclusion of the colonial soldier with his surprising centrality to French accounts of their own military exploits. Using publications issued by the army for its internal readership and archival records of the military occupation's day-to-day activities, the author argues for a modified understanding of the French Republican notion of assimilation that is able to take account of the prolific representation of the North African soldier, and his accommodation, in Cold War Germany.

AbstractThis article explores the social impact of North African soldiers' experiences in French military hospitals during World War I. In particular, it examines improvised "Muslim hospitals" that were opened in order to isolate North Africans from French civilian society. Colonial and military officials believed that North Africans, presumed to be warlike, pathogenic, and promiscuous, could corrupt and be corrupted by the French public. Yet while existing literature tends to highlight the dehumanization of North Africans at the hands of military and medical authorities, this article, drawing from personal correspondence, photographs, and military and medical records, reveals a more ambiguous daily reality. I argue that the individual needs and desires of wounded North Africans and of French nurses, as well as material limitations and contingencies, created spaces for an unprecedented series of humanizing personal encounters. In military-medical "colonies within the metropole," these soldiers found themselves caught between a newfound sense of affinity with the French public and a starker sense of the boundaries of colonial practice.

This dissertation examines the representations of African child soldiers in selected contemporary African narratives with a view to mapping the dominant factors that writers privilege in their depictions of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In its engagement with the African child soldier genre, this study posits that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. Such reductive decontextualizations of war realities, I argue, serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centred on a moral and humanitarian urge for Western intervention. Regardless of whether the casus belli legitimating those wars are genuine or not, those conflicts (and children's involvement in them) are understood within the same racist colonial and ethnocentric stereotypes about Africa that have been privileged in Western thought and the Western moral-political imagination for centuries. Thus, in studying African child soldier narratives, I focus on novels whose settings feature African ethnopolitical conflicts – such as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria – notable for their exploitation of children for military ends. I maintain that these works are significant in the varying ways they reify and challenge the Western ideas of "child" and "childhood," as well as privilege child soldiers as social actors whose intricate makeups disavow being simply understood as innocent victims or irredeemable perpetrators of atrocities. Moreover, I contend that these works also participate in age-old Afropessimistic depictions of a homogenous Africa where it is dangerous to be children, where human lives have no meaning, and where wars are waged senselessly. Overall, my textual-interpretive analyses of the selected novels in this study emphasize the importance of some works belonging to the African child soldier canon to ongoing campaigns against the ...