Mr. Senghor is the only son of M’Bap Senghor, killed on December 1, 1944 while claiming his arrears of pay for his participation in the Second World War.
French authorities at the time admitted the deaths of at least 35 people. But several historians put forward a much higher number of victims, up to several hundred. The whereabouts of the fallen soldiers have never been precisely revealed.
“Until three years ago, before I lost my sight, I went every year to pray at the Thiaroye cemetery. I learned that riflemen are buried there in a common grave, near a baobab tree. , but I don’t know anything about it,” explains Biram Senghor, retired gendarmerie chief warrant officer, to AFP.
“France was cowardly. It must apologize, pay damages to the people it massacred and raise them to the rank of martyrs,” said this father, dressed in a sky-blue boubou and a white scarf, in his house in Diakhao, a peaceful town with sandy streets in west-central Senegal.
The man has poor hearing and uses a cane to walk, feeling for obstacles in his path, his face blocked by dark glasses, before sitting down on a plastic chair under a veranda.
“I want my father to be compensated. I want support from the Senegalese authorities”, who invited him to the official ceremony on Sunday in Thiaroye, he insists, rosary in hands.
– “Crime sur crime” –
“Biram Senghor is the only living descendant” known to those executed at Thiaroye, French historian Armelle Mabon told AFP.
Mobilized in September 1940, a year after the start of the conflict, M’Bap Senghor quickly left Senegal for Europe, says his son. “I was not yet weaned,” adds the man who, on civil status, was “born around 1938.”
At the beginning of November 1944, in the last months of the conflict, more than 1,600 riflemen, who had come from several French colonies in West Africa in 1940 to participate in the fighting, embarked from France to be brought back by boat to Dakar.
They arrived more than two weeks later in Senegal, where they demanded payment of their arrears of pay, and various bonuses and combat allowances. Some refuse to return home without being paid.
On December 1, 1944 around 9:30 a.m., the riflemen, gathered at the Thiaroye military camp, about fifteen km from Dakar, were disarmed by soldiers of the French colonial army then killed, notably with machine guns, according to historians.
France, which owed them four years of arrears, not only “refused to pay”, but also “massacred” them, deplores Mr. Senghor.
“It’s a crime after a crime,” denounces the man who does not know if his father was one of the soldiers “killed in their barracks” or who were “finished off in the hospital”, as historians have said.
Among the executed riflemen, six were recognized in July as “dead for France”, a list which “can be completed as soon as the exact identity of other victims has been established”, according to the French secretariat of state responsible for Veterans and Memory.
Among them, four were Senegalese, including M’Bap Senghor.
– “Disgusted” –
“This recognition disgusts me,” fumes his son Biram, who has fought for decades to assert his rights as the son of a victim of the massacre.
He remembers having, in 1948 and 1953, accompanied his mother and an uncle to Fatick, a neighboring town, summoned by colonial officials about his father. Without result.
After the massacre, M’Bap Senghor “was considered ‘non-returned’ (disappeared) then a deserter”, writes Ms Mabon in her work, “Thiaroye Massacre. History of a State Lie”, published in November.
His death was not officially recognized until nine years later, in 1953, she said.
In 1973, Biram wrote to Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor to ask him to help him obtain compensation, but encountered a taboo. “He did not answer me. His chief of staff will tell me (later) that (my) letter is too delicate.”
He was not discouraged and wrote in 1982 to French President François Mitterrand. He was promised research, but “it led to nothing,” he grumbles.
In 2013, Ms. Mabon, her mentor in this affair, found her father’s file in the archives. “She contacted me,” he said, and since then, “we have continued this fight with France.”
