His father was one of the many riflemen massacred by the French colonial army in 1944 in Thiaroye, near Dakar. A few days before the 80th anniversary of the killing, Senegalese Biram Senghor, 86, the only known living descendant of the victim, is demanding an apology and compensation.
M'Bap Senghor was killed on December 1, 1944 while claiming his back pay for his participation in the Second World War.
“I want my father to be compensated”
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.
“France was cowardly. She must apologize, pay damages to the people she massacred and raise them to the rank of martyrs,” said this father.
“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. 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.
“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.
In 1973, Biram wrote to Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor to ask him to help him obtain compensation, but encountered a taboo. “He didn’t 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, Armelle Mabon, his mentor in this affair, found his father's file in the archives. “She contacted me,” he said, and since then, “we have continued this fight with France.”
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