(SenePlus) – The recent dismissal of Cheikh Oumar Diagne, on December 31, 2024, after describing the riflemen as “traitors”, reveals the deep tensions surrounding the memory of these African soldiers. According to Le Monde, this controversy illustrates the complexity of a colonial heritage which continues to divide Senegalese society.
The figure of the rifleman crystallizes contradictory perceptions. On the one hand, these men are celebrated as heroes who paid a heavy price, notably during the Thiaroye massacre in 1944, where dozens, even hundreds of African soldiers were killed by the French army while they were demanding their return. pay. On the other hand, their participation in colonial repression raises delicate questions: they were deployed to put down uprisings in Madagascar, Morocco, Algeria and Cameroon.
“After independence, they may have been considered in a negative way,” explains historian Martin Mourre to Le Monde. This ambivalence is reflected in the poignant testimony of N’Dongo Dieng, a former rifleman, who evokes his discomfort during his deployment in Algeria, confronted with other Muslims “like us”.
The historian Pape Chérif Bertrand Bassène underlines the need to go beyond simplistic judgments: “Heroes, traitors, victims, it is in any case restrictive to summarize in this way what the riflemen were.” He recalls in particular that some of them were former slaves “bought back” by France, further complicating their status.
The memorial project launched by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, including a commission on Thiaroye and a national memory council, therefore promises to be delicate. “Such a memorial project cannot be done without debates and opposition,” asserts Bassène, citing the paradoxes inherent in this work: the Louis Faidherbe bridge in Saint-Louis, a contested colonial symbol, reminds us that this administrator himself supported on riflemen.
This complexity is found even in the celebration of national heroes. Bassène mentions the case of Fodé Kaba: “For many, he is a great resistance fighter, but in many villages of Casamance, he is an authoritarian man who arrived there through conquest.”
France’s recent recognition of the Thiaroye “massacre”, described by Minister Jean-Noël Barrot as a “gaping wound in our common history”, marks an important step. But it also underlines the need for an in-depth dialogue on this shared history, as Senegal engages in a redefinition of its relations with its former colonial power.
This work of memory, necessarily complex and sometimes contradictory, must, according to Bassène, rely on historians and universities to avoid the pitfalls of a simplifying vision of the past. The challenge is high: to construct a national narrative that does justice to the complexity of this history, without falling into the pitfalls of a solely heroic or accusatory reading.
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