Ct is one thing to criticize from a general point of view the military institution known as the “Senegalese Tirailleurs” and it is another to spit on the remains of each of the hundreds of victims of the massacre of December 1, 1944 in Thiaroye. In the first scenario, we can legitimately claim freedom of judgment which, however, does not give anyone the right to falsify facts patiently reconstructed since the 1940s by specialists from all walks of life. The riflemen insulted by Cheikh Oumar Diagne are not abstract beings, each of them has a name and a story but also numerous descendants who cherish his memory from generation to generation. It is still disturbing to see an adult lash out against the dead with a hatred and rage that can only have some meaning towards the living. It brings to mind vituperations in the silence of a cemetery.
In Thiaroye, African fighters were betrayed by their superiors, murdered and hastily thrown into mass graves. It’s that simple. Does Cheikh Oumar Diagne want to tell us that it was well done for them? He does not go so far as to describe the Senegalese riflemen as subhuman, but the word is undoubtedly not far from his thoughts since he describes them as traitors, victims less of colonial racism than of their greed. If his remarks did not go completely unnoticed, it is only because he is a close collaborator of President Diomaye Faye. Truth be told, it’s hard to take such excessive language seriously. We clearly realized this during Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko’s “General Policy Declaration”. He praised the martyrs of Thiaroye in passing but no MP felt it necessary to return to this controversy during the marathon question-and-answer session which followed.
However Cheikh Oumar Diagne will at least have had the merit of generating numerous articles these days whose authors fortunately want to be much more rational and nuanced than him. However, we may wonder why such a debate on the Senegalese riflemen is taking place so late. For almost a century, theDawn of Blood – title of a rarely taken into account play by Cheikh Faty Faye – especially appealed to African filmmakers, writers and musicians and the relative indifference of historians and politicians allowed the French State, guilty of this mass crime under the the authority of General de Gaulle, to completely control the story, thereby obstructing any real work of memory. Paris was finally forced to confess only three weeks ago and one might have expected that this almost unexpected victory would stimulate the quest for truth on the exact circumstances of the carnage of December 1944 and an increase in consideration for its victims from several African countries. On the contrary, it is the moment that we choose to surf on a slightly chic and less and less modest revisionist wave. So-called international media – it is easy to guess which ones – wanted to take advantage of the language discrepancies of a senior Senegalese official to add to the confusion. It’s fair game. Other reactions, although sincere, measured and entirely respectable, are less easy to understand insofar as they naively serve the purposes of journalists literally on a commissioned mission and for whom tens, even hundreds of thousands of deaths outside of Europe will always count less than the interests of their country.
One might believe from reading certain analysts that the vast majority of the Senegalese riflemen were volunteers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The colonial administration, with its formidable propaganda apparatus and its coercive capacities, most of the time left them no other choice than to go to the front. In the context of the time, disobedience would have been an absurd and suicidal act of personal rebellion since no political or social organization had risen against the recruitment campaigns initiated by the all-powerful masters of the day with the help from their local relays. The corps of Senegalese riflemen was not an African exception since on all continents and in all eras the victors created similar ones to complete the process of conquest. The fact is that everywhere, while waiting for days more favorable to concerted resistance, the colonized had no other choice than to take up arms alongside the colonizer.
What about the Africans who rushed enthusiastically to the recruitment sites, ready to shed their blood for France? They do not deserve our contempt any more. Sembène Ousmane and Frantz Fanon were among these teenagers who almost had to push themselves to offer their lives to the Motherland in the fight against Nazi Germany.
Samba Gadjigo relates a revealing anecdote in this regard in his biography of the famous Senegalese writer-filmmaker. At the start of the war, Sembène, an apprentice mason barely sixteen years old, was slightly injured in the eye by one of his friends in front of a cinema in the Plateau and his first reaction was to exclaim that he unfortunately will no longer be able to be recruited by the Tubaab army because “They don’t accept one-eyed people!” Finally mobilized in 1944 in the 6th Colonial Infantry Regiment stationed in Niger, he will one day admit to having never learned as much about life and about human beings as during this short period under the flags. We know the rest of the story: an exceptional anti-colonialist awareness and a film of rare effectiveness in tribute to those of his comrades who fell in Thiaroye.
Frantz Fanon, to whom all humanity owes so much, would perhaps not have been the same fertile thinker without his participation in the Second World War, during which he was wounded in the chest. Listening only to his precocious anti-fascist instinct at the age of seventeen, he did not wait to be invited to join the Gaullist forces. His family tries in vain to dissuade him and since he does not have enough to pay for the passage to the Dominican Republic – from where he was supposed to go to England – he steals and sells one of his father’s suits! Always the same as himself, he later distanced himself from this experience which had nevertheless allowed him, by his own admission, to better understand the Algerian Revolution. In The wretched of the earthhis master book, he will take up in full African dawn, the famous dramatic poem by Keita Fodéba, dedicated to the drama of Thiaroye and this is certainly not by chance.
A traitor to Africa, Sembène Ousmane? A common bounty hunter, Frantz Fanon, future spokesperson for the Algerian FLN and according to the words of his biographer Adam Shatz “an emblematic figure of national liberation movements in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America” ?
Is it reasonable to expect young African peasants of the 1940s – who were in fact kids – to have a better understanding of the political issues of their time than such powerful minds as Frantz Fanon and Sembène Ousmane? To ask the question is to answer it.
Unless we want to reverse the roles of executioner and victim, December 1, 1944 can only be a day of infamy for those who coldly mowed down nearly four hundred of their comrades with machine guns.
We can therefore only welcome the choice made by the government of Senegal to commemorate the event without waiting for permission from any foreign power. This decision very quickly forced Paris to officially recognize that what happened at the Thiaroye transit camp was indeed a carefully planned massacre and not the repression of a mutiny. It is essential to note that this public gesture of repentance is unprecedented in French post-colonial history.
The tragedy of Thiaroye has never really been forgotten in West Africa but we had to wait sixty-four years of independence for one of our governments to dare to mark the anniversary with a remembrance ceremony worthy of this name. It was in the presence of several of his peers – including the current president of the African Union – that the Senegalese head of state paid an emotional tribute to the riflemen and this communion with our missing was also a great moment of pride. Even if there is still a long way to go so that the commemoration of this African tragedy is not the exclusive affair of the country where it took place, the memorial surge of December 1, 2024 is a clear message from the authorities as to their will to forcefully reiterate the humanity of our compatriots previously dehumanized by the occupier. This lucid reconnection with a painful past is, despite its complexity, a simple necessity of survival.
In the specific case of Thiaroye, the line between executioners and victims is so clearly drawn that such an exercise should not arouse any controversy. It turns out that, strangely enough, he seems to embarrass or annoy some of the riflemen’s grandchildren. It is their right since it takes everything to make a world but it is still curious that we are unleashed with such vehemence against people who have been dead for almost a century in the circumstances that we know. Cheikh Oumar Diagne is fortunately the only one to have indulged in such extravagance.
