Senegal commemorates on Sunday the massacre of dozens of riflemen by French colonial forces in Thiaroye, near Dakar, on December 1, 1944. This 80th anniversary will be as much an act of memory as of sovereignty on the part of the new executive, believes the AFP historian Mamadou Diouf.
Mr. Diouf, interviewed by AFP in New York, accuses France of having sought to remove the massacre from memory.
Q/ The Senegalese executive has decided to reflect its policy of rupture in this anniversary. What to expect?
A/ Commemoration is a political act. It announces a dual sovereignist and pan-African commitment*. The Thiaroye massacre is a form of ideological and political indexation (incrimination). Its exhumation displays a story that France strived to conceal by hindering any reference to the massacre, concealing the truth about the repatriated riflemen, the nature of the movement, the scale and means of the repression, the number of deaths, the identification of graves etc.
The commemoration now constitutes a story and a memorial site, a history shared with the territories where the massacred riflemen came from. It will take place every year.
This is a break with previous regimes. The new regime takes Senegal out of the guilty and complicit silence, firmly imposed by France on the successive regimes (of presidents) Léopold Sédar Senghor, Abdou Diouf, Abdoulaye Wade and Macky Sall.
Q: You chair the commemoration committee. What is his task?
A: The mission of the committee is, on the one hand, to organize an official ceremony, military and civil, at the cemetery and at the military camp located in Thiaroye. It will be chaired by the President of the Republic of Senegal. On the other hand, the committee is responsible for drafting a white paper which will be submitted to the government in April 2025. A work which is not only limited to research carried out by the social sciences and the humanities, but also to literary and artistic production.
Q: What difficulties do you encounter?
A: The main difficulty we face is the intransigence of the French authorities who, until now, in the face of demands from historians, refuse to draw up a list of the archives relating to the massacre, to authorize their consultation, to ‘indicate precisely whether the documents handed over by President Hollande represent all of the archives held by France. It seems to us that for 80 years there has been, in a deliberate manner, a desire to remove the massacre of the public space from deliberation and from the historical and memorial order.
Senegal has just formed a delegation of historians, archivists and documentalists. They must carry out, in the coming weeks, a mission to France to discuss this central question of the archives held by France, their access and digitization for the archive deposits of the countries which supplied riflemen to France . A very precise list of files to be digitized has been drawn up. France made certain offers. Some were accepted, others not.
Q: French President François Hollande promised in 2014 to the Thiaroye cemetery to provide a copy of the entire archives…
A: François Hollande’s promise has been partially kept. He handed over some archives but not all. This is why it is difficult to establish the facts. Some archives remain inaccessible or declared destroyed or non-existent. What historians dispute.
Q: Mr. Hollande spoke of “events (…) simply appalling, unbearable”, of “bloody repression” against “men who wore French uniforms and on whom the French had turned their guns”. What is missing ?
A: As (historian) Armelle Mabon wrote, François Hollande will go down in history as the president who recognized France’s responsibility in the events of Thiaroye, in Senegal, but the account is not there Again.
The French president certainly recognizes that French bullets killed the riflemen. However, recognition of the bloody repression whose victims wore French uniforms seems to have the value of absolution. France will be able to collaborate in the following actions: making available to African countries and access to all archives, recognition of the massacre, the review process and reparations, the identification of mass graves, the contents of the cemetery graves or other burial sites.
Q: Isn’t this likely to turn into a settling of scores with France?
A: The enterprise is an interrogation of a hidden event, of a hindered memory and of a falsified history. This is not an undertaking to condemn France. That we can draw moral consequences from this story, including requests for reparations, is completely normal.
*the riflemen came not only from Senegal but from the French possessions in Africa
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