Senegalese tirailleurs: a book upsets clichés

Many holidaymakers write postcards, even though their number is decreasing irreparably from year to year, to the chagrin of La Poste. Yet simple postcards can tell us about the “big story”. Like those contained in an exciting book, released this spring, With a Weapon and a Grin (with a gun and a smile) by Stephan Likosky. Published by the American Schiffer Publishing, this book offers a panorama of the representation of Africans at the beginning of the 20th century on old postcards and the reorientation of their image during the Der des Der. Indeed, from the Crimean War in 1854-1856, almost half of the French army was of African origin. African contingents took part in the Mexican expedition in 1860, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the conquest of Africa. Nevertheless, Africans were portrayed as savages awaiting civilizing light. In preparation for a possible war with Germany, General Charles Mangin established in 1910 the Black Force arguing that African recruits had natural predispositions: the ability to carry weights over long distances, a less developed nervous system which made it possible to better endure suffering, more obedient and coming from a continent where combat was second nature … More than 140,000 Africans were thus enlisted by the French army, at the cost of thousands of desertions, even of suicides, and more than 30,000 were amazed.

History through images

To allay fears of this presence in public opinion, propaganda campaigns have infantilized African soldiers into grown-up children, with radiant smiles and naive character. “The image of the uncivilized and threatening African male needed to be changed by fighting fierce, loyal to the motherland and without danger to its citizens,” notes Stephan Likosky. Along with the millions of postcards published during the war, satirical cards on the hypocrisy and contradictions of Western civilization from the point of view of the African military also existed. With the war, the barbarian was no longer the African that we previously saw in human zoos, but the German soldier, readily compared to the Huns. Scandalized by the use of African troops on European soil, the Germans reinforced the image of the African as savage and cannibal in their own propaganda with postcards titled The Ruhr Invasion. “During the occupation of the Rhineland after the war, among the French soldiers, 5,000 Africans were deployed. Humiliated, the Germans used the term black shame and Hitler, in My fight, spoke of it as a pollution and negrification of the French population, ”specifies the author. Despite the prevailing racism and nationalism, unions between Africans and Germans took place and their children called Rhineland bastards had to undergo a program of forced sterilization under the Nazi regime.