What happened in Africa should not stay in Africa
By Jacques Enaudeau and Kathleen Bomani
Africa is a country | July 30th, 2014
For the next four years, the world is celebrating the Centenary of
World War I, and once again Africa is not invited to the party.
The story of Africans’ involvement in
the Great War is unheard of outside of academia, and thus remains to be
told: the tens of thousands of African lives lost at home and abroad,
defending the interests of foreign powers and the lives of complete
strangers; the forced recruitment of African soldiers to fight Europe’s
war, and of African workers to replace the labour force gone to the
front; the battles between colonies pitting Africans against each other
on their own soil; the reshaping of Africa’s borders and inner workings
after the war under new rulers.
It was supposed to be the “war to end war” and yet, by the proxy of
colonial empires, it created war where no one cared for it, dragging an
estimated two million Africans into the conflict, originating from
Algeria to South Africa. Such bitter irony is lost on today’s France,
Britain, Germany, Belgium and Portugal, all colonial powers who sat at
the Berlin conference in 1885 to finalise the scramble for Africa.
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