 | When I picture the two named World Wars, I do not immediately conjure images of Africa, so when reading the next section in Hew Strachan's book, The First World War, I found some of the African portions of the war to be interesting. By this time, the war is truly world-encompassing. Nowhere is that more obvious than on the African continent. In 1914 the entire continent of Africa with the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia was under the rule of European powers, principally Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. Of the other colonial powers in Africa, Spain, Italy and Portugal, and Spain remained neutral throughout the war, and Portugal entered the conflict in 1916 principally in order to secure international support for its shaky authority in Africa. |
Sadly, when Africa is involved, things can never be discussed without race becoming an issue. We may never get far enough from the issue of race to say it exists solely in the past. Just consider the thought processes of some white leaders during World War I:
To many whites it seemed self-evident that the use of colonial troops to topple other European powers could only be self-destructive in the long term. War would rekindle the very warrior traditions that colonialism had been designed to extirpate, and ultimately the black trained to use a rifle against a white enemy might turn his weapon on his own white ruler.
While the second world war is the one we think about concerning a superior race, those ideas did not begin in the 1940s.
Smuts was determined that his campaign was going to prove the invincibility of the white man. The South-West African campaign had been an affair of whites only. When the 1915 mixed-race Africans had offered to rise in revolt in support of the South Africans, the later rejected their cooperation for racial reasons.
Still, we will not reduce the Great War to a squabble over racism. Racism is certainly part of the history, but just as the American Civil War was not solely about slavery, the first world war was not fought over African equality. It is not as simple as saying whites didn't like blacks, and they fought to suppress them. The fact remains that some whites feared people with darker skin. Indeed there may have been stereotypes that spread due to the fact that cannibalism did exist among limited groups in Africa. Stories about such could have made whites afraid of being dominated by people who practiced this kind of barbarism. Those types of fear - and continuing ideas that blacks were thought to be generally inferior because of a Noahic curse - could turn races against each other.
Strachan wraps up this section with this:
Strachan wraps up this section with this:
In the eighteenth century Britain and France had fought each other in India and America for the control of continents. This was not why war came to Africa in 1914. The powers did not fight to take territory. Indeed, the most obvious immediate effects were to loosen the holds of empires. Most whites in the colonies feared that the sight of Europeans fighting each other would promote rebellion and resistance. Those fears could only grow as local administrators joined up, and as local forces turned from their policing function to that of confronting an external enemy. But such fears proved exaggerated.
Why put myself through the reading of 340 difficult pages? It is all a part of my preparation for the Teacher Institute at Fort Ticonderoga in July. For more anticipation and reflection on the week-long experience, go to my Fort Ticonderoga page.
