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Bibliography
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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6 - Health
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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Growing interest in the history of military medicine, colonial medicine in Africa, and African militaries has not translated into a rich historiography on the health of Africa's colonial armies. With limited primary sources, excellent pioneering social histories of African colonial soldiers recognize the importance of medical services and health but vary in attention devoted to this theme. A recent study of military medicine in Britain's late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century West India Regiments (WIR), initially recruited from enslaved and conscripted West African men and eventually men of African descent in the Caribbean, traces the evolution of racial thought among white British authorities who initially saw black soldiers as almost superhuman but then highlighted their alleged medical vulnerabilities. Most histories of Britain's West African colonial army of the late nineteenth and twentieth century neglect health as a distinct subject as they appeared before the advent of military or colonial medical history or lacked appropriate sources. Nevertheless, in West Africa, a region popularly known as “the White Man's Grave,” the preservation of health among military personnel represented a crucial factor in extending and maintaining British colonial rule. Archival documents and memoirs indicate that Britain's West African army helped pioneer Western-style medical facilities in the region, as it rigorously pursued two sequential health-related objectives among its European and African personnel. While efforts to minimize the impact of tropical diseases during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enjoyed considerable success, the subsequent campaign against sexually transmitted diseases from the 1920s to 1940s proved a dismal failure. As such, the engagement of Britain's West African soldiers with the evolving colonial health system comprised a significant part of their daily military experience and of the region's colonial military culture.
Tropical Disease and Military Health during the “Scramble” for West Africa
During the formative years of Britain's West African colonial army, tropical diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and various gastrointestinal problems represented the force's overriding health concern. The prevalence of tropical disease had long restricted European colonial penetration of the region's interior. Throughout the early and mid-nineteenth centuries, tropical disease seriously weakened British military garrisons and hindered operations along the West African coast .
Abbreviations
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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11 - Former Soldiers
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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It is difficult to measure the impact of former colonial soldiers on British West Africa. During the colonial era, most soldiers served the usual minimum term of six years in the army and then returned to civilian society, thus disappearing from the military archival record. Over the whole colonial era, hundreds of thousands of men served in Britain's West African army, yet it is almost impossible to systematically trace them after discharge. Nevertheless, the popular notion that West African veterans of the Second World War returned home to continue their struggle for freedom and democracy through the nationalist movement obscures a more significant and empirically demonstrable impact of former colonial soldiers in the region. Throughout the period of British rule, a significant number of West African ex-soldiers continued their old military role of maintaining British control, becoming junior functionaries and enforcers for different parts of the colonial state and economy. These former soldiers turned colonial agents were usually those who had served longer-than-average terms in the army, fought in wars, received decorations, achieved promotion, and/or performed well. The most seasoned soldiers with around twenty years’ service were still in their forties upon discharge and usually had wives, young children, and extended family members to support. The army became an avenue into a second career. While these ex-soldiers possessed experience, skills, and proven reliability useful to the colonial state, British officials and officers clearly felt obliged to help them gain suitable and respectable paid positions. British officers in West Africa regularly circulated notices to civilian government departments about upcoming discharges of long-serving soldiers, recommending their employment in forestry, colonial police, native police, courts, prisons, and as uniformed messengers. At times, officers loaned travel money to recently discharged NCOs enabling them to take up government employment in other parts of the country or other territories. Similarly, colonial officials often wrote to the West African military looking for soon-to-retire African NCOs with supervisory and training experience to fill key positions.In colonial West Africa, a former soldier emerging from a successful military career and still physically fit represented a valuable and scarce human resource.
Contents
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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1 - Slave Origins
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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The most obvious connection of the early British West African army of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to older West African military systems and ways of warfighting revolved around engagement with the institution of slavery. The mobilization of slave soldiers embodied a common feature of precolonial West African military culture. While the definitions and military roles of West African slave soldiers varied over time and place, the main advantage in utilizing these unfree troops was their personal allegiance to their leader-owner, whether a centralizing ruler or an upstart merchant prince. At the same time, arming enslaved people posed risks, such as the possibility that they could rebel and form their own independent groups or even found new states. Examples of slave soldiers in West African precolonial history are legion. Increasing involvement in the transatlantic slave trade expanded the employment of slave soldiers in West African coastal powers such as Asante, Dahomey, and the Yoruba states. In addition, and building on the institution of slave soldiery in the early Muslim states of the Middle East and North Africa, the great Muslim empires of West Africa's interior Sahel zone, such as Mali, Songhay, and Bornu, relied heavily on slave troops for their cavalry armies. Nineteenth-century jihadist states in the West African hinterland, particularly the Sokoto Caliphate with its massive enslaved population engaged in plantation labor, made extensive use of slave soldiers as cavalrymen, musketeers, and commanders. It appears hinterland Muslim men sometimes served as specialist slave soldiers in traditionalist powers located closer to the West African coast. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Oyo Empire, in what is now western Nigeria, operated a cavalry force dependent on Muslim slave soldiers from the Sahel to the north who knew how to handle horses and whose religion separated them from the rest of local Yoruba society. When the British attacked the slave port of Lagos in 1851, enslaved Hausa from the interior defended the town. Visiting what is now western Nigeria in 1861, British explorer Richard Burton observed, “The upper Yoruba country, with Hausa and Burnu, supplies an admirable material for native soldiers.”
Introduction
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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Like Britain's “Tommy” or America's “G. I. Joe,” the West African men who enlisted in Britain's colonial army gained popular nicknames in their region. The most common was “Waffs,” which was taken from the abbreviation for West African Frontier Force (WAFF), later renamed Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF), comprising the umbrella military structure in British West Africa during the early and mid-twentieth century. Soldiers from the Sierra Leone–based West African Regiment (WAR), the only locally recruited British Army unit in the region to stand outside the WAFF framework, received the moniker “Wars.” Other territorially oriented labels included Sierra Leone's “Frontiers” originating with the territory's Frontier Police of the 1890s, which morphed into part of the WAFF and the Gold Coast's or Ghana's “Abongo” derived from a popular Second World War–era army marching song about fictional soldier Corporal Abongo Frafra. While most of these nicknames disappeared along with the colonial titles of military institutions, Abongo continued to hold meaning in postcolonial Ghana where it became a derogatory term for uneducated men who became soldiers due to limited opportunities. The fact that people in British colonial West Africa referred to soldiers by these nicknames speaks to the military as a well-known element of society at that time but also to the existence of stereotypes about men in uniform. Nevertheless, the troops who bore these sobriquets have become obscure figures in West African and military history.
The men known as Waffs and Wars, Frontiers, and Abongos comprised Britain's largest military force in colonial sub-Saharan Africa. During peacetime, the Nigeria Regiment alone equaled or outnumbered the entire King's African Rifles (KAR), an equivalent force based in Britain's East African colonies. With London's thrifty approach to empire and the prevalence of tropical disease in West Africa mitigating against the large-scale employment of metropolitan troops, British colonial conquest and military occupation in the region depended heavily on locally recruited soldiers. From Britain's large and populous colonies like Nigeria and the Gold Coast to the smaller territories of Sierra Leone and the Gambia, West African troops, led by a few British officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), maintained colonial rule. Britain's West African soldiers suppressed local uprisings and discouraged potential rebels, and their uniformed and armed presence served as an important symbol of colonial authority.
Frontmatter
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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Appendix: Biographies
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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Since colonial authored documents offer scant information about the individual soldiers who made up Britain's West African army, these mini-biographies seek to illustrate the life experience of a few of these almost forgotten men. In the absence of detailed service records for most West African military personnel, those who received special awards or punishments are usually the only ones who stand out from the almost anonymous rank-and-file. Reflecting a variety of territories and periods, the following soldiers represent examples of the tiny number whose names appear more than once in colonial military records or other documents.
Bawa Yawuri: Bush-Fighter Turned Imam
Around 1870 Bawa Yawuri was born in Ilorin, the most northerly Yoruba town in western Nigeria conquered by Fulani jihadists from further north about fifty years earlier. The name Bawa Yawuri indicates Hausa ethnicity and family origins further north. At some point, he traveled around 220 miles south from Ilorin to the British coastal enclave of Lagos with the circumstances of this movement remaining unknown. At the start of the 1890s, when he was around twenty years old, Bawa enlisted in the Lagos Constabulary, previously known as the Armed Hausa Police. He was a Muslim like most of the other soldiers in that Lagos-based colonial paramilitary formation, which included an imam and Arabic teacher, and generously accommodated Muslim religious life. In 1892, as a young soldier, Bawa participated in the British colonial subjugation of the Yoruba state of Ijebu about sixty miles northeast of Lagos. Bawa was among 165 troops from the Lagos Constabulary who joined 150 GCC and one hundred Sierra Leone– based WIR soldiers as well as allies from the nearby Yoruba state of Ibadan for the attack on Ijebu. At the Battle of Imagbon, in mid-May, Bawa and the other colonial troops fought their way through thick forest and waded across the forty-yard-wide Osun River under enemy fire to defeat the seven thousand to eight thousand–strong Ijebu army. Like the other soldiers from Lagos, Bawa may have hesitated to cross the river given a rumor that the Ijebu people had made a human sacrifice to secure assistance from the river goddess Osun—or perhaps it was enemy bullets that discouraged them.
9 - Mutiny
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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Greatly feared by military commanders, mutinies represent soldiers’ revolts against military authority, ranging from passive strikes where troops refuse orders to violent insurrections. Throughout the history of Britain's West African colonial army, African soldiers staged a series of protests characterized by their officers as mutinies. The occurrence of such incidents clearly formed a pattern. While mutinies happened more commonly during the early years of Britain's West African army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another spate of these episodes took place during the Second World War and in the 1950s, just a few years before the withdrawal of British colonial rule. They did not take place during the interwar era of the 1920s and early 1930s when British colonialism in Africa seemed at its most secure. Mutinies happened during periods of war and peace and involved troops from all Britain's West African territories of Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. In addition, it is almost certain that many more of these disturbances took place among British West African forces than indicated by the available evidence. Authorities covered up some events, the records of some inquiries and military trials are lost, oral histories point to incidents for which there are few if any accessible official records, and some archival documents allude to episodes for which there are no detailed accounts. Nevertheless, the frequency of mutinies among Britain's West African soldiers appears not much different from those of troops from American, British, or Canadian armies of the same period. During the American Civil War (1861–65), for instance, federal and confederate forces experienced over two hundred different episodes defined as mutiny by officers.
In explaining soldiers’ protests, a recent study of army mutinies in the states of postcolonial Central and West Africa found that such incidents did not represent simple acts of indiscipline. These episodes differed from the military coups that became common in parts of independent Africa in that mutineers did not aim to take over the state. Rather, mutinies usually began over soldiers’ specific material grievances and/or perceived injustices that were symbolic of larger problems within the military; they served as desperate attempts by frustrated troops, ignored or blocked by their immediate superiors, to communicate with higher military leadership.
2 - Identities: Nigeria and Ghana
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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The history of modern African ethnic identities is much debated. The colonial view of African ethnic affiliations like the Yoruba of Nigeria or the Kikuyu of Kenya (often uncritically called “tribes”) as primordial and static seemed confirmed by the prevalence of ethnic politics in independent Africa. According to this view, which became widely popular in Africa and elsewhere, specific ethnic groups have always possessed their own special traits and loyalties, differentiating them from other broad communities. Nevertheless, and inspired by wider interest in the making of traditions and identities, Africanist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s revised this understanding, presenting modern African ethnic affiliations and stereotypes as relatively recent constructs of the colonial era, resulting from official divide-and-rule policies, missionary education, and the activities of Westernized African elites. Recognizing that broad African linguistic and cultural groups existed prior to colonization, these constructivist scholars maintained that precolonial African identities were complex and multilayered, and that wider ethnic groupings and rivalries only became important from the colonial period onward. Such revision appeared particularly influential in the study of Southern and East African history but less so with regard to West Africa. From around the 2000s, however, other scholars questioned the recent invention theory, claiming that broad African ethnic identities and values around them comprised important concepts well before colonial conquest.This academic disagreement may never achieve resolution given the limited evidence relating to Africa before colonial conquest and the amorphous nature of the concept of identity.
Debates over the development of African ethnic identities extend to the continent's military history. Some of the most well-known African ethnic stereotypes revolve around martial or warrior reputation. In colonial Africa, given the primordial view of African ethnic identities, European officials believed that specific indigenous communities possessed inherent martial qualities and consequently produced effective soldiers. The French in West Africa preferred to enlist the supposedly more “civilized” Sahelian peoples such as the Tukolor and Bambara and were initially dubious of Wolof martial abilities given that group's history of interaction with Europeans in Senegal. Men from the southern coastal forest of West Africa such as southern Cote d’Ivoire, so French authorities imagined, were too primitive and physically weak for soldiering.
Map
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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5 - Symbols
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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Scholars easily dismiss the history of military visual symbols such as uniforms, badges, flags, and ceremonies as inconsequential and antiquarian. However, symbols like these have long constituted a feature of soldiers’ daily experience and have played an important role in forging military identities and military culture. In South Asia, the British colonial reinvention of Indian military identities during the nineteenth century revolved partly around the introduction of new visual elements like insignia and uniforms. Similarly, Britain's West African army of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries used visual symbols to nurture a colonial military culture that maintained the colonial state. Soldiers from colonial Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia wore symbols, carried symbols, participated in rituals around symbols, and represented symbols themselves. British officers and officials invented these visual symbols and the traditions associated with them in a program to build an imagined military community within West Africa's colonial society. Such symbols conveyed ideas about military service designed to enhance soldiers’ morale and therefore enhance military effectiveness, but these devices also said something about the West African soldier's position within regional colonial society and the larger British Empire. Within the context of interpretations of empire, it is possible to understand these symbols as concurrently “orientalist” in that they presented an exoticized image of West Africans as an inferior and racialized “other” and “ornamentalist” in that they reproduced a socially hierarchical empire and promoted affinities between colony and metropole. These military symbols included uniforms, military bands and music, insignia and unit flags (or “colours”), and the involvement of West African soldiers in public spectacles particularly in Britain. Regrettably, and typical of the history of colonial Africa, Britain's West African soldiers did not leave behind their own accounts of how they viewed these symbols, leaving historians to depend on evidence authored by colonial observers.
Uniforms
Uniforms comprise a central element of military life. Broadly speaking, uniforms encourage the “militarizing of civilian bodies” transforming “individual strength into collective power.” The enormous economic and technological resources mobilized by governments to manufacture uniforms speak to their centrality in developing militaries. Looking at the British example of the early 1800s, Scott Hughes Myerly states, “The uniform was the army's trademark and symbol—a distinctive dress that immediately set the soldier off from everyone else.”
West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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Explores the history of Britain's colonial army in West Africa, especially the experiences of ordinary soldiers recruited in the region.
4 - Religion
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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Closely related to identity, religion represents a popular topic in African History. For West Africa, the many important and well-studied themes include the arrival of Islam via medieval trans-Saharan trade routes, missionary Christianity along the coast and Muslim revitalization movements in the interior during the nineteenth century, religious syncretism involving traditional beliefs, the rise of independent African churches during the colonial era, and postcolonial religious extremism. However, the religious dynamic within the colonial and postcolonial militaries of West Africa, a region where militaries have played a central role in postcolonial politics and warfare, lacks similar scholarly attention. David Killingray, groundbreaking historian of the British colonial military in West Africa, highlighted that “next to nothing is known about the religious experiences of African soldiers.” The root of this problem is that European officers, structurally and socially distant from the African rank-and-file, authored the available evidence. This alienation was most acute when it came to the potentially controversial and fundamentally personal subject of religion. Making the most of limited primary sources, social histories of African troops in other colonial militaries contain short sections on aspects of their religious history. In British East and Central Africa, the KAR evolved from a primarily Muslim to a mostly Christian force with officers using religion as a disciplinary tool. Reflecting broader change, African police and soldiers in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) initially practiced traditional beliefs, but by the 1940s most were Christians working in a Christian institutional ethos with a few becoming prominent clergy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germany's mainly Muslim African soldiery expanded Islam across German East Africa provoking resentment among European Christian missionaries. French colonial authorities attempted to ensure loyalty among Muslim African troops by facilitating religious observance and appointing imams to counter First World War German and Ottoman propaganda. French officers also organized army pilgrimages to Mecca during the 1950s to boost the morale of Muslim West African soldiers fighting Muslim insurgents in Algeria Nevertheless, the religious history of Britain's locally recruited West African army remains obscure. Despite limited sources, it is clear that religion comprised a fundamental but constantly changing feature of military culture and life in British West Africa. The point becomes clear by examining West African troops’ religious affiliations, religious observance in the colonial army, and the military appointment of Christian chaplains and Muslim imams.
Conclusion
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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Informing the experience of ordinary soldiers and their families, the military culture of Britain's West African army evolved through periods of instability and decentralization separated by a few decades of stabilization and centralization. During its formative years in the late nineteenth century, Britain's West African military was unstable and dispersed, comprising separate paramilitary units made up of many men who had escaped enslavement and enslaved men indirectly or directly purchased by British agents at Cape Coast, Lagos, or interior slave markets who were transformed into colonial soldiers. This situation often put the early British paramilitary forces at odds with local West African elites who lost their labor to the colonial army, and slaves who had become soldiers exacted revenge on former oppressors both real and imagined. In this period, British officials and ordinary West Africans applied the term “Hausa soldiers” to the men of diverse hinterland origins (and usually some past association with slavery) who joined Britain's West African constabularies in what is now Nigeria and Ghana. The term “Hausa soldier” did not exist in Sierra Leone, although some of the same processes related to formerly enslaved men were evident. At the same time, men from other communities enlisted in these colonial forces, including large numbers of Yoruba from western Nigeria and almost every ethnic group of Sierra Leone.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Muslim troops dominated the ranks in Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and the Gambia (and formed a sizable minority of those in Sierra Leone), a simplified and adaptive form of Islam developed in Britain's West African army supported by military imams and occasionally Arabic teachers and mosques. While a racial hierarchy dominated these colonial paramilitaries all led by British commanders, a few prominent “native officers” helped with recruiting and provided local knowledge important for military operations. Although similar to the institution of “native officers” in British colonial India, there were far fewer such leaders in West Africa. Fighting numerous wars of conquest that expanded British rule inland, these West African paramilitary regiments set up a network of many small military outposts to supervise subjugated populations, impose colonial policies like taxation, and quickly suppress resistance.
7 - Women
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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A combination of European and African military cultures and histories informed the involvement of women in Britain's West African colonial army. Up to the 1700s, western European armies included large numbers of women mostly categorized under the vague heading of “camp followers.” These women provided various support services including soldiers’ wives and children who foraged for food and firewood, merchants who sold food and liquor, and cooks, laundresses, tailors, and sex workers. From the middle 1700s, the number of “camp followers” in European armies gradually decreased with the development of formal military logistical systems to maintain an increasing number of troops, the rise of Enlightenment ideals of femininity that disapproved of women's presence during wars and the changing status of soldiers from hired mercenaries to citizens serving the nation. During this period, the British Army imposed severe restrictions on marriage among its all-male troops indirectly encouraging what became a stereotypical military “culture of womanizing and misogyny.” This process of reducing the informal involvement of women continued in the Victorian-era British Army given military professionalization and centralization, the wider development of separate social and economic spheres for men and women, and the idealization of Christian marriage and nuclear family life coming out of industrialization. As previously discussed, a series of nineteenth-century Contagious Disease Acts (CD Acts) attempted to protect the sexual health and military effectiveness of Britain's male soldiers and sailors by imposing a regime of medical inspections and detention on female sex workers. By the late nineteenth century, the period of the so-called Scramble for Africa, the British Army and many of its western European counterparts became increasingly male institutions as female “camp followers” almost disappeared, and the small number of women and children associated with the military comprised members of officially regulated nuclear families. Historians know much less about the participation of women in African armies before the twentieth century. While evidence for the role of women in precolonial African warfare remains very limited, the infrequency of standing armies and the absence of logistical services means that the situation in many places likely resembled the “camp follower” culture of early modern European armies. Female fighters like the “Amazons” of Dahomey and celebrated female military leaders such as Queen Nzinga of Angola or Queen Amina of Zazzau (Zaria) in Northern Nigeria were extremely rare in precolonial Africa, with women more typically providing male combatants with food, firewood, intelligence, and motivation.
8 - Flogging
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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British colonial forces in Africa and other parts of the world relied on violent punishment or more commonly the threat of violent punishment to maintain discipline among the rank-and-file. Racism informed this practice as during the early nineteenth century, when flogging applied as a punishment to all British troops and could mean hundreds of lashes, the black soldiers of the WIR were more likely to be beaten and beaten more severely than their white colleagues. Britain established its locally recruited West African paramilitary forces during the late nineteenth century around the same time that the metropolitan British Army outlawed official corporal punishment. Nevertheless, Britain's African forces continued to use flogging as a disciplinary instrument among African soldiers until the Second World War. The existence of corporal punishment within military law in British Africa reflected white officers’ racist attitudes towards African troops but also the existence of flogging within the broader legal frameworks in these colonies. Within the system of indirect rule, Britain administered most of its African territories through a network of African traditional leaders governing by local customary law that often included options to inflict corporal punishment on offenders. During the first half of the twentieth century, one of the main differences between the experience of British metropolitan and West African soldiers was that many of the latter experienced or witnessed formal flogging.
In Britain's colonial African army, flogging represented one of the most serious among a number of punishments including imprisonment, fines, demotion, and dismissal available for authorities to impose on African soldiers convicted of violating aspects of military law. Most soldiers charged with offenses appeared before their commanding officer, who possessed the authority to deal summarily with a range of offenses but those accused of the most serious crimes faced trial by court-martial, presided over by a panel of officers with greater powers of punishment. Flogging represented both a legal punishment and an element of military culture performed as a ritual, whereby an African NCO using a hide whip or cane inflicted an assigned number of lashes on an offending soldier who had to lie on the ground before his entire unit. It represented a form of humiliation and deterrence. Reinforcing the racial hierarchy of these colonial units, white officers determined and observed punishment but remained aloof from its violent implementation.
10 - Murder and Mayhem
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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Aside from their involvement in the colonial state's internal security operations or other military campaigns, Britain's West African soldiers committed acts of brutal violence against civilians across the region and at different times during the colonial period. To be clear, West African soldiers engaged in independent acts of violence against West African civilians separate from the “everyday and extraordinary violence” they perpetrated on behalf of the colonial state. On the other hand, and beyond the context of anticolonial rebellion, civilians did not always remain passive victims of such arbitrary military abuse and they periodically attacked soldiers. Examples of seemingly random violence by Britain's West African soldiers against civilians seemed to occur more commonly in the conquest era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, faded away during the interwar era and became rampant again during the Second World War. Historians of the British colonial military in East and Central Africa have identified a similar periodization of soldiers’ maltreatment of civilians. In this way, the ebb and flow of such unofficial violence paralleled official flogging and incidents of mutiny within Britain's West African army. Acts of informal everyday violence also took place among Britain's West African soldiers who sometimes inflicted terrible abuse on each other and attacked troops from units originating from other territories. A recent study of the extreme violence perpetrated by Soviet soldiers against civilians during the Second World War offers some useful points for understanding the mistreatment of civilians and sometimes colleagues by Britain's West African colonial troops. For the Soviet case, violence by military personnel against civilians did not represent pointless or mindless acts but “served as a mode of self-expression among soldiers.” As total institutions, armies including those of the Soviet Union and British West Africa establish “their own set of harsh orders, symbols and social hierarchies, providing soldiers with little space outside the institution and nurturing a perception of `us against them.’” In colonial West Africa, these violent acts carried out by soldiers seemed to express their sense of separateness and superiority when compared to civilian communities and occasionally colleagues from other regiments or of lower rank. Absent a large body of written accounts by ordinary soldiers and civilians, these disturbing events illustrate the place of the West African soldier within the region's colonial society and how that changed over time.
3 - Identities: Sierra Leone and the Gambia
- Timothy Stapleton, University of Calgary
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- West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960
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Summary
The British tried but failed to construct martial races in Sierra Leone and the Gambia. While robust and well-known martial identities and reputations emerged in colonial Nigeria and the Gold Coast, British officers in the two smaller West African territories struggled to find communities on which to impose similar designations. Despite a history of intense precolonial war-fare in the area, and after many colonial experiments and changing opinions about military recruiting, British authorities labeled all Sierra Leonean and Gambian men as lacking the inherent qualities needed to make good soldiers. At the same time, the need for military personnel to provide internal security in these territories and to fight wars in other places meant that the British still recruited many Sierra Leoneans and Gambians into the colonial army. During the Second World War, British officers in Sierra Leone and the Gambia admitted that colonial martial race theory represented a fantasy.
Before colonial conquest, powerful military identities existed within the societies of both Sierra Leone and the Gambia. During the nineteenth century, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, where the British had already established the respective coastal enclaves of Freetown and Bathurst (Banjul), experienced intensive warfare. Central to the fighting of these wars were growing mercenary bands composed of armed young men, popularly called “war boys,” from various ethnic groups who wore magical amulets believed to protect them from bullets and received a share of loot from their cam-paigns. War boys fought with guns and swords, specialized in ambushes and raiding in the bush environment, and built defended stockades. In Sierra Leone, local powers fought a series of “trade wars” over control of commerce with the coast and in the Gambia, traditionalist communities and Jihadist Muslims waged war on each other. In the 1890s, during the so-called Scramble for Africa, the British pushed into the hinterland of both territories in a race with the French to secure the region. In Sierra Leone, in 1890, the British created the locally recruited Frontier Police that gradually extended colonial authority over the interior with the proclamation of a protectorate in 1896. However, in 1898, a widespread rebellion by both Mende and Temne peoples, the largest ethnic groups in the territory, against British rule broke out in Sierra Leone given oppression by the Frontier Police, abolition of the local slave trade, erosion of chiefly power, and in particular the imposition of colonial taxation.