The African war correspondents who travelled to Asia from May to July 1945 penned an Africa-centered account of the conflict. They explored the lives of some of the 100,000 West Africans fighting in Asia against the Japanese from 1943 to 1945. In doing so, they constitute a rare example of African civilian commentary from the Asian battlefront.Footnote 1 As we shall see, this differs significantly from both African civilian commentary from the “home front,” and also combatant narratives.Footnote 2 African war correspondents remain an extreme rarity in the conflict, even while South Asian and African American reporters were covering the war.Footnote 3 The newspapermen’s writings expand our understanding of African military service itself, while also revealing how elite civilians from the home front interacted with African troops in the theatre of war.Footnote 4 This unique positionality of being prominent African civilians on the battle front, both afforded the newspapermen privileged access to African troops, and established relationships with the servicemen. The newspapermen were no combatant “Burma Boys,” and traded on their relative celebrity back home in their respective colonies.Footnote 5 Despite these entitlements, their reportage comes closer than most sources to African military service, and offers one solution to the challenge, articulated by David Killingray, of “trying to recapture the experience of men who went off to war long ago.”Footnote 6
We contend that the correspondents’ tour makes two key contributions to our understanding of the Second World War in Africa. Firstly, it joins the home front and the fighting front—two spheres that remain largely separate in historiography of the war. The correspondents were prominent civilian reporters from the home front, but who were thrust into the theatre of battle and rear echelon support environments that often had social and intellectual connections back to West Africa. The history of the tour must account for both Africa and Asia in a common framing.Footnote 7 At the same time, their reportage constitutes a rare African-authored archive of Second World War military service. This was due both to the newspapermen’s unique positionality as African colonial subjects reporting on African troops, and to the unprecedented access granted to the correspondents by South East Asia Command of the Allied forces (SEAC), and the umbrella organisation coordinating Africans in Burma, the West African Expeditionary Forces’ (WAEF).Footnote 8 Both of these factors ensured that the correspondents perceived military service in ways that differed in theme and scope from both European officers’ and combatants’ accounts.
The present article focuses on the correspondents’ journalism and accounts of the tour in the West African press, ranging from nationalist publications like the West African Pilot, to the newspapers that the correspondents edited and wrote for, including Ayodele Lijadu’s conservative Nigerian Daily Times and Melvile C. Marke’s Sierra Leone Weekly News. It makes less reference to Gerald Plange’s Gold Coast Standard, and does not extensively consider Hausa language sources, such as Mallam Makama’s Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo. Footnote 9 Drawing on contextual material from the Nigerian National Archives, Ibadan, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the article refers to Nigerian sources, and deliberately seeks to center African-authored sources. The newspaper articles referenced were accessed at the British Library, the Centre for Research Libraries, and the British Library Endangered Archives Programme. Following a grounding of the tour on the African home front, we move to analyse three areas of the correspondents’ reportage: their interaction with African troops, their coverage of soldiers’ complaints about their relations with home, and their experience of military medicine.
Between Home Front and Overseas Theatres: The Correspondents’ Tour as an African-authored Archive of African Military Service
The correspondents’ tour contributes to the historiography of the Second World War Africa in two ways: firstly, it crosses a major historiographical divide between the home front and overseas combat. Secondly, it presents an African perspective on key elements of military service that are poorly documented elsewhere. To situate the tour, we must join the two, oft-separated fields of the domestic historiography of the home front, and the history of African overseas military service.
The home front is a rarely used term in the historiography of wartime West Africa, but it is one that has heuristic utility because it connects the domestic war effort to the global conflict.Footnote 10 The historiography of World War Two anglophone colonies in West Africa has often been understood as relatively detached from the overseas combat of troops. The history of the home front has significantly evolved from an earlier literature on popular criticism of the government, and anticolonial nationalism, to more recent scholarship exploring African “wartime intellectualism” and engagement with the war effort.Footnote 11 As Carolyn Brown has argued, the war period within Nigeria was an era of widespread discontent with the colonial government, including increasing labor activism.Footnote 12 At the same time, a nationalist public sphere developed with the formation of parties like the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), and the increasingly critical tone taken by newspapers like the West African Pilot. Although military matters sometimes appeared in these claims, including the continued controversies regarding the flogging of African troops and pay inequality between European and African servicemen, there remains little linking of domestic developments to overseas military service.Footnote 13 This has remained true even as more recent historiography has stressed African agency across philanthropy and commentary on the Allied war effort.Footnote 14 This does recognise the importance of international affairs at a discursive or representational level, but it does not account for the mobility of colonial subjects between the home front and the theatre of combat, which remain largely partitioned areas. A parallel historiography of colonial mobilities acknowledges civilian travel during the war but not in war zones specifically.Footnote 15 The correspondents’ tour directly links both areas, as the newspapermen moved from the home front to Asia and back again.
African overseas military service has received relatively little attention, and is almost absent from several field-defining works on the Second World War in Africa, which focus instead on domestic social, economic, and military developments inside the continent.Footnote 16 The situation is not universal to Africa’s Second World War histories, and historians of East and Francophone Africa have both been more willing to integrate discussion of overseas military service into more general studies.Footnote 17 Only recently has this situation begun to change, but then it has often been in terms of either studies focused on demobilisation, or accounts of individual combatants.Footnote 18 These works have rarely examined transnational connections between the home front and the fighting front. The correspondents, by contrast, document the connections of soldiers and themselves between Asia and West Africa.
When it has considered overseas fighting, the historiography of the war in West Africa has generally either focused on specific subjects that relate to military archives, including strategy, morale, and welfare.Footnote 19 Although there are exceptions, military sources generally accord little space to African voices. Major areas remain obscure from War Office files, including soldiers’ own experiences of war, their social organisation away from European officers, and their intellectual and cultural lives.Footnote 20 Similarly, combatant narratives offer only a partial resolution to the problem. Although several narratives by combatants exist, it remains the case, as Killingray has argued, that “most [soldiers] were nonliterate,” and could not “convey… in print what they had undergone.”Footnote 21 The insight is applicable to English; a separate African language literacy is attested by soldiers’ letters in Hausa, Yoruba, and other languages, but this remains poorly understood within the historiography of the war. Soldiers’ letters are beyond the scope of this article, but were frequently published in fora like the Gaskiya, which ran a recurrent feature “Takardun sojammu na Burma,” or “Letters from our soldiers in Burma.”Footnote 22 Extant anglophone narratives are close to the fighting, but it is unclear why we should consider this to be a definitive badge of validity for their value as sources. As Killingray observes, few authors write of their own combat experience, and they are often limited to specific units, while others have complex composition histories, being written at a considerable remove from the events.Footnote 23 There is little reason to be more confident about a small pool of oral accounts, which yield information only in isolated cases where they have been recorded.Footnote 24 A more recent avenue of oral research has been song, which presents a largely unexamined archive.Footnote 25 The newspapermen may have been civilians, but they were skilled communicators back to West Africa, and were deliberately shown a very wide range of combat and support functions.
The War Correspondents’ Tour in West Africa
To appreciate the significance of the correspondents’ tour in Asia, we must briefly consider its status back in West Africa. As a history of “transnational mobility” within a global war, it is impossible to evaluate the tour with reference to Africa or Asia exclusively.Footnote 26 Social, cultural, and print networks tied the Asian itineraries of the reporters back to Africa. At origin, the tour was a product of the immense wartime public interest in creating African war correspondents. At a practical level, the tour was only possible because of the commitment of the colonial government to fund the correspondents’ tour, and the military’s judgment that the Asian war had sufficiently turned in the Allies’ favour for the tour to proceed. The correspondents nonetheless enjoyed significant popularity among urban elites in West Africa. By the tour’s end, the domestic situation had changed markedly, not least due to the 1945 general strike in Nigeria, which ensured that the correspondents returned to a Nigeria paralysed by industrial action and political discontent.Footnote 27 The wartime conjuncture in which demand had grown for African war reporters had now decisively changed to a post-war world concerned with imperial rule and managing the demobilisation of African troops.Footnote 28
The tour was ultimately the result of African organising and lobbying. Although funded by the colonial government, with some £1,250 being approved by Nigerian’s legislative council alone, the demand for African war correspondents had grown since the West African Editors’ Delegation to London in June 1943.Footnote 29 A more immediate catalyst was the widely publicised visit of African American war correspondents to West Africa in the winter of 1944/45, which accelerated demands for local reporters to cover African fighters in Burma.Footnote 30 Africans, however, had less control over the newspapermen ultimately selected to staff the tour, with early popular candidates, including Ernest Ikoli and Anthony Enahoro being unsuccessful.Footnote 31 In April 1945, the colonial government selected the final correspondents. Local opinion still celebrated these candidates as allowing for a “first-hand idea” of African achievements on the Asian front.Footnote 32
The Public Relations Office of the Indian government and the military command in Asia agreed to accredit the African reporters with the privileges granted to all other war correspondents.Footnote 33 The reporters obtained passports and vaccination certificates, leaving for Cairo on May 16 and arriving in Karachi on May 21.Footnote 34 The tour was co-ordinated by the British Army’s West Africa Headquarters (GHQ) at Achimota, with the journalists each required to pen 2,000 words per week to send back to Africa.Footnote 35
The correspondents returned to a changed world. The impact of the 1945 Nigerian general strike had a direct impact on the correspondents’ return. Lijadu recalled first hearing of the events from African ground staff when the reporters’ plane stopped at Maiduguri.Footnote 36 By the time the reporters had landed in Lagos, the colonial government announced that it was cancelling a planned Nigeria-wide tour of Marke, Plange, and Lijadu due to internal conditions in Nigeria.Footnote 37 At Lagos, the correspondents were, however, the centre of a series of dinners and other social events attended by newspapermen, local politicians, and philanthropic figures.Footnote 38 Plange and Marke were celebrated on their return to Accra and Freetown.Footnote 39 Makama later published an account of his journey in a series of articles entitled “M Makama Ya Ba Da Labarin Tafiyarsa Da Kansa,” or “M Makama tells the story of his journey himself.”Footnote 40 Makama later also published a pamphlet entitled “Kyaftin Makama,” or “Captain Makama,” with the Gaskiya press.Footnote 41
Lijadu’s twenty-four-part lecture series was broadcast between August 1945 and February 1946, culminating in a live final lecture and screening of the propaganda film Burma Victory at the Rex Cinema in Lagos.Footnote 42 Upon Lijadu’s final lecture, the Times argued that the correspondents had shown the troops overseas to be laying a “solid foundation” for a “new West Africa” due to “first hand information” obtained from “the actual theatre of operations.”Footnote 43 Some of the correspondents continued to report on servicemen, with Lijadu visiting a demobilisation centre in October 1945.Footnote 44
Ultimately, despite the prestige they experienced in 1945, the correspondents struggled to claim payment from the colonial government. Although Plange and Marke returned to their respective colonies with a £30 and £50 a month salary, respectively; the Nigerian journalists received no pay, although their expenses were covered by the government.Footnote 45 Lijadu was still attempting to reclaim pay from the tour in the spring of 1946. Makama also appears to have felt unrecognised by the post-war government. As late as 1948, he enquired whether his “3 months’ service overseas” could be rewarded by a medal.Footnote 46 Despite the tour’s obscurity in subsequent historiography, during the summer of 1945, the newspapermen became widely known figures among literate West Africans and enjoyed substantial support as pioneering African war correspondents.
The Correspondents and Africa Soldiers’ Social Organisation
The war correspondents interacted extensively with African servicemen. While some of this contact was anticipated by military officials, the reportage reveals that many other interactions took place away from official oversight. These ranged from socialising with those educated African clergy and technicians whom correspondents like Lijadu and Marke already knew from pre-war life in Lagos and Freetown, to employing non-elite soldiers from their hometowns or towns of origin as cooks and servants.Footnote 47 These relationships are of considerable historical importance because they reveal the variety of social networks existing among the wider African soldiery. These latter types of informal social networks often fell below the radar of colonial and military officials, only appearing in military archives when linked to the possibility of mutiny.Footnote 48
The Correspondents as Observers of Social Life
Our point here is not that military authorities were entirely unaware of these relations, but that they knew very little about their extent or shape, and rarely tried to investigate them. A key exception to this was the limited understanding that WAEF’s Calcutta-based welfare unit developed of informalised social networks among soldiers motivated by the fear of mutiny. Morale reports sought signs of organised protest among soldiers, detecting “associations and brotherhoods” in 82 (WA) Division, but these only appear to have been legible when connected to the fear of their “semi-political nature.”Footnote 49 As Killingray argues in the case of protests and rebellions among servicemen, “without the ‘view from below’… any scholarly analysis… can only be very tentative.”Footnote 50 Any positioning of the correspondents as “from below” encounters the barrier of their elite status, reading their reportage “against the grain” reveals one way beyond this impasse.
Correspondents revealed the existence of widespread forms of sub-regional identification in their journalism. It must be appreciated that these forms of identification differed from one area where the colonial military recognised ethnic and regional identities: martial race. By the time of the mobilisation for Asia in 1943, the Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF) was moving away from “martial” recruitment strategies, and although elements of this culture continued, it was largely in decline, with Hausa increasingly giving way to English as a language of military command among officers who often had little prior training in Africa.Footnote 51 Nonetheless, some military administrative practices encouraged regional differentiation. Authorities at a camp near Bombay were divided into geographically distinct “companies” named “Sokoto, Lagos, Kumasi, Daru, and Bathurst.”Footnote 52 Language use also exacerbated other general divisions. Despite the recent growth of English, military officials typically relied on both English and Hausa, often through interpreters, to communicate with troops. Major languages like Yoruba were also covered by literate clerks who could translate into English.
The correspondents’ daily labour of engaging with African soldiers was divided by language, revealing further division among the soldiers. On visiting units, Makama conducted Hausa-language interviewing, while Lijadu (who also spoke Yoruba) engaged the anglophone troops. But beyond these more widely spoken languages, the correspondents found that they had limited opportunity to communicate with men speaking smaller tongues.Footnote 53 The reporters also found evidence of wider ethno-linguistic division among the troops. At the 82nd Division Headquarters in Burma, they found soldiers “were divided into two groups,” with “Hausas in one tent,” and “Southerners in another.”
Writing about Gold Coast troops, Plange recognised the importance of regional social organisation. This sometimes appeared obliquely or euphemistically in his writings: “naturally the interests of a man from Navrongo are different from those [from] Keta.”Footnote 54 Navrongo was a northern territory favoured by military recruiters from early in the war, whereas Keta was a southern coastal region.Footnote 55 Marke similarly admitted that leisure organising among Sierra Leonean soldiers took ethnic or at least geographical lines in Burma. “[T]he rest of the [football] teams [other than that composed of Freetown men] were an assortment of men drawn from… up country tribes,” he observed, including “[the] Kurankos… Mendes, Konnos…Temnes… Lembahs.”Footnote 56 These people from the interior of Sierra Leone had a tense relationship with the predominantly Krio population of colonial Freetown.Footnote 57 The Mende and Temne had been the target of “martial race” recruitment by the British.Footnote 58 Divisions extended to socialising; Makama enjoyed socialising with the Hausa soldiers, and enjoyed hearing northern Nigerian songs performed by men, many of whom were, like Makama, from Kano.Footnote 59 The strength of these regional identifications was also indicated by Lijadu, who confessed that he “felt really at home” when he heard “Negro Spirituals” emanating from the southerners’ tents.Footnote 60
Correspondents also engaged in negative or patronising accounts of African soldiers from other ethnic groups. They did so at a period that predates the more widely recognised eruption of negative ethnic stereotyping into press discourse from 1945, such as in the Action Group/NCNC press war of the later 1940s.Footnote 61 In doing so, the reporters sometimes drew on language that paralleled ethnographic and colonial discourse. These accounts undermine any simple sense of the correspondents as aligned to all African servicemen or simply as speaking for the soldiers in general. Despite these limitations, their accounts reveal forms of cultural organisation among African soldiers, even if the correspondents were largely ignorant of the cultural significance of the events. Such accounts particularly coalesced around the neo-traditional activities that were common in the RWAFF, which had developed the “West African Soldiers’ Social Activities” [WASSA], involving supposedly traditional dancing.Footnote 62 Despite the fact that WASSA celebrations could be located in interwar reforms to the colonial military, the correspondents often mistakenly read these performance as examples of “traditional” behaviour among northern or mainland men, from whom they differentiated themselves. One example of the cultural condescension involved can be found in Marke’s comment on how military service was particularly aiding “upcountry” groups from the interior of Sierra Leone to be “stepp[ing] into civilization for the first time.”Footnote 63
Even if the correspondents were unreliable observers for the soldiers’ recreational events, they nonetheless provide rare documentation of the proceedings and do so in terms which are no more prejudiced than the viewpoints found in many British officers’ memoirs.Footnote 64 Lijadu described how Tiv soldiers engaged in dancing for entertainment in a military camp. He did so in terms that closely resembled terms used by RWAFF officers, one of whom alleged that Tiv troops were characterised by “filed teeth,” an “air of stupid innocence,” and “brutal shouted virility.”Footnote 65 Lijadu described the men as “fine” and “square shouldered…broad-chested warriors,” who were as “admirable on the battlefield as they are at play.”Footnote 66 Using the derogatory British military phrase “Munshi,” a colonial term based on the Hausa term munchi or mun ci for the Tiv, Lijadu reflected on the soldiers’ “constant cheerfulness” and “wonderful physique.”Footnote 67 He also described gender fluidity in the performance with male dancers adopting female roles.
Even when the dancers shared a linguistic context, they attracted a wider audience. Marke described a “community dance” among convalescents in a medical centre, whose instructor “appeared to be a Nigerian Hausa.” Like “all… members of his tribe,” Marke reported, he wore a beard. “I could not make out the nature of the dance,” he admitted, but felt “certain that the men were singing war songs.”Footnote 68 Lijadu describes European officers engaging in the festivities, along with southerners. Both Lijadu and Marke were describing men whom had been key targets of British martial recruitment during the early years of the Second World War, it is likely that men being described, who do not appear to have spoken English, would have belonged to the combatant “rank and file” of the colonial military, and thus constituted a very different group to those educated men with whom the correspondents chose to socialise.Footnote 69 Our point here is not that these social activities had never previously been documented, but rather that the correspondents’ reportage reveals rare African appreciation of these neo-traditional military activities.
The Correspondents’ Social Relationships with African Servicemen
The correspondents directly engaged in social relations with African servicemen. This gave them a unique perspective into the social worlds of African troops. The servicemen acquaintances of the reporters can be divided into two groups: literate men, many of whom had been known socially to the correspondents before the war, and men who lacked literacy in English and perhaps also Western education, but who shared a hometown or ethnic connection with an individual newspaperman, and who undertook work such as cooking on his behalf. These relationships were more personal and extensive than the day-to-day contact that the newspapermen enjoyed with the many servicemen who questioned them after their talks and presented them with their personal grievances. At Ramsee Island, off the Burmese coast, Lijadu recalled how readily he traced Yoruba social networks: “we soon found… some Nigerians -Yorubas most of them.”Footnote 70 At Chittagong in Bengal, he enjoyed the company of “several old [Lagosian] friends,” including one man, who was, Lijadu explained, “brother of Mr Archibong of the Medical Stores in Lagos.” He also met a Sergeant Eyo and Corporal Laniyonu “all of them of the Land and Survey Department” of the Nigerian government prior to enlistment. Lijadu thus related how Laniyonu “was one of Nigeria’s most outstanding Tennis aces’ Inter-Colonial Star before the war.” At Dhond, Lijadu related how medical staff member R. A. Savage was “son of the late Dr R. Akinwande Savage.”Footnote 71 While at Poona, Lijadu revealed that he had already met several staff-members and patients at the hospital during his time in Lagos. Plange recorded how a football team he saw in Delhi included “two former stars” of the Accra Standfast team, and another from the Dwarfs team of Winneba.Footnote 72
Even though they often socialised with fellow professional elites, the correspondents also employed non-elite men from their localities and hometowns. Lijadu maintained close links with his family home in Abeokuta, including while in Asia.Footnote 73 In an exercise of patrimonial relations, several correspondents employed soldiers from their hometowns or areas as servants. Despite being thousands of miles from West Africa, Lijadu found a man from Wasimi Ake, Abeokuta, his “own town,” and who knew “all my people quite well,” a fact aided by Lijadu’s belonging to a prominent Egba family.Footnote 74 Elsewhere, Lijadu thanked a “devoted orderly” who was a fellow “Yoruba speaking Southerner” and a “kind friend.”Footnote 75 At Ramsee Island, Marke hired a “Gambian young man” serving in the military camp, and kept him under his “personal direction,” including tasking him with cooking jollof rice for the correspondents.Footnote 76 While present in military camps, the correspondents revealed “many individual visits,” ranging from “friendly courtesy calls,” to questions from the talks that correspondents gave. These visits were also occasions when the correspondents were brought modest presents by the soldiers. Visitors “brought us…shea[ve]s of the useless paper currency issued by the Japanese during their occupation of Burma,” as well as telling correspondents “exciting stories” about their battle exploits.Footnote 77 In common with other cultures of gift giving in West Africa, such production of material and oral gifts could be understood as servicing a reciprocal exchange, suggesting that those who visited the correspondents understood themselves to be obtaining some service or value in return for their efforts.Footnote 78 These were only a fraction of a much wider range of social relations that the correspondents continually entertained, and about which military authorities seem to have known very little.
The correspondents’ coverage of African soldiers reveals the extent to which localised forms of organisation and cultural activities persisted within the colonial military in Burma. Although their analysis of social organisation was neither systematic nor scientific, it reveals the complexity of the civilian newspapermen’s interaction with African troops, and the range of forms of social organisation in which African troops were engaged.
“Letters Are Their Life-Blood”: Soldiers’ Affective Anxieties Reported to the African Home Front
Soldiers’ welfare constituted a further dimension of the correspondents’ activities. The theme brought the home front directly into contact with the war front. Correspondents attempted both to explain soldiers’ grievances to civilians, and to intervene in the problem by guiding civilians in how they could improve their correspondence with servicemen. Historians have tended to understand servicemen’s family lives in terms of the home front, typically in terms of civilian petitioning and interactions with the colonial government.Footnote 79 That the correspondents spent much time listening to the complaints of troops was no accident. Fearful of troop rebellion, military officials argued that letters constituted one of the “two strongest factors in maintaining morale,” along with leave.Footnote 80 Military reports identified how African civilians were often slow to reply to letters from their soldier relatives.Footnote 81 At the time of the tour, these grievances were becoming more acute. They had recently been the subject of a dedicated welfare visit to African soldiers in Asia by the Duke of Devonshire.Footnote 82
Military initiatives, however, did not determine the activities of the correspondents on the ground. The reporters were often dedicated to hearing soldiers’ complaints. A dramatic example of this occurred early in the tour in northern India when the reporters escaped from their officially designed itinerary to hear soldiers’ worries. They then evaded military censorship, sending an account to the nationalist Pilot, which published it in a 10 June 1945 article.Footnote 83 In reality, this military censorship was aleatory; in March 1944, the authorities in Achimota were receiving large numbers of letters from India in West African languages, and “only [a] small amount [of] censorship [was]… possible.”Footnote 84
The correspondents’ circumvention of censorship well illustrates the limits in simply perceiving the correspondents as envoys of the colonial government. It prompted a flurry of government correspondence, with the chief secretary to the government of Nigeria writing to Lijadu, to warn him that “any despatches which you have sent during your visit” remained “subject to military censorship.”Footnote 85 Critically, unlike military officials, such as those based in the WAEF headquarters, the correspondents engaged with servicemen as fellow African colonial subjects. This is not to argue that they treated all servicemen as equals, but rather that they approached the soldiers from a positionality informed by West African social, educational, and ethnic divides, rather than in terms of the formal military hierarchy.
Encouraging action on the home front was a key objective of the correspondents’ journalism. They wanted to boost correspondence with servicemen, not only among their literate readership, but also to find amanuenses to act for the anglophone illiterate. In a development from the interwar growth in epistolary culture in West Africa, the war saw a wave of soldier letter writers sending correspondence back to Africa, including to newspapers, politicians, friends, and families.Footnote 86 It was this last category that particularly preoccupied servicemen who felt forgotten or mistreated by their relatives. Soldiers repeatedly raised the issue with the correspondents, resulting in “furious outbursts of bitterness.”Footnote 87 In turn, the correspondents demanded that civilians write more frequently to enlisted family members, and that they compose higher-quality letters. Lijadu explicitly appealed to civilians, and most particularly women, to act as amanuenses for illiterate relatives.Footnote 88 As well as encouraging civilians to pen more letters, the correspondents took an active role in attempting to shape content. Women’s voluntary engagement as amanuenses for soldiers’ relatives had already developed by the time of the correspondents’ tour and can be understood as part of a more general trend of social engagement by elite women during the 1940s.Footnote 89
Lijadu was dismayed by witnessing first-hand how soldiers experienced “great annoyance and disappointment” due to the poor letters they received. These were, he judged, “far too often… uninformative,” and “too frequently contained requests for financial assistance from relatives.”Footnote 90 Plange also dealt with correspondence, with the Gold Coast reporter acknowledging that “a letter from home” had more significance for Ghanian troops than “a whole article… devoted to praising their valour and recounting their exploits.”Footnote 91 He specifically focused on family members, although his comments reveal a second and largely unstudied correspondence, as even soldiers neglected by their families “seldom lack letters from friends.”
To remedy soldiers’ anxieties, the correspondents undertook to spell out what content civilians should include in their correspondence. He wanted civilian writers to focus not on practicalities, but rather the political and social issues that they deemed to be of interest to servicemen in contemporary Indian and West African politics. Sometimes too hastily dismissed by historians considering the influence of Asia on African servicemen, this interest was partly conditioned by the widespread practice of debating current affairs as part of advanced English language classes within army night schools, but it appears too widespread to be reduced to this.Footnote 92 Lijadu guided his readers to “refer to news from home,” explaining that “I do not mean just current gossip but real news concerning social and political develop[ments] in West Africa.”Footnote 93 This was necessitated by the fact that military service meant that soldiers had “seen the progress made by Indians” in economic and political matters. Soldiers were as interested in events in West Africa; demand for publications, including the troop newspaper the RWAFF News and, more rarely, the Pilot was high. Plange encountered this when he found himself questioned in Delhi by Ghanaian soldiers asking, “what the chiefs are doing for them in representations,” as well as contemporary legislation such as the town planning bill.Footnote 94
Aside from politics, soldiers were extremely worried by the apparent misallocation of funds that they had sent back to support their families. The war had created a network of soldiers sending funds home to their families through an Army-run “allotment” system; the WAEF’s Forward Base Pay Office dealt with some 1,000 queries a week on the subject.Footnote 95 In practice, the system was plagued with problems, including the relatives of soldiers’ wives taking funds without permission. The military-side of these allocations has been less studied than their domestic corollaries, with Oliver Coates and Chima Korieh exploring the role of civilians, and especially women, in contesting financial payments.Footnote 96 Less is known about soldiers’ own perceptions of the allocation system, which represented their chief opportunity to exercise an influence over family and local affairs while in Asia.
We must approach the categorisation of the “family” with caution here, particularly when enshrined in military legislation that dictated only a soldier’s “wife” could collect financial assistance. In reality, the range of social relations in West Africa did not fit colonial and military expectations, which were often rooted in European gender norms.Footnote 97 Soldiers nonetheless reported significant anxiety over illegitimate claims on their payments. Financial assistance formed “[o]ne of the questions” that soldiers “first put” to the war correspondents, as well as forming the basis for a flow of letters that arrived at newspaper offices.Footnote 98 The correspondents’ response to these concerns was twofold: firstly, to help explain the financial payment system to readers, and, secondly, to point to more systemic issues relating to payments.
Lijadu reminded readers of the problems caused by “frequent mistakes” made by soldiers’ relatives. These mishaps often revealed as much about the incapacity of the colonial state as the behaviour of soldiers’ relatives, and included basic problems in implementing regimes of bureaucracy across different regions of each colony. Practical issues involved pay offices having no current address for soldiers’ relatives, and difficulties in determining who was and wasn’t a soldier’s wife.Footnote 99 Elsewhere, the correspondents explained how to correctly pack a parcel for dispatch to soldiers in Asia. Another strategy was naming individual servicemen in the hope of spurring their relatives to action. Plange asked “why is it that GC 37999 Kweku Donkor has had no letter from his family for two years although they continue to draw allotment money?,” before also naming the complaints of “GC 53127 Kwaku Gyem, of Kumasi, [and] of GC 62389 Kwabena Yebuah of Anum.”Footnote 100 “Why has Ed Addo of Crew Avenue,” he urged, “not heard from his wife for over three months, and yet she has been drawing allotment money?”
A second strategy included more general commentary and touched on the cultural mismatch between military bureaucracy and local social structures.Footnote 101 Lijadu particularly identified the problem posed by “minor” wives in eastern Nigeria. These women, sometimes minors as young as seven, were below the age of majority in the eyes of the military administration, but nonetheless entitled to financial support from their servicemen husbands.Footnote 102 In practice, district officers had resisted making payments to minors, drawing on their own assumptions about marriage to assert that minor wives could not possibly be the genuine spouse of the soldier concerned.Footnote 103 The situation often resulted in women being unable to claim their husbands’ financial assistance. Lijadu recommended that Native Authorities take greater steps to verify girls’ claims, pointing out that they were entitled to the money under “native customary law.”Footnote 104 Following Lijadu’s story, the problem was taken up in a Times editorial, which argued that the status of these girls “needs clarification.”Footnote 105 Abuse of the allotment system was also targeted by Lijadu, who encountered reports of fraudulent claims by distant or fictitious relatives of soldiers. Cumulatively, the reporters’ interventions in soldiers’ correspondence with Africa displayed their advocacy of African soldiers’ claims. They attempted to assist families in navigating an unfamiliar and complex bureaucratic system, which concealed areas of fundamental social and cultural misunderstanding, such as in marital relations in eastern Nigeria. In doing so, they provide evidence of both African attempts to mediate military bureaucracy to other Africans and of a sustained investigation into the domestic and family grievances of African servicemen.
The correspondents’ reporting on servicemen’s grievances over letters provides a rare illustration of these welfare questions from the perspective of the soldiers themselves, rather than military officials or civilian families. In addition to this, the way that the newspapermen attempted to use their reportage to intervene in civilian behaviour illustrates the way in which their journalism closely linked the war front with the home front.
“I Am … Grateful to God Who Has Enabled Me to Live”: Medical Care for African Soldiers
Medical treatment formed a key element of African military service. The correspondents’ reportage illustrates the major role of Africans within the racially hierarchical world of military hospitals. The reportage made it clear that wounded soldiers did survive and recover, and it brought their voices into print. African experiences in wartime military hospitals have only intermittently interested historians. They are often understood in terms of racial discrimination or sexual health, and rarely examined in Asia itself.Footnote 106 Those accounts that do exist originate from European doctors, with the exception of Isaac Fadoyebo’s autobiography.Footnote 107 Little research examines African civilian responses to the rapidly expanding military medical infrastructure of the war, while a significant historiography exists on public perceptions of civilian medicine in Africa.Footnote 108 Although, as Killingray argues, the network of African military hospitals attempted unsuccessfully to continue of racial segregation, they also formed major sources of African employment.Footnote 109 Large medical centres existed in Dhond and Poona in western India, and at Dhakka and Comilla in Bengal, and these were linked to a network of forward medical bases in Burma itself. The correspondents visited both Burmese outposts and the large Indian hospitals and convalescent depots. Their reportage provides rare documentation of African participation in these institutions, as well as the experiences of soldier patients.
The correspondents visited multiple sites, including a field dressing station in Burma, the 52nd West African Convalescent Depot at Dhond, the 40th General Hospital near Poona, and the 152nd General Hospital at Chittagong in Bengal. They introduced their civilian readers to the complexity of the medical network for Africans in Asia, covering functions ranging from casualty triage and malaria prevention, through surgery, to recovery and rehabilitation. At Bombay, Marke witnessed convalescents dancing until they laughed compulsively.Footnote 110 In Dhond, the reporters visited classes for servicemen who had suffered leg or foot injuries, while in forward station in Burma they met African ambulance drivers, who were also skilled technicians and repaired broken vehicles.Footnote 111 Plange developed a broader concept of “health” to include an appraisal of educational efforts, arguing that “sound minds” shaped by evening classes for African convalescents complimented the “healthy bodies” being formed by the hospital network.Footnote 112 The lectures and debates on current affairs and “Indian politics and history” were taught by British officers and non-commissioned officers, but were part of a wider school run by a Ghanaian soldier J. Gattoh from Accra, that also included literacy in English.Footnote 113
Individual Africans play an important role in the correspondents’ coverage of medical affairs, as Gattoh’s example suggests. Both African doctors and patients are discussed in the reportage. At the field hospital in Burma, Makama introduced soldier Gizami Nakoki, who had been wounded in fighting, and used the case to chart his journey across Asia’s military hospital network. He continued to share with his readers the stories of two soldiers, a Lance-Corporal Umaru Marwa, and a Private Musa Chanj, including providing quotations from his discussions with both soldiers. While there is no way of verifying the veracity of Makama’s account, his strategy provides an unusual example of two Hausa soldiers having their voices reproduced in the anglophone southern press at some length.Footnote 114 Marwa shared how he was “grateful to God” for “enabl[ing] me to live and tell his story personally,” and described his experience of being shot by Japanese troops.Footnote 115 Chanj shared his relief that “nothing has been cropped in my body.”Footnote 116 In Dhond, Lijadu reported on African staff, including the instructor of a convalescent class for disabled servicemen, while at Poona, he related how Marke gave an address to the hospital’s African staff.Footnote 117 Lijadu and Makama both offered pen portraits of Nigerian Major G. A. Savage, “the only African [medical] Officer in the Hospital” at Poona, and related how African troops “took their troubles to him” frequently, and how he “had a great deal to do” with their welfare.Footnote 118 The correspondents’ reportage on medical treatment reveals the key role of Africans as staff members within medical institutions, while also presenting a rare encounter with the experiences of African soldier patients. It brought these subjects with immediacy to the home front and made the experiences of convalescents intelligible to civilians.
Conclusion
The war correspondents’ tour significantly develops our understanding of African military service in the Second World War. It reveals the interaction between newspapermen from the home front and soldiers in the theatre of combat, thus challenging a long-running division in the historiography of the war in West Africa between domestic developments and overseas fighting. The African home front must be understood in relation to mobilisation overseas, rather than in isolation. We have demonstrated how the correspondents’ transnational mobility enabled them to interpret African military service from the vantage point of social elites from the home front, and how they articulated this back to Africa. This interaction of home front and battle front was in no way limited to the correspondents’ tour and was also reflected in soldiers’ own correspondence with home. This article therefore calls for the home front and fighting front to be understood in tandem rather than as separate domains, as has often been the case in anglophone West African history.
We have argued that the correspondents’ journalism is significant because it constitutes an African authored archive of Second World War military service. This positionality accorded the correspondents a unique insight into the lives of African servicemen. Although we have contended that the correspondents were defined by their social, educational, and professional privileges in their interactions with servicemen, their reportage nonetheless sheds new light on African military service. This is true of the three domains we have explored: soldiers’ social networks, including their interactions with the newspapermen; their correspondence with home; and their experience of medical institutions. The correspondents’ reportage moves our understanding of these areas beyond the parameters of previous historiography.
Cumulatively, this Africa-centred archive reveals how African military service during the Second World War can be understood in terms of African civilian voices, as well as textual and oral accounts by combatants. Unlike the cases of South Asian or African American reporters, the existence of African war correspondents remains rarely acknowledged in a growing literature on the global reframing of the conflict. Their case is important because it shows how African voices played an important role not only in the description but also in the analysis of a global war.Footnote 119
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