Civilization: The West and the Rest (33 page)
Nor did the sufferings of the native peoples of South-West Africa end there. As if obliterating the greater number of them were not sufficient, the Germans inflicted further trials on the Herero and Nama peoples in the name of ‘race hygiene’. At least one doctor conducted lethal experiments on concentration-camp prisoners in South-West Africa. In 1906 as many as 778 autopsies were performed on prisoners for so called racial-biological research. After that, sample skulls were sent back to Germany for further research. Incredibly, female prisoners were forced to scrape the skulls clean with glass shards.
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Dr Eugen Fischer was one of many German scientists intensely interested in the voguish new field of race. Intrigued by what he heard about a mixed-race people in South-West Africa, the Rehoboth Basters, Fischer spent two months in the field measuring them from head to foot and scrutinizing their physiognomies. In 1913 he published his findings, trumpeting them as the first ever attempt to apply to humans the principles of genetic inheritance developed by the Russian Gregor Mendel. ‘The Bastards’, as he called them, were racially superior to pure negroes but inferior to pure whites. There might therefore be a useful role for people of mixed race as colonial policemen or lower officials. But any further racial mixing should be avoided:
We know this absolutely for sure: without exception, any European people … that has absorbed the blood of less valuable races – and only a zealot can deny that blacks, Hottentots and many others are less
valuable [than whites] – has paid for this absorption with its spiritual [and] cultural downfall.
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By this time there was already a complex of laws against miscegenation in German South-West Africa.
Not everyone in Germany subscribed to such views. German Socialists and Catholics raised their voices to protest at what was being done in Africa by their supposedly civilized country.
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Even the theorist of colonial economics, Paul Rohrbach, condemned Trotha’s genocidal policy, pointing out that South-West Africa simply could not function without African labour.
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Yet the disturbing question remains. Was South-West Africa the testing site of future, much larger genocides?
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Was it, as Conrad suggested in his novel
Heart of Darkness
, a case of Africa turning Europeans into savages, rather than Europeans civilizing Africa? Where was the real heart of darkness? In Africa? Or within the Europeans who treated it as a laboratory for a racial pseudo-science that ranks alongside the ideology of communism as the most lethal of all Western civilization’s exports?
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Yet the cruelties inflicted on the Africans were to be avenged in a terrible way. For racial theory was too virulent an idea to be confined to the colonial periphery. As a new century dawned, it came home to Europe. Western civilization was about to encounter its most dangerous foe: itself.
The war that began in 1914 was not a war between a few quarrelling European states. It was a war between world empires. It was a war within Western civilization. And it was the first sign that the West carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. In this war, more than in any previous conflict, the West unleashed its killer applications against itself. The industrial economy supplied the means of mechanized destruction. And modern medicine, too, played its part in the bloody business of total war.
In no theatre were the problems of communication more severe than in Africa and, in the absence of extensive railways and reliable beasts of burden, there was only one solution: men. Over 2 million Africans served in the First World War, nearly all as carriers of supplies, weapons and wounded, and although they were far from the
fields of Flanders, these forgotten auxiliaries had as hellish a time as the most exposed front-line troops in Europe. Not only were they underfed and overworked; once removed from their usual locales they were every bit as susceptible to disease as their white masters. Roughly a fifth of all Africans employed as carriers died, many of them the victims of the dysentery that ravaged all colonial armies in the field. In East Africa 3,156 whites in British service died in the line of duty; of these, fewer than a third were victims of enemy action. But if black troops and carriers are included, total losses were over 100,000.
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As we have seen, the familiar rationale of white rule in Africa was that it conferred the benefits of civilization. The war – which was fought in all Germany’s African colonies (Togoland, the Cameroons and East Africa as well as South-West Africa) – made a mockery of that claim. ‘Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation,’ wrote Ludwig Deppe, a doctor in the German East African Army. ‘We are no longer the agents of culture; our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years War.’
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For most of the First World War there was a stalemate. As the defenders, whom the French and British had somehow to drive from their entrenched positions on the Western Front, the Germans had the advantage in what amounted to the biggest siege in history. There was a similar impasse on the Trentino and Isonzo Fronts, where the Italians could not dislodge the Austro-Hungarians. The war in the East was much more mobile, but here too the Germans had the upper hand, despite the blunders of their Habsburg allies. Attempts to break the deadlock by opening new fronts – Gallipoli, Salonika, Mesopotamia – yielded miserable results. Nor did any wonder weapons materialize in the way that the atomic bomb later would; poison gas was widely used, horrible in its effects, but not decisive; submarines could disrupt Britain’s import trade but not stop it. By the spring of 1917, as the war of attrition ground on, the outlook for France was darkening. Mutiny and revolution in Russia in February had given Germany the prospect of victory on the Eastern Front. The United States, though
officially at war with Germany from 6 April, would not be able to play a significant military role on the Western Front for at least six months. And, after the staggering losses suffered at the Battle of Verdun (1916), the French government was deeply concerned about the shortage of men. The limitation of family size had begun earlier in France than elsewhere – perhaps because sex was better understood by French women and contraception more readily available to them – so there were significantly fewer young Frenchmen than Germans. Already by the end of March 1917, some 1.3 million Frenchmen had been killed or taken prisoner. In all, French wartime losses were nearly double those of the British. Roughly one in eight Frenchmen aged between fifteen and forty-nine lost their lives. The ‘blood tax’ –
l’impôt du sang
– was heavy indeed.
It is easy to forget that France lost two out of three wars against Germany between 1870 and 1940. In 1917 it seemed on the verge of losing the First World War too. Where should France turn to for help? The answer was to Africa. Although, as we have seen, most of them were denied full French citizenship, France’s African subjects were still regarded as eligible to bear arms in the defence of
la patrie
. Yet everywhere – in Senegal, French Congo, French Sudan, Dahomey and Ivory Coast – Africans declined to answer the call of the motherland. The collective mood was captured by the lament of one mother to a French officer: ‘You have already taken all that I have, and now you are taking my only son.’ Most felt that induction into the army amounted to a sentence of ‘certain death’. The only man who seemed capable of resolving this situation was Blaise Diagne, the first African to have been elected to the French National Assembly. Now, was he willing to return to Senegal as a kind of glorified recruiting sergeant?
Diagne saw the chance to strike a bargain with Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. He insisted that any African who came to fight should be given French citizenship. More hospitals and schools should be built in West Africa. Veteran tirailleurs should be exempt from taxation and receive decent pensions. Diagne cabled his colleagues in Dakar to discourage enlistment if the concessions he demanded were not forthcoming.
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In his maiden speech in the French National Assembly Diagne had said, ‘If we can come here to legislate, we are French citizens, and if
we are, we demand the right to serve [in the army] as all French citizens do.’ It was an ingenious appeal to the tradition of the French Revolution, with its ideal of the nation in arms – everyone a citizen with the right to liberty, equality and fraternity, but also with the solemn duty to bear arms for the defence of the nation. Clemenceau was won over: ‘Those who fall under fire fall neither as whites nor as blacks,’ he declared. ‘They fall as Frenchmen and for the same flag.’
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As an incentive to join up, the promise of French citizenship proved startlingly successful. At least 63,000 West Africans answered Diagne’s call, more than twice the number the French had asked for. In all, 164,000 men from French West Africa and Equatorial Africa were combatants in Europe during the war, a substantial part of a half-million strong colonial force drawn from all over the French Empire. As one recruit, Ndematy Mbaye, recalled: ‘He [Diagne] told us that France had entered a war with the Germans. And he said that “You are friends of the Frenchmen. So, when you are friends with someone – when someone has troubles – you have to help them. So, the Frenchmen have asked [you] to come to help them in the war.” ’
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The majority of volunteers were enthusiastic – averring how ‘glad’ they were to serve, how ‘happy’ they were to fight, how ‘proud’ they felt to be in the army. Demba Mboup was among those eager to fight for France:
I was very happy because I didn’t know what the war was really like. So it was a kind of curiosity – to know what the war was about, and about being a soldier … So I was happy [thinking] I was going to discover new experiences. I didn’t know.
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He was to find out soon enough.
His commanding officer General Charles Mangin thought he knew a thing or two about Africans. He had been a member of Marchand’s Fashoda expedition. In 1910, as an ambitious young lieutenant colonel, he and a group of scientists had toured West Africa with orders to increase recruitment. Mangin was familiar with the latest racial science. His survey team, after examining recruits with the full range of pseudo-scientific methods, concluded that, thanks to their supposedly underdeveloped nervous systems, African soldiers would feel less fear and suffer less pain than their European counterparts. They would therefore be exceptionally steadfast under fire. In 1917 Mangin
was able to put his theory to the test. Under his leadership, Mboup and his fellow tirailleurs were pitted against perhaps the best-trained soldiers the West has ever produced: the fighting machine that was the imperial German army.
In April 1917 Demba Mboup and his comrades in the French Colonial Corps, part of General Charles Mangin’s Sixth Army and General Denis Duchêne’s Tenth Army, faced the heavily fortified positions of the Seventh German Army under General Hans von Boehn on the Chemin des Dames – the Ladies’ Road, so called after its use by the two daughters of Louis XV in the eighteenth century. In March 1814 Napoleon’s retreating soldiers had fought along the same road against the invading Austrian and Russian armies. It was the key to the German defensive position on the Western Front.
The French commander General Robert Nivelle was confident that he would be the man who achieved the long-awaited breakthrough on the Western Front. The French built 300 miles of new railway lines to supply the offensive with 872 trainloads of munitions. Altogether more than a million men were massed in readiness for the assault, stretched along a 25-mile front. Days of artillery barrages were supposed to soften up the Germans. Then, at 6 a.m. on 16 April, the colonial troops advanced up hills that had become mudslides in the rain and sleet. Mangin had placed the Senegalese in the first wave of the attack. But he almost certainly had an ulterior motive: to spare French lives. According to Lieutenant Colonel Debieuvre, commander of the 58th Regiment of Colonial Infantry, the Africans were ‘finally and above all superb attack troops permitting the saving of the lives of whites, who behind them exploit their success and organize the positions they conquer’.
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From the German trenches, Captain Reinhold Eichacker watched in horror:
The black Senegal negroes, France’s cattle for the shambles. Hundreds of fighting eyes, fixed, threatening, deadly. And they came. First singly, at wide intervals. Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish.
Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster. Thus they rushed closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in their cloud. Strong, wild fellows, showing their grinning teeth like panthers. Horrible their unnaturally wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes.
On they came, a solid, rolling black wall, rising and falling, swaying and heaving, impenetrable, endless.
‘Close range! Individual firing! Take careful aim!’ My orders rang out sharp and clear.
The first blacks fell headlong in full course in our wire entanglements, turning somersaults like the clowns in a circus. Whole groups melted away. Dismembered bodies, sticky earth, shattered rocks, were mixed in wild disorder. The black cloud halted, wavered, closed its ranks and rolled nearer and nearer, irresistible, crushing, devastating!
