Kent’s tidal coastline has changed in length and shape since 1700 due to the constant movement of tides and currents of sea and rivers and human activity. This can be clearly seen when comparing eighteenth-century maps of the Isle of Thanet and Romney Marsh with those of today. Evidence of ‘history without humans’ can be seen in the way that the low-lying north Kent coastline has been ‘eaten by the Thames’, as one eighteenth-century anonymous observer described it. Human activity has directed those changes in attempts to control and restrain the sea by reclaiming marshes, building coastal defences and flood barriers, and constructing harbours, groins and piers. The course and flow of rivers have also been changed by the construction of bridges, embankments, walls, weirs and locks.

The greatest change to the coastline, resulting from human endeavour, has occurred since 1800 and was a result of population increase, the growth of coastal towns, and improved technology. New harbours were built or greatly extended at Ramsgate, Whitstable, Dover and Folkestone. The costly process of guarding the coastline increased in the twentieth century, one example being the intermittent wall of cement from Seasalter east to Herne Bay. These changes were in response to the power of the sea, shown in the great storm of 1703, and by North Sea ‘surges’ of 1881 and 1897, and early 1953. Extensive sea defences, their maintenance and repair, whether by commissioners of sewers in the eighteenth century or by modern local authorities, have required large-scale expenditure of national and local revenues.

The ‘re-invention’ of ships in the nineteenth century, from wood to iron and steel, and from sail to steam and diesel, with increased size and tonnage, required larger yards for construction and new deep-water docking and port facilities. In 1840 the average size of a merchant vessel trading to Kent ports weighed under 100 tonnes; by 1914 that figure had increased nearly twentyfold. At the same time ocean freight was carried in new larger iron- and steel-hulled sailing vessels, and smaller sailing ships continued to ply their trade in Kent’s coastal waters and rivers.

Rivers, for centuries used to transport commercial goods, were also subject to changes to aid navigation, accommodate larger vessels, and to allow for a greater volume of trade.

On 4 September 1707 the London newspaper, Post Boy, carried the following advertisement:

Similar notices, common in eighteenth-century British newspapers, raise interesting questions about individual lives, communities, and understandings of race and place. Who was ‘Prince’? Did he have another name? How did he get to Kent, and what was his status in Deal? Why did Prince run away? What can we infer from the scattered references to his scarred body, his belongings, and his ‘Master’? Broader questions arise about contemporary labour relationships, about the network of locations mentioned, and other Black people then living in Kent. Prince cannot have packed much and he probably possessed few goods, given his status, and the success of his escape would depend on unfettered speed and motion. But the report of his flight leaves plenty to unpack about how the histories of diverse peoples, maritime spaces, and imperial exchanges entangled communities in Kent.

There is no firm evidence in the advertisement that Prince was enslaved. A handful of Black people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain were referred to as ‘slaves’, having been brought into the country by colonial planters from the Americas, who often continued to treat them as such. English law was ambiguous on the status and rights of Black people in England.

The Second World War had a profound impact on colonial Africa, signs of which were obvious to some but by no means all observers at the end of the war. By 1945 the major European colonial powers had declined in global power and status and were now overshadowed by two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In fact, the war had been won by Soviet manpower and American financial and industrial power. France and Belgium, although among the ‘victors’, had suffered defeat and foreign occupation in 1940–45. Italy had rapidly lost the empire that it had gained mainly in the 20th century by conquest. Although among the Allied ‘Big Four’ powers, Britain had also suffered a decisive defeat at Singapore in 1942, and the wartime ‘Quit India’ campaign pointed up the acute difficulties of retaining control over the subcontinent.

Although India's future within the Empire was almost certainly a lost cause, Europeans acquainted with Africa, along with most literate Africans, expected colonial rule in the continent to endure for many years to come. The Colonial Office continued to recruit men and women for a lifetime of service in Africa. Colonial control was firmly entrenched and faced few serious indigenous challenges. African political parties were small and poorly funded and led by urban conservative elites, with limited influence mainly restricted to the towns. Trade-union membership had grown during the war years and continuing measures were being taken to prevent unions from engaging in politics. Like previous governments, the new Labour government in Britain, despite its own deep trade-union roots, was unwilling to see this kind of political linkage develop in the colonies. Africa's exports of mineral and agricultural resources were seen as vital to Britain's postwar economic recovery and as a means of propping up a weak sterling system against the power of the American dollar. Postwar plans were also in hand to encourage further European emigration to the white settler colonies of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia as well as to South Africa. Despite this confidence of continued alien control over Africa colonies, the war had subtly and profoundly brought change to the continent. Towns had grown in size, wartime shortages compounded by inflation hit real incomes and generated discontent, felt most keenly and increasingly expressed by people in the expanding urban centres.

It is widely acknowledged that the Second World War constituted a watershed in the recent history of sub-Saharan Africa and that it marked either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end of European colonialism in Africa. By 1945 the Western European colonial states had suffered defeat or siege and declined in political and economic power. In a pyrrhic victory, they were overshadowed by the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. By the end of the war the political balance in Africa had also changed. The colonial powers were still in charge – indeed, it was widely believed that their rule would continue for a very long time – but the seeds of change had been sown, increasingly during the war but also in the years preceding 1939. Within 15 years of the war's end a large part of Africa was either independent or well on the road towards that goal.

Official perspectives

During and immediately after the war, officials and observers understandably commented on the likely effects that exposure to modern warfare and overseas travel would have on the several hundred thousand African soldiers who had been enlisted. A few, mainly in the colonies, feared that on returning home the soldiers were likely to constitute a destabilising influence and could be a threat to future colonial rule. Lord Hailey, writing in 1941, said: ‘It is, of course, too early to judge of the full reactions of the present war on the African outlook, though they cannot fail to be far-reaching.’ In 1945, and based on his own firsthand observations, he reported that although ‘war experiences had a very marked effect on the troops themselves … their return had had less immediate effect on the structure of African society than many colonial authorities had anticipated’.The South African government's refusal to arm black troops was partly influenced by white public opinion but it also reflected fears about what messages this might give large numbers of Africans especially when they were removed from the narrow racial agendas of the Union.

Recruiting and mobilising a large army from the African colonies for war was a process spread over several years. Demobilising such a large number of men once the war had finished took nearly two years and presented serious challenges to the military and civilian authorities in London and the colonies. In mid-1945 more than 300,000 African soldiers were serving in southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as well as in Africa, and they had to be brought home, resettled and reabsorbed back into the civil life of the colonies. There were few precedents that offered practical lessons. The plans formulated in Britain for demobilising the home army were geared to the circumstances of a modern industrial state and the need to return rapidly to a peacetime economy.Such a feeling of urgency did not apply to the officially perceived conditions and needs of colonial Africa in 1945–46. African demobilisation at the end of the First World War had a few helpful local illustrations to offer but not many; on that occasion the number of troops involved was much smaller and soldiers’ origins, experiences and thus expectations were for the most part of a very different kind. The most appropriate body of experience was that of India, which at the end of the First World War had demobilised nearly three million men. By 1942 India had begun drawing up plans for the resettlement of soldiers when the war against the Axis powers was over.

The end of the war in Europe and the Mediterranean in mid-1945 was foreseen, whereas the Japanese surrender came unexpectedly following the dropping of the two atomic bombs in August that year. The main fighting may have ended, but major logistical problems remained for the victors. A large army of labour was needed for clearing up after a long war. Vast supply dumps of war material had to be secured and then disposed of, formerly enemy-held territory reoccupied and prisoners-of-war guarded.

This book is concerned with African soldiers who served in the British colonial forces, and the South African Defence Force, during the Second World War. These men, and a very few women, have not been given the attention that they deserve in the historical literature. Indeed, there are many who will be surprised to know that large numbers of Africans served in the war in the armies of Britain, South Africa, France, Italy and Belgium. To cover all of those African soldiers in one book would be a Herculean task, so the focus here is on those who were black and who came from what rather crudely can be called ‘Anglophone’ Africa. This ignores white South Africans who fought in the war, but their literacy and the racially discriminatory nature of that country until the 1990s means that they have been documented, with their experiences detailed in numerous chronicles and also by official histories. In contrast black soldiers throughout the whole of Africa have been largely ignored. Official documentation tended to treat them collectively, as units, battalions, regiments and brigades, and as most were nonliterate few individuals produced memoirs or accounts of their war experiences.

The attempt in this book is to tell in their own words the story of African soldiers who fought for Britain and South Africa. Thus the account rests heavily on oral evidence, soldiers’ letters, and other sources in which the African rank and file were noted or recorded their experiences of the war years and after. This is ‘history from below’, a ‘people's story’, an account of men who so far have been largely forgotten. There are many books by and about ordinary soldiers in European armies in the Second World War, and there are several accounts by Africans who served with the French colonial armies. A good deal has been written on the campaigns in which African soldiers were involved, in Abyssinia, North Africa, the Levant, Italy, and Burma, and although African units are often mentioned their experience has been largely ignored. One or two novels have dealt with African soldiers in the Second World War, the latest being Burma Boy.

On a sunny morning in March 1944 a small detachment of West African and British soldiers of the 29th Casualty Clearing Station of the 6th West African Brigade stirred in their makeshift camp on the banks of the River Kaladan in Burma. As part of the 81st (West African) Division they had paddled their way down the river on flat open bamboo rafts, following the retreating Japanese forces. With nightfall they had tied up their rafts and slept between river and forest. With the light of morning a few Burmese from the village of Nyron came down to the river, attracted by the unusual sight of black men. Soldiers in various states of casual dress chatted, shaved and drank tea in preparation for the continued journey down the Kaladan. Isaac Fadoyebo, an 18-year-old Nigerian volunteer, stood drinking tea and talking to his countryman, the tall and imposing Sgt Duke, who was clad only in white vest and blue underpants. Suddenly

Diégo Suarez, December 1943

The men of the 1st Infantry Battalion, Mauritius Regiment, who landed at Diégo Suarez as part of the Madagascar invasion force on 20 December 1943 were already deeply dissatisfied. The week-long voyage had been stormy and most of the soldiers had been very seasick. There was widespread and deep resentment at the racial discrimination within Mauritian forces, which were segregated into white and non-white units. Whites were primarily combatants and paid more than non-whites who were mainly employed as military labour. All officers were white, a mixture of upper-class francophone and anglophone Mauritians, and all attempts by non-whites to gain a commission had been rebuffed. And for many of the recruits in the 1,000-strong regiment that went ashore there was a double sense of betrayal: they had been enlisted for service only in Mauritius and were now being sent abroad, while no white units had been sent overseas. This rankled deeply. An added and deep anxiety was for the welfare of the womenfolk back home, now subject to the attentions of the Nyasaland troops of 17 KAR, who had recently arrived to garrison Mauritius.

John Harrison, then a lieutenant in the British Army but later a distinguished social historian, remembers that the Mauritian troops ‘landed on the quay at Diégo Suarez late in the morning, when the sun was at its hottest, and had to parade there in full kit for over an hour. Some fell down from sheer exhaustion and were insulted by their Anglo-Mauritian officers.’ Lt-Col Jimmy Yates, a regular officer, refused transport and decided that his men should march the 12 miles to the camp at Orangea. Harrison continues: ‘The march was a disaster, as the troops were in no fit state and kept falling down on the road or in the ditch. Witnesses said later that at least one Anglo-Mauritian officer kicked the men while ordering them to get up.’ At Orangea the tented camp in a forested area was poorly cleared and prepared. One man set fire to ‘a bit of the forest, the fire spread and half the camp was destroyed before the fire was brought under control’. The final breaking point came over an apparently insignificant event the next morning. Company commanders ordered physical training at 6.30am. The battalion baulked, some soldiers refusing to assemble while others staged a sit-down strike on the parade ground.

The war years saw the largest mobilisation and movement of men within and out of Africa in modern history. Altogether more than one million men left their homes, which were mainly in rural areas, to serve in the military forces of the colonial powers. In British Africa and South Africa the total number of men enlisted was in the region of 600,000. Although wartime recruitment was eventually extended beyond the traditional recruiting grounds the majority of soldiers continued to be drawn from those areas. The social and economic impact of this large and sustained process of enlistment and lengthy service, often overseas, was for many men profound. Men recruited from remote rural areas had no visual image of the new artefacts and scenes they would encounter. For the most part they came from a world without books or illustrations, having had few reference points to prepare them for what they were going to see. For example one recruit, having recently encountered the railway, believed that ocean-going vessels ran on tracks under the sea. And yet adaptation was relatively speedy and new sights, sounds and experiences were readily absorbed. Adapting to change, even profound change, has been an ingredient of human experience throughout history. There were many similarities between wartime military service and the processes of migrant labour to the mines of central and South Africa. Both military service and migrant labour involved men leaving rural areas for a lengthy absence from wives and children, with all the strains that this imposed on family relationships and rural production. Migrant labourers in southern Africa often lived in predominately male compounds or barracks, a regulated environment involving various measures of social control; there were new languages and skills to be acquired; and migrants were exposed to modern technology and to urban culture. A good deal has been written about the social history of migrant labour, less on the social impact of soldiers in wartime, the subject addressed by this chapter.

The day war broke out, 3 September 1939, ‘was an ordinary day, a day like today’, recalled Robert Kakembo from Buganda, when serving as a soldier. ‘Most of the tribes in East and Central Africa,’ he continued, ‘did not know what the trouble was about.’ Josiah Mariuki, a Gikuyu, recalled that ‘the great war that came in 1939 between the Europeans did not much effect life on the farm’. Early in the war, he wrote, ‘there was an ominous rumour that Hitler was coming to kill us all and many people went fearfully down to the rivers and dug holes in the bank to hide from the troops.’ Elsewhere in East Africa when people heard of the outbreak of war they immediately thought of the horrors of compulsory labour service during the Great War 25 years before, and some fled into the bush. And a Gikuyu age-group initiated in 1939 ‘had heard so much about the threat of Hitler and of mbobomu, or bombs, that they called themselves “Hitler”, to the alarm of the authorities. Literate Africans in urban areas could read in the local press about the likelihood of war and its consequences. In late August the Uganda Herald informed readers how to act if Italian bombers attacked the main towns: ‘Lie down quietly out of doors and wait till the trouble is over’; and in event of gas, ‘urinate on a handkerchief and hold it over your nostrils and mouth’.

While this advice was being read and absorbed, on the other side of the continent the Governor of Nigeria, Sir Bernard Bourdillon, was on tour and out of radio contact on a boat in the maze of waterways that formed the Niger Delta. To alert him that war was imminent and he was needed back in Lagos, the Chief Secretary had a message dropped to his boat by aircraft. On 3 September governors and administrators in colonial capitals from Khartoum to Lagos and Kampala to Maseru were informed by telegram that war had been declared on Germany.

In each colony local military or police forces were put on a war footing, German commercial enterprises sequestrated, enemy nationals either detained or placed under restriction, and discussions begun on the future economic and social consequences of belligerence.

In early 1942 the 16-year-old Isaac Fadoyebo thought he would not be able to get a suitable job in Nigeria. Many years later he wrote: ‘I simply saw military service as a good job. Without consulting my parents and caring less about the consequences I took a plunge into the unknown by getting myself enlisted in the army at Abeokuta.’ As with many other Africans who served in the Second World War, Fadeyebo was a volunteer, eager for paid work, the chance of adventure, or perhaps to wear a uniform to impress young women. There were other men who found their way into the army by means not of their choosing. ‘The chief picked out some men and sent them to Bawku … The chief told me to go and do something there and I was put in the army,’ said Agolley Kusasi, recalling 40 years after the event how, as a 19-year-old farmer in the northern Gold Coast, his chief had sent him to join the Gold Coast Regiment in late 1939. Unaware of the real reason for which he was being sent to Bawku, Agolley Kusasi found himself with other young men enlisted in the army and sent away for training and eventually war service in Burma. He did not return home to his family until 1946. About the same time as this young man was forcibly enlisted, the district commissioner recorded that ‘both Bawku market and Bawkumaba's court was [sic] noticeably affected by the recruiting campaign, people being afraid to come into Bawku’.Throughout Britain's African colonies during the war years several hundred thousand men were recruited for military service, most enlisting voluntarily but some as a result of varying degrees of pressure, including force.

In September 1939, Britain's African Colonial Forces (ACF) were small and inadequately equipped for a modern war, but only deemed necessary for use in Africa. Through the 1920s colonial defence plans for West Africa assumed any future conflict would be with France, although this was assessed as ‘very unlikely’. However, the Abyssinian crisis of 1935–36 turned the spotlight onto the potential threat from Italian policies, mainly in the Horn of Africa.

For many young men the Second World War was a time of adventure and opportunity. Despite regimentation, occasional danger and much boredom, they could look back on their ‘good war’ as the most exciting time in their lives. They left home and familiar surroundings, met different people, travelled to other countries, saw new sights, and underwent a range of novel experiences. This was true for many Africans who enlisted in the British colonial armies, and who entered a life very different from their civilian one. Men who had never worn boots or eaten with utensils, had never seen a tarmac road or a motor vehicle, let alone the sea, or had never travelled aboard a vast ship, were thrust from the bush via the barracks into a startling new world. However, the ‘good war’ is a reflection for fortunate survivors. The dead lacked a voice and those whose lives were shattered had bitter regrets; for example, a wounded Tswana sergeant wrote from a hospital in the Middle East in 1945: ‘I never get sleep out of the pains from my knees. I now feel that I am a cripple who will not do anything in life.’

Initial training

For African recruits the first encounter with army life was invariably being taken, sometimes by lorry, to an assembly point or camp. There men were formally enlisted by a recruiting officer, often with the help of an African NCO who acted as interpreter. An attestation form was completed detailing the soldier's name, ethnic origin, home, next of kin, physical appearance, weight and height. Literate men signed the form, nonliterates provided a thumbprint. Recruits swore an oath of loyalty. In West Africa this involved ‘pagans’ licking a bayonet and saying, usually in Hausa: ‘If I should break this oath, may this bayonet devour me’, while Muslims and Christians swore on the Qur'an or the Bible. Soldiers were given a uniform; in the KAR this consisted of a light khaki tunic and “long shorts” (to keep out thorns), a khaki slouch hat, with the battalion number on it in Arabic numerals, and boots, the latter just introduced and worn unwillingly on the parade ground only. Heads were closely shaved against lice.