Untold Deaths and Sufferings of ‘African Human Machines’ in World War One ( by Anozie Awambu)
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood on African soil in 2007 and bluntly declared “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history”. Africans seethed at the insulting, many even believed racist, tone of that speech. But as the world commemorated the centenary of the end of World War One during last weekend, and as historians and the media recounted the many sides of its history, I came to see that Sarkozy might even have been generous. Neither the exceptional contributions of native Africans, nor their unique sufferings, in that senseless conflict was even footnoted in any of the written commentaries and TV documentaries that I reviewed. If you saw any, please let me know about it. Did anyone mention that, apart from the thousands of Africans who died fighting as enlisted soldiers for the various colonial (German, British, French, Belgian and Portuguese) powers, an estimated 1.5 million African “labour corps” men, women and