West African recruits take an oath of loyalty to King and Empire, Zaria, northern Nigeria. Most West African recruits signed up for money and adventure. (courtesy of Jill Hopwood)
Sizing up whether a recruit is soldier material. British officers said Hausa soldiers ‘had very good physique’. (courtesy of Jill Hopwood)
Training in Nigeria before the journey to India, 1943. General Woolner said his soldiers were ‘absolute beginners’. Regardless, they would be taking on the Japanese. (courtesy of Jill Hopwood)
The West African 81st Division marched long distances through the dense, hilly Arakan jungle, carrying loads on their heads. (Imperial War Museum)
Mrauk U, capital of the ancient Arakan kingdom, and site of a key victory of the West African troops in Burma.
(PHOTOBYTE/Alamy)
Traditional basha near the Kaladan River, the Arakan. Shuyiman’s house was built in this style. (© John Warburton-
Lee Photography/Alamy)
Soldiers welcomed home from Burma at Lagos, Apapa docks, 1946. When Isaac arrived the previous year journalists swarmed over his ship, hoping to collect their war stories. (courtesy of Jill Hopwood)
Proud soldiers parade through the streets of Lagos. In the words of Robert Kakembo, ‘the war has shown the world that we are men, and given the opportunity, we are a match of anybody else in the world’. (courtesy of Jill Hopwood)
Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa (at right) addresses the nation at Nigeria’s Independence Ceremony, 1 October 1960. Princess Alexandra looks on. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Tokunboh Street, Lagos, As Isaac would have known it in 1954…
(courtesy of Jill Hopwood)
…and in 2013 (Barnaby Phillips)
Post-colonial hospitality: Isaac (middle row, far left) and other Commonwealth civil servants at a training course in England, 1969 (courtesy of Fadoyebo family)
Family man: Isaac, Florence, and all their daughters, c.1970
(courtesy of Fadoyebo family)
A memorial to the African soldiers who died in Burma to save the British Empire, in Taukkyan Cemetery near Rangoon (Barnaby Phillips)
Shuyiman’s grandson, Roshi, and son, Adu, Pagoda Hill, June 2011 (Barnaby Phillips)
Sittwe, June 2011. A few months later, the town would be convulsed by fighting between Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingyas. (Barnaby Phillips)
Isaac tells his story, Emure-Ile, Nigeria, 2011. (Barnaby Phillips)
Notes
1. One big man
“All they knew…one big man”: Jolasanmi Olaleye Falore, Omo Ayeko: The Life and Times of Moses Oni Ayeko-Falore (Ibadan: Hiswill Books, 1996), p. 71.
the posters screamed: For examples of British propaganda posters used in Nigeria during the Second World War, see Peter B. Clarke, West Africans at War 1914–18, 1939–45: Colonial Propaganda and its Cultural Aftermath (London: Ethnographica, 1986).
‘Adolf Hitler ma se o’: Sung to me by Mrs Bisola Williams in Lagos, 14 January 2013. Aged seventy-five, she remembered it perfectly from her childhood.
‘the town burnt famously’: Illustrated London News, 13 March 1852, quoted in Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning, Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 145.
‘the final act in the long struggle’: Bryan Sharwood Smith, But Always As Friends (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 4.
‘formerly we stole Africans’: Hansard, 4th ser., xxv, 243–244, quoted in Huzzey, Freedom Burning, p. 169
first British person…in Owo: Dates and details on the arrival of the British in Owo and subsequent developments come from Chief Adedokun Joseph Aralepo, official historian to the court of the Olowo. I met Chief Aralepo in Owo in January 2013, when he said he was 103 years old. He has kept a meticulous record of key dates in Owo’s past, which he is determined to write up into a formal history. He says the secret to his longevity is his abstention from alcohol and womanising.
‘detestable, abhorrent, disgraceful’: Olatunji Ojo, ‘Slavery and Human Sacrifice in Yorubaland: Ondo 1870–94’, Journal of African History, vol. 46, no. 3, (November 2005): 379–404.
‘a good African band’: I visited St George’s Primary School in January 2013. I found more than eighty pupils crowded into some classrooms. One block had been abandoned because the roof had been destroyed in a storm. Teachers crowded round me, pleading for donations towards a laptop or generator. Fortunately, the headmistress was able to find the school records from the 1930s, including the brown leather book, at the bottom of a wooden cupboard in the corner of her office.
‘flowers were trimmed’: Anthony Enahoro, Fugitive Offender (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 35.
‘as familiar with…London’: Ibid., p. 43.
‘most modern and civilised town’: ‘Coaster’, Coast and Bush Life in West Africa (London: Gay and Hancock, 1924), p. 13.
‘Eton of Nigeria’: Enahoro, Fugitive Offender, p. 51.
2. Let this bayonet drink my blood
‘largely because no other party’: John Hamilton, private papers, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University. Part of a collection of papers of British officers who led African soldiers, compiled in the early 1980s, and listed as RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734. Hamilton’s papers are (168) in this collection.
‘What war?’: J. Allen Bull, Palm Oil Chop (private memoirs, Pietermaritzburg: 1987), p. 65.
the boy…had been signed up: Mario Kolk, Can You Tell Me Why I Went To War? (Zomba: Kachere, 2008), p. 16.
‘packed…like firewood’: Martin Plaut, Africa and the Second World War, BBC World Service for Africa, 3 September 1989.
former inmates of Kano jail: Jack Osborne, interview, 5 May 2011. Jack was 101 years old at the time, and still fond of reading Russian and Portuguese literature in the vernacular. He died on 15 August 2012, aged 103. The Daily Telegraph ran this obituary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9531609/Jack-Osborne.html.
kosa-ankobifour: Cameron Duodo, ‘Good Night, Good Knight: Profile of Major Seth Anthony’, New African Magazine, 1 March 2009.
‘vast numbers of men came forward’: Philip van Straubenzee, Desert, Jungle and Dale (Durham: Pentland Press, 1991), p. 16.
‘An African Soldier Speaks’: Robert Kakembo, An African Soldier Speaks (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1946), p. 7.
‘We thought that the Germans’: Esther Salawu, interview, Lagos, 22 January 2013. Esther was in her late eighties at the time.
‘It…would put any black man’s back up’: Plaut, Africa and the Second World War.
one in every hundred African soldiers…could read and write: Trevor Clark, Good Second Class: Memoirs of a Generalist Overseas Administrator (Stanhope: The Memoir Club, 2004), p. 66.
‘even if not particularly sophisticated’: John A.L. Hamilton, War Bush: 81 (West African) Division in Burma 1943–45 (Norwich: Michael Russell, 2001), p. 32.
‘of pure European descent’: David Killingray, Fighting for Britain, African Soldiers in the Second World War (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2010), p. 85.
never addressed a single word: David Killingray, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (243).
‘Everything had to be portable’: Lieutenant Colonel John Filmer-Bennett, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (139).
‘we took an enormous amount of exercise’: van Straubenzee, Desert, Jungle and Dale, p. 15.
‘silly munts’: Major Ernest Lanning, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (258).
never even seen a black person: Ruairi Fallon, My Father and the Forgotten Army,
BBC2, television programme, 7 July 2013.
‘avoid too easy fraternisation’: ‘A Brief Introduction for HM’s Forces about to serve in British West Africa’, National Army Museum Archives, accession no. 2007-10-09.
‘We were one army firmly divided by colour’: Arthur Moss, A Piece of War (n.p.: Vajra Press, 2011), p. 49.
‘One bloody African’: Private correspondence shown to me.
‘the men and women who had lived…in that jungle’: Fred Clarke, The Road to Spiderdore (Taunton: Rocket, 1995), p. 64.
‘echoed Rawalpindi and Dar-es-Salaam’: Charles Carfrae, Chindit Column (London: William Kimber, 1985), p. 35.
‘we regarded the troops as our children’: R.R. Ryder, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734, Box X.
‘I’d been sent to pick up cannon fodder’: Hugh Lawrence, interview, April 2013.
a bishop’s mitre and a duke’s coronet: May Mott-Smith, Africa From Port to Port (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1931), p. 189.
‘For to them he is more important than King’: Arnold Mayard, Private Papers of A.A. Mayard, Imperial War Museum documents no. 1254.
‘the usual dreary drinking session’: Ibid.
a dingy brothel: Inspiration for a Lagos brothel scene from Carfrae, Chindit Column, p. 64.
‘Me-no likee English sold-ier’: James Shaw, The March Out (London: Panther Books, 1956), p. 16.
‘an unfortunate phase’: Major Ernest Lanning, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MS.Afr.s 1734 (258).
known by the soldiers as Werewere: Description of the bullying sergeant at Enugu, nicknamed Werewere, taken from J.O. Ariyo, Oju Mi Ri Ni India (London: Longmans Green, 1957), p. 27; in Yoruba and translated by Yinka Oke.
fantastic names like Venus Bonaparte Smith: Creole women’s names taken from Lawrence Green, White Man’s Grave (London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1954), p. 191.
‘our chaps place the Japs’: Alan Warren, Singapore 1942: Britain’s Greatest Defeat (New York: Hambledon, 2002), p. 46.
‘The Japanese did not expect’: Ronald Blythe, Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 284.
‘I have been considering use of African troops’: General Archibald Wavell’s correspondence with the War Office is in the Public Record Office at Kew. PRO WO 193/91.
‘be in accordance with…Colonial Office policy’: Ibid.
‘that these resources released from West Africa’: Ibid.
In January 1943, the War Office: Colonel A. Haywood and Brigadier F.A.S. Clarke, The History of the Royal West African Frontier Force (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1964), p. 373.
‘the virtually naked’: Clark, Good Second Class, p. 68.
‘jungle-reared or not’: Hamilton, War Bush, p. 30.
3. A calabash in the wind
‘Since the day we left…a calabash’: Kenneth Gandar Dower, Abyssinian Patchwork: An Anthology (London: Frederick Muller, 1949), p. 33.
‘known to his peers as “Kit” ’: Hamilton, War Bush, p. 352.
‘really does fight to the last man’: Major General Christopher Woolner wrote a sixty-page report on the formation, training and performance of the 81st Division in July 1944, just as he was about to be relieved of his position. It can be found in the Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (403).
‘Sir. Which time dis war done finish?’: Richard Terrell, Civilians in Uniform (London: Radcliffe Press, 1998), p. 53.
men were worried that the wells…were nearly empty: Alf W. Gardner, Na Godé (Brighton: Pen Press, 2003), p. 111.
as dark as the indigo of aro: Aro is a famous Yoruba black-indigo dye, used for fabrics and skin decoration.
‘dis place ebe Englan, nobbe Blackman country’: ‘This must be England, it is not a black man’s country.’ Letter from a Nigerian soldier quoted in Dower, Abyssinian Patchwork, p. 36.
‘But you don’t arm these monkeys’: Bull, Palm Oil Chop, p. 78.
so few black faces on the streets: Ronald W. Graham, There was a Soldier: The Life of Hama Kim (Africana Marburgensia, 1985), p. 10.
‘I for one have never forgotten its delights’: Carfrae, Chindit Column, p. 76.
‘a city of well-stocked shops and lovely weather’: Moss, A Piece of War, p. 79.
‘the undernourished and ill-dressed native blacks’: Ibid., p. 78.
an older white woman intervened: Ibid., p. 79.
‘I cannot leave my homeland’: Major Ernest Lanning, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (258).
‘like a huge sheet of glass’: Clarke, The Road to Spiderdore, p. 90.
‘One would see them huddled’: Bull, Palm Oil Chop, p. 77.
‘E i lo∙ de∙e∙ E i lo∙ de∙e∙’: Ariyo, Oju Mi Ri Ni India, p. 40; in Yoruba and translated by Yinka Oke.
‘No be say all people where de for house’: Ibid., p. 36.
‘as the weather grew warmer, the drums beat’: Captain Richard Ryder, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734, Box X.
‘sat glumly waiting to be dismissed’: Terrell, Civilians in Uniform, p. 61.
‘the King of England’s enemies’: Carfrae, Chindit Column, p. 75.
‘One thing doubt me, sah’: David M. Cookson, With Africans in Arakan, National Army Museum, accession no. 2007-10-9.
‘were utterly bewildered’: Brian Crabb, Passage to Destiny: The Sinking of the SS Khedive Ismail (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1997), p. 77.
‘the sufferers became frightened’: Carfrae, Chindit Column, p. 76.
‘dying almost like flies’: Jack Osborne, interview, 5 May 2011.
4. The generals are met
‘The Generals are met’: David M. Cookson, De Bello Kaladano: An Unfinished Epic, verse 2, National Army Museum, accession no. 2007-10-9.
‘starched and pressed’: John Hamilton, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (168).
‘With my rifle hot in my hands’: Moss, A Piece of War, p. 81.
‘India woman like angel’: Terrell, Civilians in Uniform, p. 64.
‘Is it not madness to worship what is good to chop?’: ‘Chop’ means food in West African ‘pidgin’.
‘useless to try and stage’: Private papers of General Noel Irwin, Imperial War Museum documents no. 10516.
about 100,000 soldiers: Julian Thompson, Forgotten Voices of Burma (London: Ebury, 2010), p. x. Thompson estimates that the Indian contribution to the 14th Army was 340,000 men, with 100,000 Britons and 90,000 Africans (as well as 66,000 Chinese and 60,000 Americans, who were under separate command). David Killingray, Fighting for Britain (James Currey, 2010) estimates that 120,000 Africans, including various support units, served in the Burma campaign. In addition to the two West African divisions that fought in the Arakan, East African soldiers from the King’s African Rifles fought with the 11th Division, mainly in the Kabaw Valley.
‘well-to-do West Country farmer’: Frank Owen, ‘General Bill Slim’, Phoenix: South East Asia Command Magazine, 1945, reproduced at the Burma Star Association, http://www.burmastar.org.uk/slim.htm
‘more obviously at home’: William Slim, Defeat Into Victory (London: Pan Macmillan, 1999), p. 165.
J.O. Ariyo…struck by the similarities: Ariyo, Oju Mi Ri Ni India, p. 63; in Yoruba and translated by Yinka Oke.
‘seeing is believing’: Captain Melvin Crapp’s papers in the Rhodes House collection include a fascinating batch of letters by West African soldiers recording their impressions of Calcutta in December 1943, the same month that Isaac was there. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (108).
‘Please Miss, this be welfare?’: Major Ernest Lanning, Rhodes House collection of officers’ papers. RHL, MSS.Afr.s 1734 (258).
twenty times the size of Lagos: I have used an estimated population for Calcutta in 1947 of four million, taken from the Asian Urban Information Centre of Kobe (http://www.auick.org/database/ids/ids01/ids01-04.htm) and a contemporary New York Times
report (http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/03/opinion/03iht-edold.t_5.html).
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