In this new and excellent book, Eric Jennings further enhances our understanding of the topic—World War II in the French Empire—that was also the subject of his earlier important work, Vichy in the Tropics (Stanford University Press, 2002). By focusing on the much neglected story of the federation of French Equatorial Africa (AEF), which was under the Free French during the war, this book gives us the opportunity to compare both types of competing colonial regimes that emerged due to the circumstances of the war—the Free French and Vichy. Jennings, therefore, not only contributes to our knowledge about French participation in the war, but also enhances our understanding of the nature of French colonialism in Africa and its ramifications both on the metropole and on the African populations living in the colonies. Jennings’s goal, as he states in the introduction, is not only to measure the importance of AEF for the Free French movement, but also to expose the actions, roles, and voices of those African soldiers, workers, and farmers who were part of the war effort and to determine how they perceived the war and what it meant for them.
The book is based on a wide and impressive range of primary sources collected from archives in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States, as well as in African archives in Congo, Cameroon, and Senegal. The first part introduces us to the struggle between Vichy and Free French supporters over AEF and the initial attempts of the Free French to legitimize their rule over the federation following their grasp of power. One way of acquiring legitimacy was by presenting the unfamiliar French leader, Charles de Gaulle, to Africans through propaganda. Jennings offers us a fascinating glimpse here of the African reception of this image by quoting an African legend distributed at the time according to which de Gaulle had been dead for five years and had come out of his grave to save France.
The second part of the book deals with the military participation of AEF in the war. Here Jennings does not retell known stories about important battles on the African continent but rather completes these stories by putting them in their African and colonial context. We learn about discontent among soldiers who resented the racist attitudes of their commanders and also that the first “whitening” of the Free French units actually occurred during the fighting in the city of Algiers a year before the more famous battle of liberation.
In the third and especially fascinating part of the book Jennings leaves the military domain and deals with the everyday reality of Africans who were forced to work for the military effort. Through an examination of complaint letters submitted by African farmers and workers to colonial administrators, Jennings exposes the harsh reality in which Africans lived during the war and the racist attitudes they encountered. This part of the book reveals the incredible measure of colonial repression and extortion of resources that the Free French exercised in AEF. The conditions of forced labor, which were severe enough before the war, became even worse due to the pressure to produce more to support the war effort. Jennings thus demonstrates how the Free French turned the federation into a war machine.
Finally, in his epilogue Jennings discusses the ways in which the Free French episode in Africa was later remembered. The choice of adding this part was an excellent one, as it can help us evaluate better the current French “politics of remembrance” in relation to the role that French-ruled Africa and African soldiers played in the liberation of France and the eventual Allied victory.
By completing the picture of WWII in the French empire, Jennings opens the door for a wide array of questions that can teach us not only about the specific subject of the book but also about the French colonial experience in general. More than anything, Jennings reminds us that while it is important to remember the contribution of the empire and its peoples to the war effort, we should not forget that this contribution was usually not voluntary. It was part of a long tradition of colonial repression. The striking similarities in the colonial context between two regimes with opposing ideologies—the Free French and Vichy—should not be blurred by the myths African politicians helped to encourage after the war and which they may not have believed themselves. Current French and African celebrations of the loyal empire and its part in the victory over Nazi Germany should therefore not obscure the fact that even the antifascist regime of the Free French was part of a repressive colonial system based on the same values it supposedly rejected.
