S4 E15: Decolonizing African heroes' books: the glorious lives of Senegalese "Tirailleurs"

"Africa has cost us heaps of gold, thousands of soldiers and streams of blood; gold we do not think to ask them. But the men and the blood, it must pay us back "these are words from Adolphe Messimy in the daily newspaper Le Matin, September 3, 1910. This French parliament member was expressing his support to the project of French army General Charles Mangin, to make Africa, the reservoir of a great "Black army" for the future, a project developed in his book The Black Force. This book, considered the pinnacle of military racism at the beginning of the 19th century, is responsible for a still tenacious cliché about the physical strength of Africans. It justified one of the most intense demographic reduction of the African population in the French colonies, sometimes exceeding those during the slave trade.

Hello and welcome to this Sankofa flight, which is following in the footsteps of a real west African myth, that of the so-called Senegalese rifleman, seen to be a clown more than a soldier, a guy not adapted to modern wars , a ridiculous guy, whose evocation was making us rather laugh as children. Who were these skirmishers? where do they come from? and why?