On Free French Africa in World War II

“Between August 1940 and the summer of 1943, the heart of Free France was not located in London, as standard accounts would have us believe, but rather in Free French Africa. Instead of a beret-coiffed white maquisard in the Alps, the archetypal early French resistance fighter between 1940 and 1943 was, in fact, black and hailed from Chad, Cameroon, or Oubangui-Chari (modern-day Central African Republic).”

“In a speech at the Palais Chaillot, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, on January 26, 1945, Henri Laurentie observed that never before had a motherland been liberated by its empire. Far-flung Roman provinces had not retaken Rome after its fall, he noted.”

And yet, this is exactly what happened in the case of France during World War II. Free French Africa—consisting primarily of what is now Cameroon, Central African Republic, Gabon, and Chad—permitted De Gaulle to gain legitimacy in his fight against the Axis and push against Italians and Germans from the colonies. After all, thousands upon thousands of Central Africans pushed north into the deserts of Libya, where Marshall Leclerc pledged not to relent until the liberation of Strasbourg, after which the Free French went on to attack Rommel head on. This is significant, as the general view of the “French Resistance” is of the maquis, fighting against German authorities in occupied France. Yet, there was little “French Resistance” until the Free French—more than half of whom were not French citizens—made a dent in North Africa. At this point, De Gaulle was able to move his capital from Brazzaville (not London) to Algiers and engage more closely with the British and Americans in preparation for D-Day, as well as the Free French invasion of France from the beaches of Provence.

This is an important story that needs to be told, as it transforms our idea of World War II and of “France” more generally. When we talk about the Second World War as a “global” event, our minds generally move to a fairly strict set of spaces. Beyond Europe and the Pacific islands, the other “global” places that most think of are Stalingrad, Singapore, China, Burma, and maybe Egypt. In truth, Africa was central to the War effort in terms of manpower, legitimacy, and resources. We can’t ignore this, and Jennings tells it remarkably well.

This book is well-researched and well-written. I especially enjoyed his epilogue, on the legacy of Free French Africa both in France (where it is mostly forgotten) and throughout Central Africa, where it is remembered, both with nostalgia and bitterness—Bokassa I of the Central African Republic had two photographs in his office, each two meters high: one with himself as a barefoot tirailleur, the other with himself as a head of state beside Charle de Gaulle; Cameroonian nationalists, in contrast, have put time into vandalizing the statue of Marshall Leclerc with the—in my opinion—reasonable grievance that French colonizers are better commemorated than anticolonial Cameroonians.