orcibly, running the risk of a general revolt.” After Vollenhoven’s embittered resignation, the French government appointed Blaise Diagne (1872-1934) “Commissaire de la République dans l'Ouest Africain” with the powers of a Governor-General, to organise the new recruitment campaign. Diagne had been the first Black African to be elected as a deputy in the French parliament in 1914. Like some African American leaders, he considered and propagated war service as a means to obtain rights such as the franchise. By September 1918, he had recruited 63,000 soldiers: many more than expected. The end of the war spared these soldiers from having to fight at the front. However, as from 1919 many of them were stationed as occupation soldiers in the Rhineland, where many became sick or died.
French officials in North Africa were less hostile towards conscription than were their colleagues in West Africa. Charles Lutaud (1855-1921), Governor-General of Algeria, even explicitly announced an expansion of conscription of Algerian Arabs in 1916. In the following year, however, he opposed governmental plans for a premature enlistment of those who would come of age in 1918, arguing that, “even though we managed to suppress last November’s uprising, the tribes’ submission is far from absolute”. Thereupon, the government renounced these plans. The government’s ambition to recruit another 50,000 Algerian Arabs in 1918 by expanding conscription to the south of Algeria, where no working colonial administration was yet in existence, was criticised by colonial officials as unrealistic. When Paris persisted, colonial administrators put the new policy into practice. However, they managed to recruit far fewer soldiers than Paris had hoped.
An important type of passive resistance was desertion. Of those young men who had not managed to avoid conscription, many deserted at the earliest opportunity. For African soldiers who had been shipped to Europe, desertion was hardly an option any longer, given the difficulties of hiding among the civilian population. German attempts to encourage defection of Muslim soldiers and to try to convince them to fight for the Ottoman Empire were of limited success, as only about 500 out of 8,000 North African POWs and defectors agreed to such a transfer. On the other hand, desertion rates in Africa were very high. They amounted, for instance, to 25 percent of those recruited by the British in Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Of the 14,000 Askari recruited and conscripted by the Germans in East Africa, no fewer than 3,000 deserted. Furthermore, the figures of 4,500 missing and 4,200 captured Askari are likely to include many more deserters. Most Askari recruited from the Gindo, Hehe and Ngoni, for instance, would desert when deployed near their home regions and wage a guerrilla war against all European armies. And the backbone of the big Tuareg rebellion in the central Sahara from 1916 to 1918 under Ag Muhammad Wau Teguidda Kaocen (1880-1919) was composed of several hundred deserters from the French and Italian colonial armies.
Active Resistance and Rebellion↑
The First World War witnessed dozens of minor revolts and a considerable number of major armed rebellions against colonial rule all over Africa, stretching from Algeria to the Cape of Good Hope and from French and British West Africa to German East Africa. Whilst the reasons behind these resistance movements are manifold, forced recruitment of soldiers and military labour accounted for many of them and in some cases recruitment can clearly be identified as the main trigger. In French West Africa, a revolt amongst the Bambara in Bélédougou (Mali) from February to November 1915 undoubtedly stemmed from opposition to recruitment. During the great revolt in West Volta from November 1915 to August 1916, which included tens of thousands of rebels of different ethnic groups, recruitment was at the very least a major trigger. The French had to deploy nearly 5,000 soldiers and policemen to quell this resistance, using brute force, destroying whole villages and killing many civilian