yet these ideas would never materialise due to both the need to keep a strong army force in Congo against attacks from German East Africa and fears that exposing Africans to warfare in Europe would weaken colonial control. Nevertheless, a small number of Congolese present in Europe managed to enlist in the metropolitan Belgian army and served on the Western Front.
The British were reluctant to deploy African troops in Europe. Although the British forces in the African theatres of war and the Middle Eastern campaigns included large numbers of African soldiers, a campaign for a “million-strong black army” following the French example, backed by several officers and politicians with colonial backgrounds, was unsuccessful. Logistical issues, coupled with racist prejudices and opposition from colonial authorities, resulted in the renunciation of the use of African troops on European battlefields. Non-white men were also banned from the “South African Overseas Expeditionary Force”. However, black and “coloured” men from the Union of South Africa served in Europe in the “South African Native Labour Contingent” (21,000 men), the “Cape Auxiliary Horse Transport” (2,800 men) and the “Cape Coloured Labour Corps” (1,200 men), all of them in unarmed ancillary roles. Furthermore, the British recruited 82,000 war workers in Egypt and 1,000 in Mauritius for service in Europe.
Wartime propaganda and memorial culture in both the Entente states and Germany was used to stress Africans’ alleged loyalty to and eagerness to fight and die for their colonial masters. Several issues related to recruitment, however, suggest completely different attitudes of Africans towards war service. Whilst it is sometimes difficult to decide between voluntary enlistment and forced conscription, it is clear that a considerable number of Africans, more than likely even the majority of them, were incorporated into wartime colonial armies against their will, even though universal compulsory service did not apply to them.
Upon the outbreak of the war, British colonial officials engaged in widespread propaganda, which managed to attract volunteers for the relatively well paid “King’s African Rifles”. Recruitment of carriers, however, proved to be much more difficult. African chiefs were called upon to turn out men, and missionaries were also expected to help. The chiefs’ forced collaboration with recruitment officers, however, would undermine their authority. Many men quarrelled with them and tried to hide. British recruiters captured men day and night for military service and sometimes even took women as hostages to be released only when their men went off to war. Chewa chief Malengachanzi in Malawi remembered such actions in 1973: “There was terror everywhere and people did not feel safe.”
The French recruitment policy in North and West Africa was mixed, including the enlistment of volunteers as well as conscription. In 1912, the French parliament had passed several acts enabling conscription in West Africa and Algeria if the numbers of volunteers were too low. Conscription became more and more important the longer the war lasted. Whilst in 1915 only 2,500 out of a total of 14,500 new recruits in Algeria were conscripts, this ratio changed dramatically in the second half of the war. In 1917, the army enlisted 6,261 volunteers and 25,925 conscripts, in the following year there were 13,942 volunteers and 34,173 conscripts. During the 1915/16 recruiting campaign in West Africa, only 7,000 out of 53,000 recruits were volunteers.
A widespread practice in West Africa was to ask local chiefs to provide potential recruits and to threaten them with imprisonment if they failed to do so. Most often, young men from the lower social strata, especially domestic slaves, were presented to French recruitment officers. As a consequence, the lower strata were highly overrepresented amongst recruits, except for contingents from regions that had preserved aristocratic martial traditions. Sometimes, however, French recruitment agents did not trust local chiefs and directly collected re