sh 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 recruits by having troops surround villages and arrest the young men. Another method was to arrest the parents of young men who had fled and only release them once their sons had given themselves up to the recruiting officers.
French colonial officials had first been in favour of recruitment, but, in view of African resistance, they soon changed their minds. In August 1914, William Merlaud-Ponty (1866-1915), Governor-General of French West Africa, wrote to Paris that “there would be extreme enthusiasm if people were informed that the natives were to be given the honour to fight in France”. His successor François Clozel (1860-1918), however, stated only a year later that “The brutal and badly prepared effort demanded by Ponty, aggravated by the officers’ incompetence, has completely disgusted everyone.” In September 1917, Governor-General Joost van Vollenhoven (1877-1918) obtained a temporary cessation of recruitment in French West Africa. Vollenhoven stressed that France should rather prioritise the economic exploitation of West Africa: “This country has been ruined just to recruit another few thousands of men!” Furthermore, Vollenhoven highlighted African resistance against recruitment:
French recruitment practices in West Africa did indeed face countless forms of opposition, ranging from bribery, malingering, self-mutilation, hiding outside the villages or fleeing to Liberia, Gambia, Portuguese Guinea and the Gold Coast, to suicide and even armed rebellions against the colonial administration. Rumours likened the French recruitment missions to the pre-colonial slave trade. From Senegal alone, an estimated 35,000 men fled from French recruiters. War veteran Kande Kamara (c. 1895-?), a Susu aristocrat from Guinea, in a 1976 interview recalled:
In winter 1917/18, when the French government decided to resume recruiting in West Africa, Vollenhoven desperately wrote: “The natives don’t want to supply any more men and we won’t get more by convincing them. If we really need new tirailleurs, we will have to recruit them f