Armelle Mabon had her life turned upside down after reading a poem. The work in question was 'Tyaroye', part of a collection of works called Hosties Noires by the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor. In the poem the Senegalese writer and politician resurrects the memory and dignity of the African colonial troops – former prisoners of war - who were gunned down by the French Army on December 1st, 1944, in the Thiaroye military camp outside Dakar in Senegal, then part of French West Africa.
Senghor writes:
“Black prisoners, I should say French prisoners, is it true
That France is no longer France?
Is it true that the enemy has stolen her face? (...)
Blood, blood, O my black brother’s blood,
You stain my innocent bedsheets
You are the sweat bathing my anguish, you are the suffering
That makes my voice hoarse (...)
No, you have not died in vain, O Dead! Your blood
Is not tepid water. It generously feeds our hope,
Which will bloom at twilight.
It is our thirst, our hunger for honor,
Our absolute authority (…) (1)
Enlargement : Illustration 1
After discovering this poem Armelle Mabon, a social worker who went on to be an historian specialising in indigenous prisoners of war, became obsessed with unearthing the truth. She wanted to highlight what she considered to be a state lie and prove that this colonial crime was a premeditated massacre. In the official version of events the shooting is portrayed as a bloody repression of soldiers who were demanding that they be given their back pay and bonuses.
It was the start of a gigantic labour, with its fair share of discouragement and disillusion along the way, and would take the stubborn academic more than 20 years. “Some would describe her as having been a troublemaker,” write the journalist-artist duo of Pat Perna and Nicolas Oter, authors of the graphic novel Morts par la France, Thiaroye 1944 ('Killed by France, Thiaroye 1944') published by Arènes. In this book they retrace the struggle of the academic who is now a lecturer at the University of South Brittany in west France as she questioned dozens of witnesses, former soldiers and the children of victims, challenging the account of the official archives.
The official version is that 35 people were killed, 35 were injured and another 35 were convicted out of the more than 1,600 African troops gathered at the Thiaroye camp. In 2014 President François Hollande, the first French president to recognise France's responsibility for the events of December 1st, 1944, spoke of 70 deaths. But according to Armelle Mabon, who acted as an expert advisor on the graphic novel, that is far short of the true figure. According to her some 400 men, all unarmed and peaceful, who had come back from four years of captivity in the so-called 'Frontstalag' German prisoner-of-war camps in occupied France, were machine-gunned in cold blood. It was a scene of carnage with the bodies then tossed in communal ditches around the camp.
The number of victims involved was apparently deliberately tampered with and covered up. The French Army claimed that just 1,200 to 1,300 soldiers were billeted at the camp near Dakar at the time, whereas the true figure was more than 1,600. The troops involved were the first contingent of the so-called 'Senegalese Tirailleurs' or colonial infantry who had been liberated by Allied or Free French forces and taken back to French West Africa aboard the British ship SS Circassia. They were supposed to have been demobilised at Thiaroye, then picked up the various bonuses and back pay they had been promised and gone back to their families. This was after going through the hell of war, either as volunteers or conscripts, under the French flag in the fight against the Nazis.
In their story Pat Perna and Nicolas Oter also follow Biram, the son of Mbap Senghor, one of the soldiers killed at Thiaroye. Biram Senghor has been battling in the French courts for more than forty years to get his father's body exhumed from the ditches, to get the money he was deprived of reimbursed and for the citation “died for France” to be officially recognised as a memorial. For at the moment the victims do not have that right. Instead, to pick up in the title of the graphic novel, they were simply “killed by France”.
For Biram Senghor, Thiaroye – seen in Africa as an unhealed wound from the past – was about vengeance on the part of the French, the whites, the colonialists. He believes that they could not bear that fact that Africans, the blacks, the colonised, had realised in the German camps that they were on equal footing with the whites and not their inferiors. “As far as the Germans were concerned, black or white, we were all prisoners,” he said.
A few days after the graphic novel was published in May this year, the administrative court in Paris found in Biram Senghor's favour and ordered the French armed forces to speak to the Senegalese authorities to get the bodies of the dead soldiers exhumed. This came as a glimmer of hope for the victims families who have been waiting for such a move for more than 70 years.
Another man who has gone to the courts is Yves Abibou whose father Antoine, a former Resistance fighter with the Free French who escaped from a German camp in 1943, was one of the 34 men sentenced after the Thiaroye massacre, in his case to ten years in prison. Though he was granted an amnesty in 1947, like all those in his position Antoine Abibou never had his honour or rights restored, and is still officially recognised as being guilty of crimes he did not commit. His son Yves applied to the sentence review committee at France's highest appeals court the Cour de Cassation to restore his father's honour but on December 15th, 2015, the committee refused to reopen the case.
Supporters of the victims families point out that the courts are relying on official documents that historian Armelle Mabon criticises as being false, and do not take account of the advances in historical research that have taken place in recent years. “The truth is like life. It always finds a way,” points out the graphic novel by Pat Perna and Nicolas Oter. It is a book that helps make an important story about a shameful episode in France's colonial past – one that was a taboo subject for a long time - accessible to a wider public. It is also a rare homage to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were ready to die for the mother country, for France, but who are still today the forgotten people of history.
Morts par la France – Thiaroye 1944, Pat Perna and Nicolas Otero, published by Les Arènes.
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1. From 'The Collected Poetry', translation by Melvin Dixon. Charlotteville: University Press of Virginia, 1991
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See an extract from the book below:
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter