Biram Senghor had not long turned six-years-old when his father, Mbap Senghor, a Senegalese tirailleur, or infantryman, who had served in the Battle of France at the beginning of WWII, was shot dead in 1944 by the French army during what has become known as the “Thiaroye massacre”.
It is not known how many tirailleurs – the name given to infantrymen from France’s sub-Saharan colonies – died alongside Mbap Senghor on December 1st 1944 at the military camp of Thiaroye in Senegal, where the demobbed troops were gunned down during an angry protest over various grievances and notably backpay they had not received. Estimates range from an official French army account of between 35 and 70 dead to one by historians who put the toll at several hundred.
In a visit to the Senegalese capital Dakar in 2012, then French president François Hollande paid homage to the victims of what he called “the bloody repression” at Thiaroye of “African soldiers, yet who had fought for France”.
Mediapart visited Biram Senghor in September at his modest home in Diakhao, in the west of the country, a village where silence is interrupted only by a distant sheep or a passing car. He had just recently received a phone call from Dialo Diop, an advisor to Senegal’s newly-elected president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Diop was the bearer of bad news: France had once again rejected Senghor’s request for financial indemnity. “They’re waiting for me to be buried to [to be able] to bury the affair,” he said.
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He had brought his case before the European Court of Human Rights, when his Paris-based lawyer proposed to the French state an out-of-court settlement for the payment to Senghor of 30,000 euros. The modest sum was supposed to compensate the money due, but never paid, to his father.
Mbap Senghor was aged 26 when he was called up to join the French army in 1939, along with tens of thousands of other African men mostly from France’s eight colonies that made up the federation of French West Africa. After landing in France, he fought against the German invasion of the country in 1940, but was taken prisoner. After the rapid German victory in June 1940, he was transferred to a special prisoner of war (POW) camp, called a frontstalag, in the town of Rennes, north-west France. The frontstalag were POW camps established outside of Germany, and were mostly established by the Nazis in occupied Poland and France (where the collaborationist Vichy puppet regime was installed).
Following the allied landings in Normandy and Provence in 1944, the frontstalag camps on French territory were progressively liberated through the rest of the year. Mbap Senghor and fellow African POWs were freed from the camp in Rennes and, along with those liberated in the frontstalag situated in La Flèche (north-west France) and Versailles, were to be repatriated to West Africa. The men, numbering close to 2,000, were due their army pay which they had not received while in captivity, the return of money from savings accounts and a bonus payment for being de-mobbed. They were told that they would be given a quarter of the sums due to them before leaving mainland France and the rest would be paid upon their arrival in French West Africa.
In early November 1944, the former POWs were taken to the Breton port of Morlaix, where a British boat, the Circassia, a passenger ship converted into a troop carrier, was waiting to take them to Dakar, then the capital city of the colonial French West Africa federation (and now capital of Senegal).
Around 300 of the assembled tirailleurs refused to board the Circassia before they had been paid the full amount due to them. On November 5th 1944 the ship left without them, and when it made a stopover in the Moroccan port of Casablanca, several hundred more reportedly refused to regain the ship before it continued on its journey south. After arriving in Dakar, the tirailleurs, including Mbap Senghor, were taken to the military camp in Thiaroye, about 15 kilometres west.
As the days passed, the money owed to the demobbed tirailleurs remained unpaid, and tensions in the camp were rising. On November 27th, those among them who were due to soon leave by train back to their homeland colonies pledged to stay put until they received the payments. As a result, French army general Marcel Dagnan visited the camp the following day, when he received a hostile reaction from the residents, later claiming that they were close to taking him hostage.
At daybreak on December 1st, a regiment of tirailleurs and a colonial artillery regiment arrived at the camp, along with an M3 light tank, three armoured cars, and a platoon of French NCOs and troops, sent by Dagnan to quell the protests. The exact sequence of events is still uncertain, but a few hours after the arrival of the military convoy the shooting began. It lasted only a short moment – time enough for machine guns to wreak a bloodbath in the courtyard where the angry tirailleurs had gathered.
The French military report at the time recorded up to 70 dead, including those who died from their wounds after the shooting. The two French historians who have, over recent years, carried out the most research into the events, Armelle Mabon and Martin Mourre, estimate the death toll at between 300 and 400. It remains unknown where the corpses of the gunned down tirailleurs are buried.
It was not until 1953 that Mbap Senghor’s family were officially notified of his death. His widow, a farmer, never received any pension or indemnity. Because he was unjustly declared a deserter, Mbap Senghor had no right to the phrase “Mort pour la France” (Died for France) after his name, which would have allowed his son Biram to benefit from aid entitled to war orphans.
“I was removed from college [secondary school] because my uncle could no longer pay,” Biram Senghor told Mediapart. “If my father had been present, perhaps he could have paid me my studies.” Instead, he joined the Senegalese gendarmerie, where he spent all his working life.
A person who commits a crime has to make up for it [...] France has a debt of blood here in Africa.
As of the 1960s, when Senegal had gained its independence, he began seeking an indemnity for the loss of his father's due payment, but also the outrageous official record that he was a "deserter". He knocked on different doors, including the French embassy in Dakar, where he said two gendarmes sent him away telling him that France “didn’t want to hear any more” about Thiaroye. He also wrote to then Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor, the newly independent country’s first head of state and, later, French president François Mitterrand – but both approaches were in vain.
In 2015, he was contacted by French historian Armelle Mabon after she had found trace of his campaigning while researching through archives. With her help, he decided to launch legal procedures through French courts.
“A person who commits a crime has to make up for it,” Senghor told Mediapart, adding that “France must pay”. It has, he added “a debt of blood here in Africa”.
In October 2017, he formally requested that the French armed forces ministry (the designation of the defence ministry) pay him the pay his father never received during his four years in the POW camp, and also the demobilisation bonus, which was also withheld from him. After receiving no reply, he took his case to the Paris administrative tribunal, but the magistrates ruled that the money in question was no longer owed because of prescription; at the time of the demobilisation and repatriation of the colonial troops in 1944, any money owed by the French administration was only owed for a period of five years, after which, if still unpaid, the debt was cancelled.
In the case of Mbap Senghor, that cancellation would have been reached in 1949. That year his family had still not been notified of his death, and in its ruling the tribunal set the validity of the debt as the five-year period that followed 1953, the year when the family were finally informed that he was deceased.
But Biram Senghor argued that the five-year statute of limitations for recovering the money due should run from 2014, which was the year when then French president François Hollande, in another visit to Senegal, officially recognised that the Thiaroye tirailleurs had been despoiled. However, the magistrates of the Paris administrative tribunal dismissed the argument, and in April 2023, France’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, also rejected his case.
After Senghor’s case was dismissed by the Council of State, his Paris lawyer, François Pinatel, took it to the European Court of Human Rights. In parallel, the lawyer filed a new request before the Paris administrative tribunal, this time for reparations for the “prejudice caused by the assassination” of Mbap Senghor by the French army. France would honour itself by recognising its responsibility, and putting an end to this dispute,” Pinatel told Mediapart.
A symbolic victory
Over recent years, other children of the Thiaroye tirailleurs have attempted legal action, and all have failed to gain justice. A case brought by Djibril Doucouré for payment of sums owed to his father, Souleymane Doucouré, who survived his period of detention at the camp, was thrown out. In a separate case, Yves Abibou, the France-based son of Senagalese tirailleur Antoine Abibou, sought to have the conviction of his father for “armed rebellion” overturned. Antoine Abibou was among the 48 tirailleurs arrested immediately after the Thiaroye massacre, and who were sentenced to ten years in prison (and finally granted an amnesty in 1947). In 2015, a France’s highest appeals court, the Cour de Cassation, rejected Yves Abibou’s request. Antoine Abibou, who died in 1981, had escaped from the frontstalag POW camp he had been detained in in France, when he joined the French Resistance underground army.
As for Biram Senghor, a legal victory did finally arrive in 2021. In April that year, the Paris administrative tribunal ordered the French state to remove the mention that his father was a deserter, which had been unjustly noted on official records. The tribunal also ordered the state to pay Senghor 5,000 euros in damages for the moral prejudice he had suffered.
Then, on June 18th, the French National Office for Military Veterans and War Victims, a branch of the armed forces ministry, ordered that six victims of the Thiaroye massacre, including Mbap Senghor, be officially declared as “Mort pour la France” (Died for France). It was a surprising decision which demolished the official military version of events at Thiaroye on December 1st 1940, according to which the massacre was in response to an armed mutiny.
“If the tirailleurs obtain the mention ‘died for France’, that signifies that the [armed forces] ministry recognises there was no armed rebellion,” said historian Armelle Mabon, who described the shooting dead of the tirailleurs as a “premeditated massacre”.
In Senegal, the description of a soldier as “Died for France” when he was in fact killed by France has caused anger. In July this year, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, who said he was speaking as leader of his Patriots of Senegal political party, declared that it was not for France, the former colonial ruler “to unilaterally decide the number of betrayed and assassinated Africans after [they] contributed to saving it [France], nor the type and extent of the recognition and reparations that they deserve”.
He announced in August the creation of a memorial committee for the massacre at Thiaroye, tasked with organising commemorations for the occasion of the 80th anniversary on December 1st, and the publication of a new historic account of the events.
According to Dialo Diop, an advisor at the Senegalese presidential office, it is certain that the country’s new government will organise an excavation at the site of the camp to try to localise and record the numbers of victims buried anonymously there in mass graves, and to identify their remains. That might allow Biram Senghor, like other descendants of the slaughtered tirailleurs, to finally be able to meditate before a tomb with his father’s name on it.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse