France guilty of amnesia?

Paris – Is France guilty of “amnesia” when it comes to the role of African troops who fought in World War I? The organisers of an exhibition on colonial fighters near Paris think so.

A collection of photos has been shown since mid-October in the town hall of Bondy, a multiracial suburb of the French capital best known as the home of French football star Kylian Mbappe.

Many people in the area trace their roots back to the countries which provided hundreds of thousands of men for France’s wartime struggle: Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali or Morocco.

“We’re stunned by the reactions which are like, ‘We had no idea about this’,” Naima Yahi, a historian and director of Remembeur, the NGO behind the show whose name plays on the French slang for someone of North African descent. “There’s a sort of amnesia” in France, she added. “We closed the book on colonisation at the end of the empire, but we also closed down the memorial dimension and we’ve barely transmitted this shared history.”

The role of the estimated 200 000 black troops used by France remains one of many painful aspects to the country’s colonial history. –