Propaganda & how it was used to get Black people Enlisted in WWI
-I AM History
The islands were also requisitioned to send commodities like cotton, sugar, cocoa and rice to England. The West Indian colonies contributed nearly £2 million from tax revenue and donations to the war efforts.
1.4 million men from British India were also enrolled in the Imperial Army. On its side, France recruited nearly 500,000 colonial troops between 1914 and 1918, from West Africa, Indochina and North Africa, and when the United States joined the war, nearly 400,000 African American troops were inducted into the US forces. In total over 2 million Africans were involved in the conflict as soldiers or labourers.
But the context was particularly cruel for brown and Black soldiers. The Germans accused Britain and France of unleashing “Africans and Asiatic savages”. The French were convinced that West Africans, supposedly more primitive, could “better withstand the shock of battle and experienced physical pain less acutely,” as historian David Olusoga reported. “This justified deploying them as shock troops in the first line of battle.” Britain applied racist recruitment rules even in its own army, rejecting some Indians for being “too lazy,” according to their ethnicity.
Thousands of soldiers from the Commonwealth transited via England to reach the battlefields, but by the end of the war Britain planned to send them back to their islands, often without any pension. Some of them remained in England however. While in 1914 Britain counted around 10,000 ‘Black’ people, by 1918 they were 30,000, according to historian Stephen Bourne in Black Poppies — Britain’s Black Community and the Great War, (The History Press, 2014).
This was just the beginning of a greater migration trend, growing with the Second World War, the reconstruction through the 1950s and1960s and the decolonisation movements.
Originally published at https://www.iamhistory.co.uk on November 6, 2020.
