Another Man's War Page 3

  From Owo, the journey took more than twenty-four hours. Travellers would hitch rides on the back of the timber lorries, which jolted slowly along a sandy track under the dark-green forest canopy all the way to the town of Osogbo, some seventy miles to the north-west. There, after arriving in the evening, exhausted and coated in dust, they would wait for the morning train to Lagos, struggling to catch some sleep on the station platform during the long night. The train was reliable but slow, proceeding as it did at a dignified pace through the hills and towns, through the thick bush and cocoa trees and oil-palms of Yorubaland, stopping frequently at small stations, each one an impromptu market, before finally arriving in the capital late in the afternoon.

  It must have been the traders who brought the newspapers back from Lagos. In the pages of the Daily Comet, Owo’s teachers read about the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and wondered why the British were not doing anything to help the brave Abyssinians. The teachers were dismayed to learn that Europeans were dropping bombs, even poisonous gas, on their fellow Africans. They launched a ‘Help Abyssinia Fund’. Even in this sleepy town, deep in the backwaters of a West African colony, the rise of fascism in Europe caused agitation. They were small ripples, only felt in a tight circle, but they were ripples nonetheless.

  The city was where Isaac had set his heart on. If not Lagos, he thought, at least Ibadan, which already had a reputation as a centre of reading and learning. He’d heard of the prestigious secondary schools: King’s College Lagos, Government College Ibadan, and so on. Each was self-consciously modelled on English public schools and designed by the British to produce a local elite who would absorb the values of fair play, discipline and selflessness; perhaps some of these pupils might go on to play a role in running the colony. King’s College had even taken to calling itself, with just a touch of grandeur, ‘The Eton of Nigeria’, and announced it was committed to producing not just fine cricketers but also ‘gentlemen of polite learning and a liberal education’.* The pupils at King’s College wore blazers in class, and a boater or cricket cap and tie whenever they stepped ‘beyond the gates’ and out into the streets of Lagos.

  Isaac understood very well that entry to one of these schools would transform his prospects in life. And he felt he stood a good chance of gaining admission. Older boys from Owo who’d taken the entrance exams in Ibadan brought back the question papers, which the teachers would then copy up on the blackboard. Isaac typically scored 95 percent. He was sure he had the brains. The only obstacle was money.

  Isaac argued his case passionately with Joshua, but to no avail. His father had already made up his mind. He had been paying Isaac’s school fees for several years, and saw no need to carry on. He wanted a return on his investment, and he wanted his favourite son closer to hand. Besides, he could sense resentment brewing in his large family. Every day, working on the farm, Joshua worried about whether the other children were jealous of the sacrifices he had made for Isaac. Secondary school in Lagos or Ibadan would cost a lot more than the primary school in Owo. The boy’s demands were impossible.

  The problem was that father and son saw things so differently. For Isaac, a primary school education had been merely the beginning of a long journey. For Joshua, it was an end in itself. Isaac’s education at St George’s was enough to secure a local job at a respectable salary. Joshua told Isaac he should sit exams for the position of ‘pupil teacher’ in the Anglican missionary schools. This job paid fifteen shillings a month, which was, as far as he knew, as much as anyone in Emure-Ile had ever earned. Reluctantly, Isaac did as he was told. He enrolled for the pupil teacher exams. His sense of pique was only heightened when, to his surprise and embarrassment, he finished just outside the top ten percent, and was not offered a position straight away.

  He was a young man in a hurry, not used to failure, and full of pride and frustration. He was sure of one thing: he had no time to sit in the village of Emure-Ile and rot his life away. He began looking for ways to escape.

  The Army propaganda team rolled into Owo a few days after Isaac received the disappointing news about his exams. Standing by the palace of the Olowo, he had listened intently to what the recruiting officer had to say. The following morning, he waited until Joshua and Ogunmuyonwa had gone to the fields and then approached his favourite sister, Adedeji. He asked whether he could borrow some money, explaining that he had a meeting with friends in Akure, the provincial capital, and said that he would pay her back. It was a strange request, because, as far as Adedeji knew, Isaac had no friends there. Still, she suspected nothing, and gave Isaac a couple of shillings.

  Isaac set out for the road and got on a lorry that was passing through Akure, but he did not get off there. He stayed on board as the lorry continued west, all the way to the town of Abeokuta. There, he signed up with the Royal West African Frontier Force, swearing an oath of loyalty to King and Empire with a Bible pressed to his forehead. He had become a British soldier.

  When the news of Isaac’s deception reached Emure-Ile, Joshua wept bitter tears. He was sure it would end in misfortune. This war, he said, it has already gone on for two years. Where will it take my son?

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  ‌Let this bayonet drink my blood

  If I am disloyal or show fear in battle,

  let this bayonet drink my blood.

  British Army swearing-in oath for African followers of traditional religions; taken while kissing a bayonet

  1942

  West Africa

  John Hamilton was an ambitious and clever young man. The son of a London policeman, he had won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School and then Balliol College, Oxford. The political atmosphere at Oxford University in the late 1930s was highly charged, a heady cocktail of disgust with the older generation, fear of the threat of fascism and growing dread of what would have to be done to stop it. Hamilton joined the Communists, he said, ‘largely because no other party at that time seemed to have any serious intention of opposing Hitler’.* He enlisted just three days after Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939. After officer training, followed by a frustrating hiatus kicking his heels in barracks, Hamilton was surprised to be told he was going to West Africa, a place he knew nothing about. The Army gave him a khaki uniform and inoculated him against yellow fever, but provided little information on what he would be doing in Africa. He was, however, told to buy a topee hat from the renowned tropical kit specialists Humphrey and Crook, on Haymarket.

  In 1942, he travelled by boat from Liverpool to Britain’s smallest African colony, the Gambia, on the very western tip of the continent. As the boat approached the coast, Hamilton could see a line of single-storey whitewashed buildings under the palm trees, mud huts roofed with thatch and an old slaving fort. The long white beaches were pounded by Atlantic surf. This was Bathurst, the capital of the Gambia. Hamilton was far from the action he wanted to see, and yet he would learn that even this imperial outpost could not escape the Second World War.

  In peacetime, the Gambia’s tiny military had amounted to 150 local men and a handful of British officers, little more than a lightly armed gendarmerie to deal with internal security. Now the British were expanding this force some thirty times, to more than 4,000 men. One night, shortly after Hamilton arrived in the Gambia, the governor ordered a clean-sweep of all the ‘corner-boys’ who loitered on street corners. Four hundred were rounded up in MacCarthy Square, put on lorries, and driven to the barracks. The following morning, Hamilton spent a few hot and busy hours enlisting them as soldiers. The reluctant recruits, all Muslims, swore their loyalty to King and Empire on the Holy Koran, but the press-gang was not a success. Within weeks, three-quarters of the men had run away, taking with them the most coveted items of clothing and equipment. It was a salutary lesson. Volunteers, Hamilton concluded, would certainly make better soldiers.

  Hamilton was as much bemused witness as active participant, but what he experienced in Bathurst was just one small act in the great recruitment
drive that was happening all across Britain’s African colonies. In towns and villages, from the Gambia on the Atlantic to Kenya’s warm coast on the Indian Ocean, the Army was hurriedly trying to build up its fighting forces.

  Until the early 1930s, the British Army in Africa, excluding white-run South Africa, had numbered a paltry 15,000 men. By the end of the war in 1945, some 500,000 Africans had worn the British uniform. Some, like the corner-boys of Bathurst, had been forced into joining. And it wasn’t only in the Gambia that the British used coercion, or even trickery, to get Africans to join a fight of which they had little understanding and defend an Empire for which they might have little affection. A British officer in the West African colony of Sierra Leone remembered an African sergeant asking a new recruit whether he was prepared to serve for the duration of the war. ‘What war?’ came the answer.* A thirteen-year-old boy from Nyasaland left a pathetic account of white missionaries going from classroom to classroom, pulling out any schoolboy who looked old enough to go off to war. Before he knew it, the boy himself had been signed up to the King’s African Rifles.* A young man from Tanganyika was picked up on the streets of Kampala, in neighbouring Uganda. He was thrown in jail, and the next day he and many others were put on a train, ‘packed…like firewood’, before eventually arriving at an enlistment centre in Kenya.* One British lieutenant in Nigeria was taken aback to discover his entire platoon were former inmates of Kano jail, handed over to the Army at the emir’s instruction.* There was a general assumption, officers in West Africa recalled, that war provided local chiefs with a useful opportunity to get rid of their undesirables.

  Coercion was not the whole story. As the fiasco in Bathurst showed, it wasn’t in Britain’s interests to field an army of reluctant conscripts. Volunteers, the British authorities believed, were less likely to desert, and would be more reliable when the fighting started. And volunteers there were, aplenty. Not that the distinction between those who joined the Army willingly and those who felt compelled to do so was necessarily obvious. The British system of indirect rule, practised with the co-operation of emirs and chiefs, could be used to exert formidable social pressure. In an eastern region of the Gold Coast, women mocked men who refused to sign up with the derogatory term kosa-ankobifour (‘those who refuse to go to war’).* However, there were also signs that many of the men enlisted with genuine enthusiasm. A British officer recruiting in the north of the Gold Coast was encouraged that ‘vast numbers of men came forward prepared to serve anywhere for the duration of the war’.*

  Robert Kakembo, who signed up for the Army in the British protectorate of Uganda, was one of them. In his 1944 pamphlet on his experiences in the Army, he recalled, ‘The recruiting officers worked from early in the morning to well beyond dusk. They saw all sorts of people, varying in education and intelligence and standard of living, from ex-students…down to half-naked men, all eager to help.’ Kakembo’s pamphlet, entitled ‘An African Soldier Speaks’,* was seen as so subversive by the British that they initially only allowed the release of a few hundred copies, with a warning stamped on the front page: ‘Confidential, Not for Publication or Circulation’. Yet Kakembo was not much of a dissident: his main argument was that the majority of African soldiers had not signed up to fight for King George VI or to defend the Empire, but to help the Europeans they had come across in their own lives, perhaps ‘a certain kindly lady missionary or a good District Commissioner whose wife plays with their children’. But there were also African soldiers, he says, who could see a bigger picture. They’d heard about Nazi theories on race, sometimes even read extracts from Mein Kampf, where Hitler had described black people as ‘semi-apes’. As a result, they were ready to fight ‘that accursed man’s ideals and save themselves and their children from cruelty and permanent bondage’.

  It’s an attractive idea; an ideological commitment to the fight against fascism, born out of an understanding of what victory for Hitler and Mussolini might mean for black Africans. Esther Salawu, who was at boarding school in Nigeria during the war, said four of her uncles volunteered to join the Army. ‘We thought that the Germans then wanted to rule the world and didn’t like black people,’ she said. ‘And it was true. So people eagerly joined. Everybody was “up” to finish this thing.’*

  In Sierra Leone, John Henry Smythe volunteered as soon as the war broke out. Born into the Creole elite, a descendant of freed slaves who had been transported by the British from North America to Africa, Smythe read Mein Kampf at school, and Hitler’s philosophies had shocked him. ‘It was a book which would put any black man’s back up and it put mine up. I grew up with hate for this man and his cronies and was pleased when I had the opportunity to fight against him.’* Smythe became the first black officer in the RAF, flying bombing missions over Germany. In 1943, his plane was shot down, and he was brutally interrogated by the SS. He spent the final eighteen months of the war in a prison camp on the Baltic coast.

  And then there was Isaac Fadoyebo, whose motivation for signing up was both more obvious and, in its way, more banal. Isaac became a British soldier because it seemed the best job available to him at the time. In this, he was surely typical of the majority of recruits. He’d seen the British propaganda in Nigeria and he had listened carefully to what the recruitment officer had to say on that December day in Owo. He’d not been impressed by all the talk of loyalty and patriotism, and he certainly wasn’t joining the Army for the sake of anybody else. Even the oath to King and Empire meant little to him. But if, as the recruitment officer had said, the Army offered the chance for a young African man to better himself, well, that was another thing entirely.

  The officer had promised that soldiers were to be paid one shilling a day. That was a head-spinning amount of money, twice what Isaac would earn if he took his father’s advice and became a teacher. And there were tangible enticements. Soldiers were given smart uniforms, sturdy boots and regular meals. Isaac had heard that some were being taught to drive, to do bookkeeping, even to operate radios. He’d caught glimpses of the modern world, but if he joined the Army he would have the chance to see much more. Becoming a soldier offered the prospect of travel, the chance of participating, if only in a walk-on role, in the historical events that were shaping the faraway places that he’d read about at school. Isaac had a spirit of adventure. He had no idea where the Army might take him, but he’d enjoyed his geography lessons, and had pored over maps of Europe and America. He was young and there was much that he couldn’t possibly know or understand. But he saw other men around him joining up, and he too decided to take his chance.

  His primary school education marked Isaac out as an unusual recruit. He was literate, and that put him in an exclusive minority. A British officer in Isaac’s brigade estimated that about one in every hundred African soldiers under his command could read and write.* Nigeria was Britain’s most populous African colony with a population of more than twenty million, a complex mosaic of dozens of ethnic groups, languages and different religions that had little in common. The British, just as they had in India and other African colonies, quickly developed firm theories as to which Nigerians were best suited for military service. Until the 1930s, recruitment had taken place almost exclusively in the North. Here the British were pleased to discover that their close relationship with the emirs ensured a steady supply of well-built fighting men. Northern Nigerian soldiers had served with distinction in the First World War, fighting in the German colonies of Cameroon and Tanganyika. When John Hamilton eventually met Hausa soldiers from Northern Nigeria, his assessment was typical of the British officer class: ‘even if not particularly sophisticated in thought and word…[they] were cheerful and willing, seldom complained and had very good physique’.*

  At the beginning of the Second World War, the British again turned to Northern Nigeria for the bulk of their recruits. The Hausa, it was agreed, made loyal and dependable soldiers. Southerners, on the other hand, were too ‘savvy’, thanks to their access to some education. They were potent
ial mischief-makers, too clever by half. But the sheer size of the force required from Africa, as well as the changing nature of warfare, forced the British to take a different approach. Modern armies needed engineers, drivers, nurses, signallers and clerks. Clearly, some of these tasks required education. And so the recruitment drive was expanded to include Southern Nigeria.

  When Isaac enlisted in Abeokuta, he was told he would be trained as a medical orderly. He was sent to a nearby military hospital where he was lectured on the basic principles of nursing. He was being taught how to administer first aid to wounded troops on the battlefront.

  Britain’s African soldiers were told they were defending freedom against fascism, but there was never any doubt that the Army would be comprised of white officers in charge of black men. As recently as 1938, Army regulations had stipulated that an officer who held a King’s commission had to be ‘of pure European descent’.* This condition was dropped soon after the beginning of the war. Nonetheless, when the first West African, Seth Anthony from the Gold Coast, was made an officer in 1942, his appointment caused a sensation. Anthony rose to the rank of major by the end of the war, but he never forgot that some of the Rhodesian and South African officers in his own battalion never addressed a single word to him in all those years.* He remained a lonely black face in the officers’ mess; only one other West African in the entire Army had been made an officer by 1945. The vast majority of British soldiers simply could not imagine, or countenance, receiving orders from a black man. Many Africans were promoted to the non-commissioned ranks of corporal and sergeant, but they were quick to notice the difference between their pay packets and those of white colleagues of theoretically equal standing whom they had to address as ‘Sir’.