Another Man's War Read online

  Isaac had never questioned the racial underpinnings of Empire before, and it did not occur to him do so now, even when he was being asked to risk his life for it. The British officers that he came across impressed him with their education. Many had been to Oxford and Cambridge. He respected them for their knowledge, and, by and large, their humane treatment of the men who served under them. But there was also a minority who carried a haughty air of racial superiority. Isaac and his fellow recruits grumbled that these officers looked down on them, considering them, as he put it, ‘as little better than black monkeys from the jungle’. A particular sergeant major, a notorious bully who was later transferred back to Britain, loved to taunt Isaac as he passed by on his way to the prayer meetings that had been arranged by a devout officer. He would laugh, and ask in a loud and mocking voice, ‘Praying? Praying?! You think that prayers are going to save you from a bullet?!’ Isaac had an education, and he was a volunteer, but the sergeant major held all his African soldiers in contempt.

  The combined force of the four British West African colonies, known as the Royal West African Frontier Force, had only numbered some 5,000 men in 1930, spread across the four colonies of Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. West Africa had the reputation of being something of a military backwater. A posting on ‘the Coast’ brought with it the risk of disease, so officers were discouraged from bringing their wives, and young children were prohibited. The staff at Humphrey and Crook would ensure that the young men heading out on the Elder Dempster ships got all the elaborate kit they would need for Africa, from a tin hipbath to polo gear. They were also happy to arrange for copies of the Daily Telegraph and Horse and Hound to be sent on. ‘Everything had to be portable in 60 lb loads, in order to be carried on carrier heads,’ recalled one officer.*

  Indeed, one of the pre-war highlights of service for officers in West Africa were lengthy expeditions through remote frontier lands, accompanied by trains of porters carrying an array of personal possessions. The officers had ample time for shooting game and leisure. In Northern Nigeria, polo became an obsession, as it had been for colonial administrators and emirs for a generation. Many Army officers kept several ponies so that they could play at least three days a week. An officer who served in the Gold Coast in the 1930s remembers, ‘we took an enormous amount of exercise, either golf, cricket or polo and evening consumption of alcohol was considerable – half a bottle of gin or whisky per person was not considered excessive, but whisky was occasionally consumed at breakfast from a teapot as camouflage to deceive higher authority.’* Morning parades were followed by long siestas. Sunday lunches of groundnut stew were washed down with so much gin that officers frequently retired to bed by teatime.

  It was an idyll, of sorts, but with the advent of the Second World War the Army was forced into a painful period of expansion and adaptation. Some of the new British officers were hurriedly enlisted ‘Coasters’ – the traders, administrators and policemen who already lived in West Africa. These men, at least, knew something of the languages and customs of the region, and many had some sympathy with, and interest in, the Africans who served under them. There were also white Rhodesian volunteers sent to West Africa, typically as non-commissioned officers. Tough men, undoubtedly, but they brought with them the ugly racial attitudes of the South. John Hamilton was surprised to find that his Rhodesian company commander referred to all Africans as ‘bloody Kaffirs’. Another British officer, in the Gold Coast, also found the Rhodesians’ attitude a bit ‘off’, although he soon noticed that their contempt for ‘silly munts’ did not preclude them striking up close friendships with local women.*

  Hundreds of officers, like John Hamilton, were also arriving from Britain itself, with orders to command men with whom they could barely communicate. They disembarked at Bathurst, Freetown, Accra or Lagos, then travelled on by train or road to a hastily constructed training camp. It was a shock for many. There were officers who confessed they’d never even seen a black person before landing on the West African coast.* They had to adjust to the humid and energy-sapping climate, prickly heat rashes, the bitter taste of quinine, water shortages and any number of venomous creatures. Still, there were consolations to these punishments. Queues of Africans formed outside camps as soon as word spread that a British officer had arrived. They were vying for the position of ‘boy’, a sort of batman who ensured an officer’s clothes were clean and neatly pressed, his shaving water always warm, and his pink gin mixed just right.

  The Army provided a special booklet, ‘Meet the West African Soldier’, to help officers fresh off the boat understand the men who were suddenly in their charge. Respect and loyalty, the booklet said, had to be earned; swearing, shouting or hitting an African soldier was not acceptable. Racist abuse was a definite no. Officers were advised to spend a good deal of time listening to their soldiers’ problems, learning their customs, ensuring they were well fed – and making them laugh. Familiarity, however, should only be taken so far; it was best to ‘avoid too easy fraternisation with the African for he, like you, is suspicious of those who attempt to make friends among people not of their own colour’. The officers might have been disheartened to read that an ‘African cannot reason things out for himself, and is not mechanically minded…Every simple little thing that is self-evident to us must be explained and demonstrated’, but at least they were forewarned. They were perhaps more encouraged to learn that, where the African ‘has not been spoiled by living in large coastal towns, he has an instinctive respect for position and authority’.*

  One British sergeant, Arthur Moss, arriving on the Gold Coast at the beginning of 1943, found a stifling culture of dreary racism among his colleagues.* ‘We were one army firmly divided by colour,’ he wrote with regret in his old age. In the sergeants’ mess each night, he heard the talk of idle, lying and thieving ‘wogs’. Moss was suspected of having liberal views and was himself labelled a ‘white wog’, a sobriquet he thought ‘applied more in pity and amusement than in contempt’. Whenever the white officers gathered to watch a film outdoors, their Africans soldiers had to make do with the reverse image, seen from behind the screen.

  Moss felt attitudes improved over time, and mutual respect built up between the British and Africans. But prejudices endured. As a military convoy set sail for India in late 1944, one ship was held up off the coast of Freetown when an alert lookout shouted, ‘Man Overboard!’ ‘One bloody African’, a British engineer grumbled in his diary, ‘why couldn’t they have let him stay in the water instead of sending a destroyer to pick him up?’*

  There were rich experiences to enjoy in West Africa, if a British newcomer was only willing to look for them. On a Sunday morning outside Freetown, a group of junior officers, among them a man called Fred Clarke, were lured by music towards a clearing in the forest, where they found a simple church, decorated with a bamboo cross. The men slipped inside and joined rows and rows of Africans dressed in all their finery. One officer, a talented musician, volunteered to play the organ, while the others joined in the singing of hymns. As the harmonies rose and the mutual smiles widened, Clarke, a former postal worker from Taunton, said that ‘the men and women who had lived all their lives in that jungle clearing realised that the white men who came from England, Australia and Canada were singing the same songs that they knew’.* It was an unexpected but wonderful moment of mutual recognition. Also on a Sunday morning, a young Catholic officer, Hugh Lawrence, cycled into Accra, capital of the Gold Coast, in search of the cathedral. He was astonished to find a packed congregation singing the entire mass in Latin with great enthusiasm, at a time when many in Europe were complaining that they could no longer understand the liturgy.

  Good officers, of course, knew that their success, perhaps one day their very lives, would depend on commanding the respect and affection of their men. Language was often the key, and in Nigeria the majority of soldiers spoke Hausa, and no English. A British captain, Charles Carfrae, found himself in the northern garrison town
of Kaduna, a place that, he felt, ‘echoed Rawalpindi and Dar-es-Salaam, Rangoon and Colombo’ in its neat bungalows, boozy parties and other staple ingredients of imperial life. There were ‘petty snobberies and assumptions of gentility, the talk of Home, the clothes no longer quite in fashion’, and the same handful of old records, played again and again at the European Club’s Saturday-night dances.* It was a suffocating atmosphere. But Carfrae was more interested in the men he was drilling on the parade ground and whom he would one day lead into battle. They were tall and, to his eyes, mysterious, with their jet-black skin, fine physiques, lines down their cheeks and closely shaven heads. He quickly realised that ‘without some knowledge of Hausa one had no hope of becoming an influential commander’, and so he knuckled down to months of hard study. On lengthy marches through the surrounding bush and hills, Carfrae forged a bond with his men. He was unusual. In the hot and drowsy afternoons, he would sit the soldiers down in the shade of a tree and attempt to explain, in his halting Hausa, the wider progress and ramifications of the war. Often, he would notice his men gently dozing off during these lessons, exhausted from their drills. He continued just the same, for the benefit of the few who remained alert.

  Today, Carfrae’s attempts come across as well intentioned, but paternalistic. But, as one officer stationed in Sierra Leone reflected years later, ‘we regarded the troops as our children, while they, fed, clothed, housed and paid by the army, were content with the regularity of army life.’* In this, he had taken to heart the advice of the ‘Meet the West African Soldier’ booklet, which explained that officers had to play the role of ‘father and mother’ to their men. In his old age, the Catholic officer Hugh Lawrence saw things a little more cynically. ‘I’d been sent to pick up cannon fodder for the Empire in West Africa,’ he said. ‘But after all, there was no conscription, most joined the army because they wanted to…and a lot of them were not averse to fighting either.’*

  Isaac’s horizons began to broaden in his first weeks of training. Abeokuta, just fifty miles north of Lagos, made Owo seem dull and provincial. It boasted more schools, more churches, and more commerce than Owo, and even had a bookshop, with a chalkboard outside, advertising Baker and Bourne’s Algebra, Shakespeare for Secondary Schools and Longmans Latin. Isaac felt intimidated in that bookshop; he had no money for books, and no understanding of Shakespeare or Latin. In fact, he often felt inferior in Abeokuta. Many of the town’s elite were Creoles, who had migrated from Sierra Leone. Saros, the Nigerians called them. They had names like Macaulay, Coker and Crowther, and they dressed and spoke like Europeans. Some even preferred European food. Their houses had pan roofs and were built of brick and stone. In comparison, Isaac felt like an ara-oko, a country-boy. He envied the Saros’ class and sophistication, but even the British were impressed by Abeokuta society. When the local king, or Alake, arrived at the barracks in a large car, the officers had admired his flawless English and his robes of spotless white silk with gold clasps on the sleeves. His crown, one visitor noted, was equally impressive, something between a bishop’s mitre and a duke’s coronet.* The Alake stood on a leopard skin, which in turn was laid on top of a small Persian carpet. A stern policeman had the specific task of carrying the skin and the carpet, while an official umbrella carrier ensured His Majesty always remained in the shade. As the Alake passed by, local people prostrated themselves on the ground. ‘For to them he is more important than King George VI,’ wrote a British soldier to his wife back home in England, evidently surprised by this discovery.*

  In the military hospital, Isaac was busy, helping the doctors treat soldiers for malaria and any number of sexually transmitted diseases. He also saw many sufferers of the dreaded Guinea Worm, a parasite that grows inside its victim, and eventually emerges through a blister in the skin, causing an excruciating burning sensation. Isaac watched as the doctor carefully wrapped the worm – long, thin and white, resembling a wriggling piece of cooked spaghetti – round a stick, so as to extract it faster. The patient often screamed in agony.

  When Isaac wasn’t in the hospital, he was invariably in the barracks. The British officers slept in wooden huts with thatched roofs, but the ‘African Lines’ were comprised of rows of simple communal tents. The ‘Cookhouse’ was not much more than a grass roof on poles, but at least the food that was boiled up in its great steaming vats was edible enough. The cooks served it up twice a day, piles of mashed cassava called eba, over which they poured a stew of meat and vegetables.

  On Sunday afternoons, Isaac escaped from his soldier’s life, hitching a ride on an army lorry to the town centre. From there, he climbed the steep path up the Olumo Rock, the great granite inselberg that rises over the town. He clambered past the entrances to several caves, too frightened to stop and see the shrines inside. From the top of Olumo, he saw the silver band of the Ogun River running through the red roofs before disappearing into the dark green of the forests beyond. On clear days, he imagined he could see as far as Lagos, as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Briefly, he had time to dream, to wonder where this adventure would take him, before he had to hurry back to barracks.

  Officers had more freedom than their men. There was a cinema in Abeokuta, run by a Lebanese man, who dutifully played ‘God Save The King’ at the end of each evening. The British noted his loyalty, although they were invariably left feeling like awkward dummies, standing rigid as the Nigerians filed around them and out into the night while the anthem was still playing. Then there was the European Club, where an officer described one bleak evening as ‘the usual dreary drinking session…a certain amount of singing, one or two brawls, and bodies quietly folding up in corners’.* For the more adventurous, there was a far more joyful option: local society dances, where Creoles in immaculate tails and evening jackets mixed on the dance floor with Yoruba chiefs in magnificent robes of indigo, canary and jade. A gramophone blared foxtrot and boogie-woogie, and Africans jitterbugged and did the conga. Then the band would take over. The musicians, dressed in flowing white robes, played their drums and guitars with such pulsating rhythms that the British officers could not resist. Briefly, they were carried away in oblivious enjoyment, and, for once, the sense of escape was not fuelled by drink.

  In Lagos, there were still more temptations for those British officers who could get down to the city for a day or two. There were boat trips across the harbour to Tarkwa Bay, its protected waters perfect for swimming, with little thatch cabins on the beach for shade. Officers gathered on the roof of the Bristol Hotel at sunset to enjoy the cool breeze off the lagoon. They drank beer and admired the view over the eucalyptus and palms of the Marina to the docks at Apapa. Then, later in the evening, in back streets that stank of animal droppings and sewage, some of those officers would file sheepishly into a dingy brothel, where they were warmly greeted by heavily painted madams, and presented with a choice of taciturn girls.* ‘You need jig-a-jig? Come see my sistah, is she good for you?’ the madam would ask. And, although the movement of ships in wartime was in theory ‘Top Secret’, many noticed a strange thing: it was the madams who had the best intelligence on the imminent arrival of the Royal Navy convoys, better even than the Harbour Master. But, as the war dragged on, and more American ships refuelled at Lagos, the ladies of the night reached their own judgement on who made the best customers, captured in cutting verse:

  Me-no likee English sold-ier,

  Yank-ee soldier come ashore;

  Yank-ee soldier plenty mon-ey,

  Me-no jigajig for you no more.‌*

  The Army could be cruel, and unfair, as many African soldiers were discovering. A British major in the Gold Coast remembered what he called ‘an unfortunate phase’, when it was commonplace for new recruits to be ‘hit or beaten for apparent stupidity and idleness’. He attributed this to the sheer frustration of trying to teach the uneducated.* Corporal punishment, known as ‘Six for Arse’, was widespread. Typically, it was administered by African sergeants or corporals, but some British officers joined in.

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nbsp; In his old age, Albert Carpenter liked to sit in his well-tended Hertfordshire garden, and think about the past. He wrote adventure novels set in West Africa during colonial times, and played Mozart and Paganini on his classical guitar. He was a tall, handsome man, a little stooped, with silver hair and a moustache. In 1942, he was a young sergeant major in a remote bush camp in Northern Nigeria, an Islington boy suddenly tasked with getting a motley group of African recruits ready for war. He led forced route marches through the bush, and came face to face with lions and hippopotamus.

  At first, spirits were high; many of Carpenter’s men, after all, had walked for days from distant villages so that they could join the Army. But he was worried about one soldier in his platoon, the driver, James Abuji, who spoke a little English, and whom he gradually came to see as a poisonous influence. Abuji, he learnt, was extorting money from other soldiers, intimidating them by boasting of his juju, or black magic prowess. Carpenter decided that Abuji was a threat to morale and needed to be dealt with. In the heat of the midday sun, he had the men tie Abuji, spread-eagled, to the metal roof of an army truck. Then he placed the bleeding carcasses of chickens around him. Vultures soon appeared in the sky, and, when they swooped down to the truck to tear at the chicken flesh, their talons passed within inches of Abuji’s face. Abuji screamed with terror. When he was eventually untied, by now delirious with thirst, he fell weeping on the ground. Then Albert ordered the rest of the platoon to urinate on him, taunting him as they did so. ‘You want water, Abuji? We come, we give,’ they said.