100 years after WWI, how much do the living know about the dead?

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London’s eastern suburbs has an intriguing temporary installation. Thousands of small white figures, each the size of a small doll, lie still on the green grass, motionless in the gloomy grey autumn skies.
Few of the events put on over the past fortnight to mark the centennial celebrations of the end of World War I are as powerful or poignant. Apart from the visual spectacle, the installation is a reminder of the sheer violence of war and nation-building.

Rob Heard, the artist behind it, was feeling sorry for himself lying in bed recuperating from a car accident when his mind wandered, first to the British soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan with more serious injuries, and then to earlier wars, and those who never came back.

His mind came to rest on the River Somme, in France, the site of one of the worst battles of WWI, and recent military history. It was here, in the middle of WWI, that British soldiers, assisted by conscripts from their colonies in Asia and Africa, and flanked by soldiers of the French Empire, attacked German forces. It was a disaster. By the end of the first day, July 1, 1916, some 19,240 British and Commonwealth soldiers lay dead – the equivalent of losing almost half of the UPDF’s infantry in a day!

When the Battle of the Somme ended just 141 days later, a million soldiers had been killed without either side gaining any territorial advantage. Rob Heard initially set out to hand-stich a white shroud over plastic figures to represent each of the 19,240 men killed on the first day of the battle. But once he started, he couldn’t stop himself and, over 13,000 hours, went on to create a shroud for each of the 72,396 men killed in the battle and whose remains were never recovered or reburied.

The installation is haunting as a visual spectacle – the white lifeless dolls a reminder of the red-clawed harvest of war and violence – and as a project in memory. My maternal grandfather fought for the British in Burma in World War II and the story of the post-war political awareness and its contribution to the independence movements is roundly told, but little is said about the sacrifice and contribution of Africans to the earlier conflict. And what sacrifice!

Space does not permit a befitting tribute here (I recommend personal interest and study of the available literature), but the effort by the British and their allies, against the Germans, who had recently taken colonial interests in East Africa as well as present-day Namibia, Togo and Cameroon, was bloodier than is publicly acknowledged – or, most importantly, taught in school.

Generally speaking, the Germans intended to draw allied forces away from more important theatres of war elsewhere and spread them thin in Africa. In East Africa, this meant several naval encounters on Lake Victoria and on the Indian Ocean, but mostly evasive on-off encounters on land.

The strategy and nature of the fighting meant that Africans played a key role in the war, initially as porters to the war effort, then as the bulk of the fighting force, alongside Indian soldiers, as the Europeans were decimated or sent back to fight on European soil.

Different scholars put the British casualties between the low thousands to about 12,000 dead and another 10,000 or so injured. The Africans suffered the brunt: As many as 100,000 African porters are believed to have died under different circumstances (the records are scanty because, as one Colonial Office official wrote in a memo, “who cares about native carriers”) but the figure is probably much higher.

The forceful recruitment of about a million Africans to join the war effort depopulated several areas, led to famine due to the land being left untended, and when the Spanish Flu epidemic reached the area in 1918 and found many of the survivors still encamped, took perhaps another 200,000 lives.

These stories are at once insightful and problematic. For instance, while by 1918, natives were a core fighting component of the Kings African Rifles and had acquired combat experience in WWI, it took almost half a century in places like Uganda for them to rise to officer ranks – and even then the selection was at best dodgy. How many still-born babies in our present-day nation states are we still carrying?

Our stories are too important to be footnotes in the history of others. While it is true that history is written by the victors, its survivors have an obligation to challenge it, to marvel at its white shrouds and ask about its black holes. The living must try to find out what the dead knew and saw.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s
freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.