Publisher description

Through both World Wars, young African conscripts from Senegal, Algeria, Morocco, the Congo and elsewhere found themselves fighting for their colonial rulers, facing unknown enemies in unknown lands. German soldiers regarded their African enemies with a mixture of curiosity and malice, sometimes posing for snapshots with black POWs, sometimes summarily executing them on the battlefield. Mistreated by their own commanders during wartime, African troops had to fight for equal postwar compensation. This book, featuring a collection of never before published photos taken by German soldiers, records the fate of many French Colonial African soldiers during World War I and World War II. The author presents the images in the historical context of imperialism and colonialism.

Only in recent years has the history of European colonial concentration camps in Africa—in which thousands of prisoners died in appalling conditions—become widely known beyond a handful of specialists. Although they preceded the Third Reich by many decades, the camps’ newfound notoriety has led many to ask to what extent they anticipated the horrors of the Holocaust. Were they designed for mass killing, a misbegotten attempt at modernization, or something else entirely? A Sad Fiasco confronts this difficult question head-on, reconstructing the actions of colonial officials in both British South Africa and German South-West Africa as well as the experiences of internees to explore both the similarities and the divergences between the African camps and their Nazi-era successors.

This new analysis of internment outside Europe helps us to understand the First World War as a truly global conflict.

Hostages of Empire is a social, cultural, and political history of the colonial prisoners of war.

This book discusses the experience of French colonial prisoners of war captured by Nazi Germany during World War II. It illustrates that the colonial prisoners' contradictory experiences with French authorities, French civilians, and German guards led to clashes with a colonial administration eager to return to a discriminatory routine following the war.