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“They got us into the war,” said 103-year-old Ndiogou Dieye, recalling more than 80 years ago when he and other young Senegalese uniformed to fight for faraway France. looked back.
“We didn’t know where we were going.”
The Crumpled Veteran is one of the last survivors of the French colonial African infantry. The African Infantry is a force that fought in two world wars and the colonial conflicts in North Africa and Indochina.
The military, neglected for years, is the subject of blockbuster ‘Tirailleurs’, which hits theaters in France and Senegal this week, and Omar, best known internationally for Netflix’s crime series ‘Lupin’ Starring Sy.
Sy plays a Senegalese father who watches over his son, who is forced to enlist and uniform in the French army during World War I. Both are thrown into the horrors of the Western Front.
Loosely translated as ‘skirmish’, ‘tirailleurs’ originated in Senegal in 1857 and consisted of lightly armed task forces that harassed the enemy in front of the advancing main force.
After World War I broke out, France recruited throughout its West African colonies to convert the Tirailleur into a unit designed to attack the Germans on the Western Front.
They took part in several important battles, most notably holding the line at the decisive moment at Verdun in 1916.
Toll
Of the 134,000 Tirailleurs who fought in World War I, about 30,000 died, according to the French magazine Historia.
Survivors were often lame or disfigured by the trauma, but their stories were often relegated to footnotes and their names never appeared on local war memorials in France. I didn’t.
Lofty plans to provide hospitals and pensions were downgraded or withdrawn by the bureaucracy.
During World War II, tens of thousands of Tirailleurs fought in sub-Saharan and North Africa and took part in the 1944 landings in southern France.
Dieye said he was drafted in May 1940 in his hometown of Thies, about 70 kilometers (45 miles) from Dakar, to join Tirailleur’s 7th Regiment.
After basic training near Dakar, his unit was sent to Madagascar, but had to turn back due to the threat of submarines.
He then traveled to the French Congo, then to Gabon, and liberated the capital, Libreville, from the cooperationist Vichy government “after a few shots,” he said.
The regiment was sent to the Middle East in preparation for operations in Europe, but by then Berlin had fallen.
Dieye returned to Senegal in 1945 as a sergeant, joined the police after the colonial period ended, and retired in 1972 at the age of 52.
He now lives in Teeth’s house, surrounded by photographs and memorabilia from his many years of service.
anger
Slow-moving but sharp-eyed, he is bitter towards France, accusing it of being “disloyal”.
In December 1944, French troops opened fire on Tirailleur in his barracks near Dakar, who rioted demanding repayment for the years spent in a prisoner of war camp.
The official death toll is 35, and no cemetery has been found where the soldiers were buried. The episode remains vague and bitterly remembered in Senegal, despite attempts by former French president François Hollande to shed light on reconciliation.
“You send someone to war, he demands his money, you punish him by killing him,” Diai said with disgust in his voice.
He is most outraged by France’s failure to pay a military pension worth 750 euros ($) a year for the past two years.
“France has not kept its promises. “I count on the good Lord and that my children will survive. I get nothing as a former Tiraille. French zilch.”
After military pensioners reach the age of 100, France usually requires documents proving they are still alive, a source at the Senegalese Defense Ministry’s Veterans Affairs Department said.
Historian Mamadou Kone said he believes only about ten tirailleurs from World War II are still alive in Senegal. Ndiaye died in 1998 at the age of 104.
At home, the Tirailleurs were long “considered exiled and armed enforcers of French imperialism. Their image was tarnished,” Kone said.
Things changed in 2004 when then-President Aboraye Wade declared December 1 as an annual day to commemorate Tirailleur, who “liberated the world from Nazism and fascism in two world wars”. praised for his achievements.
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