Charlie's War: The Life and Death of a Black South African in the Canadian Expeditionary Force

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the biography and First World War experience of Private Charlie Some, a Black soldier from Natal, South Africa who served in the No. 2 Construction Company of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in 1917/1918 and was brutally murdered in France in the last months of the First World War. Contrary to the prevailing treatment of ‘the No. 2,’ which takes a national perspective on the unit and in the process conscripts it to national ideologies, this article argues that a transnational, imperial frame reveals how the violence and racism of empire shaped the experiences of Black soldiers in the Great War, including those who served in the No. 2, and that racism and imperial anxieties were defining features of the war itself.