The Image of the Loyal African During World War II and its Postwar Use by the French Communist Party

Abstract

From Marx's writing on the Irish question, through Lenin's Imperialism, on to Meillassoux's recent work with labor migration, the impact of imperialist economic development upon class struggles within the metropolitan nations has occupied analysts of capitalist imperialism. But cultural imperialism and its relationship with metropolitan class struggles may deserve similar attention. The conceptions of African society imposed by European administrators and scholars upon colonial Africa may have played a vital role in obscuring African resistance to colonial domination and class development in Africa from even the most progressive elements of the metropolitan proletariat. The following account describes the image of African political attitudes and actions during World War II created by contemporary French propaganda and, subsequently, French historiography, and discusses the use of these images by the French Communist party in the postwar period.1