World War I and Africa: Introduction

Abstract

The study of the history of Africa during World War I raises two major problems of synthesis and a host of smaller problems. First of all, the sheer diversity of the continent and the extremely uneven nature of its precolonial development, let alone the patchy and differentiated modes of imperial and colonial penetration, make it difficult to see its experience, even of so ostensibly cataclysmic an event as World War I, as a unified whole. Indeed, the diversity of the continent was mirrored in the diversity of its experience of the war, which combined the actual agony of the battlefield for many thousands of black troops both in Africa and in Europe at one extreme, with the undoubted uneventfulness of those same years for many others.