FIGHTING ON THE EQUATOR. WAR VIOLENCE AND COLONIAL EXPERIENCES AMONG CONGOLESE TROOPS DURING WORLD WAR I

This article is aimed at understanding the dynamics of war violence in the Force publique troops of the Belgian Congo during WWI combats in the East Africa campaigns, Cameroon and the defence of the Katanga Rhodesia area. It examines the war experiences of European and Congolese soldiers of the Force publique in order to understand why this colonial army was still regarded as very violent on the battlefields by the enemy and local populations of the Great Lakes. Without in depth investigations into archives but instead the use of published memoirs, it offers historiographical and research insight into the meaning of colonial violence in the 1910s and early 1920s in the Kivu region as well as in the occupied territories of Ruanda-Urundi. Inspired by historiographical perspectives of World War I in Europe, it focuses on modern weapons, wounds, civil populations, cases of rape and massacre, cultural representations of the enemy and internal dynamics of combat units. It argues that World War I campaigns in Africa were pursuing efforts of colonial pacification inside and outside Congo, and that they resembled colonial warfare with the spreading of small flying columns of African soldiers led by European officers and non-commissioned officers.