Colonial Militarism

 Source: La Vie Ouvrière, April 13, 1923, p. 1.

Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập, Tập 1, Chính trị Quốc gia - Sự thật, Hanoi, 2011, pp. 191-192.

Translation: Foreign Languages Press, Paris, 2021.

We have said that intensive military recruitment [by the French] is one of the main causes that pushed the Dahomeans to revolt.

Let us first mention this blatant inequality: while a Frenchman undergoes two years of military service, a native man has to serve three years in the armed forces. And, after having spent thirty-six months of his youth defending free-dom and justice (!), the demobilized native man is once again placed under the system of the “Indigénat,” where freedom and justice are unknown! This inequality has, however, one positive aspect: it provokes a feeling of anti-militarism among all the native people.

The cruelties committed by the military recruiters in the colonies are “too refined” for the French people in France to even have an idea of what they con-sist. During the war, commanders, accompanied by their armed forces, went from village to village to compel the native chiefs to supply them immediately with the number of men they required for recruitment. Didn’t one of the commanders find it useful, in order to make the young Senegalese runaways return to him and put on the “chechia,”105 threaten to torture their parents? Didn’t he arrest old men, pregnant women and young girls, strip them of all their clothes and burn them in front of their eyes? Naked and tied up, the unfortunate victims, beaten by sticks, were made to run around the villages under the pouring rain, to “set an example!” A woman carrying her baby on her back needed special permission to have one of her hands released to keep her child in a stable position. Two old men fainted on the way; young girls, terrorized by such cruelties and subjected to them in turn, had their period for the first time; a pregnant woman gave birth prematurely to a stillborn child; another gave birth to a blind baby.

Nguyen Aï Quac.

105 The standard headgear of the French colonial troops in the Maghreb countries. Not to be confused with the “fez,” a much more common headdress from the ottoman era, originally from Morocco.