A lean black man with a triangular chin, dull and quite off-key from the men that surround him, slowly descends upon a spiked metal fence. He grasps the fence and looks beyond it grimly. The universe is still – quivering, yet still. The grimness of the gaze and the firmness of his clasping is interrupted by a merry friend who pulls his hand away and dusts it with the sand they stand upon. He reminds him: “we are on the soil of Africa now!” The transfixed universe is back in movement and conscious only of its own movement. The moment is gone. Or so it appears. Really the moment’s arc stretches through the film and Sembene affirms that not just triangle-chinned Sidiki Bakaba but all humans had ought to be grim all along. Notwithstanding the sentimentality of the African soil, the reality of the fence around the Africans had a more sonorous ring in the history of the soil’s people. And the Camp we are now at and the corpses whose intestines it saw gleefully were testimony.

Ousmane Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow’s 1988 joint-directorial, Camp de Thiaroye, long banned in France and censored at its home, Senegal, was self-admittedly Sembene’s most nihilistic work of art. In this film, Sembene, known for his unflinching expose of the hypocrisy of imperialism – that there could possibly be a universal citizenship fostered by Empire and the march of God that is the just law – raises a mirror before the unshakable racism that French rule upon the Dark Continent is premised upon and indicts that colonial rule had been fully eroded, if it ever possessed that is, of all ethics. The inspiration for this film is the disturbing and depraved Thiaroye massacre of December 1944; Black African soldiers who had fought in the Battle of France in 1940 against the Axis forces and held as PoWs were liberated by the US in 1944 following the Normandy landings – and subsequently kept a “transitory” (read: purgatorial) camp off the Atlantic coast, outside Dakar in Senegal. When soldiers before being “released” into their villages, demanded fair treatment, edible food, and decent pay and compensation for their war services, a compromise was arrived at but the Army doubled crossed them and under the cloister of the night, massacred – according to the veterans – over three hundred ex-servicemen.

While, arguably, history does Sembene’s bidding for him, for betrayal and blood were already in the story, the film’s beauty is thicker than just the reflection upon the massacre. It lay in the thorough autopsy (why though? While colonialism is still all around us) of the design of the colonial subject. Colonialism is never over, the film shows us. It is complete, all-pervading, and substantial but not finished. Colour of the skin is always given precedence. In what forms a good leg of the film, a well-read and cultured Sergeant Diatta visits Dakar (an African city where most spaces are reserved for Whites alone) to grab a drink but is on the way bullied by American soldiers, but a Black soldier is pushed to be the brutal one. Nation trumps colour for the Black. But following Sergeant’s hospitalisation, when the Black soldiers in our Camp retaliate by taking a White American soldier hostage, the French army command is quick to swoop down into action (i.e. demand that the hostage be treated with kindness and released) and defuse the situation. They pay no heed to Nation. Are they (the North Atlantics) not all part of the ethical universal (White) commonwealth? The message though is clear: Blacks ought to be tied to nation but the White empire, need not.

And imperial racism is so full that the allotment of meat is different for the different cadres of soldiers in the camp: White Frenchmen get a can, “natives” – whatever that means – get half a can, and Black Africans only get mashed potatoes and gruel for meals. A soldier called typically in this film by the country he belongs to – each is referred to by their nation alone to comedic effect: the colonial (and post-) order is comical indeed – questions: are the sizes of the bullets that enter the body of each different?

While in a “mainstream” film, this could be a “high” moment, this provocation actually leaves us to look at history. And yes, while the bullets shooting into each body is race-agnostic, the bodies themselves were very much racial and racialised, so much that the French justification for breaking the taboo of not deploying colonised bodies Black and Brown in conflicts between European states (the taboo stemmed from the fear of the psychological and political ramifications of Asian, African, and other indigenous men being allowed to kill White Europeans, and worse, on European soil) was that simply the Black body was more resilient to wounds. Watching this film, I was made to think of David Olusoga’s masterful work The World’s War where he argues that in the recruitment of the colonised people, truly the First World War was indeed the real first global conflict. Olusoga dedicates an entire chapter to the La Force Noire, a 1914 pamphlet by Charles Mangin, a French strategist. In the book he declared:

The black troops… have precisely those qualities that are demanded in the long struggles in modern war: rusticity, endurance, tenacity, the instinct for combat, the absence of nervousness, and an incomparable power of shock. Their arrival on the battlefield would have a considerable moral effect on the adversary.

It comes then to us of no surprise that Mangin had even earned his credibility to propose French military strategy from having led in the disastrous Foshoda Campaign, (a race between the Brits and French in the 1890s to capture the city of Foshoda and become the first to touch with their African empires sea to sea) the Tirailleurs Senegalais, the very army that is the subject of our film. It is hence the above reassurance that the empire(s) gives itself that allows Maori, Punjabis, Gurkhas, Arabs, Senegalese, and Zulus to all fight in Europe (including, as Olusoga shows, become lab rats to the most terrifying military experiments like the first use of artillery and tear gas in the Battle of Ypres in 1915).

Racism while being prevalent had to substantially give way to the martial spirit in war (for Indians fighting in Europe, this meant also relaxing caste rules before they are reasserted after 1918) and it seems for too many people, the burning smoke of illusion had rested too long in the air. A curious way to frame this film is to see it as the story of the necessary disillusionment thereafter. Even Whites had apparently all along been part of this illusion and disorientation. When the French Army black soldiers take the White American hostage, a White French Captain sympathises with the hostage and remarks: “how can the White be expected to sleep in the same room as the Blacks?”  An apparently “good” General questions: what about when the war was waging? The captain is quick: “That is different.” Everyone is disillusioned at a different pace. But the most powerful portrayal of the simmering agony of disillusionment and reorientation is in the theatre around the soldiers’ uniforms. After the soldiers had been freed from German prisons in France by the American armies, they had been given American uniforms to wear till they returned home and this meant not only the light khakhi colour of the shirts and trousers but all the regalia that followed American military line of command and the hierarchy that the World War brought in (in fact it is the shared uniform of the Sergeant and parasitic American troops in Senegal that frustrates the latter soldiers till they beat up the Sergeant). Wearing these uniforms had made the soldiers at the Camp feel not only part of the French Army, but also equal parts of the French Empire (why would they even feel comfortable to spell out their distaste for the food?), Alliance, and the Global Commonwealth for the Good. Placed above his fellow Blacks, he is sold on the fable of meritocracy. In a long-drawn act in the film, the soldiers are all made to return their khakhi uniforms and wear the colonial army clothes: where each colony and each community is neatly placed in a sartorial cartouche. Thin white half sleeved shirt and shorts, and a red Fez for the Tirailleurs Senegalais. The soldiers all return to their wooden cottages and assure each other fierily that all is well: but realise of course that they had been told that they were citizens of empire only for the war. Now they must learn to be subjects again. The biggest shock comes to the Sergeant who had bought the nice and sweet myth of meritocracy. As they receive their colonial uniforms, he notices that his regalia are all gone. He cries: “you gave me the hat for rank and file.” In silence, Sembene responds: no you received the hat for the colonial subject.

The Sergeant who by living in the metropole, marrying a Frenchwoman, and giving birth to a mixed race child had turned optimistic about empire learns over the course of the film that even the “good ones” are not really that good. Sembene anyways had always had a particular disdain for the metropolitan and colonised intellectual: in Moolade, the France-returned would-be-groom is the least virile and activist, much less so than the fiery female protagonist, and in Mandabi, the educated lawyer is an outright cheat. And this time, Diatta becomes an opportunity for the filmmaker to dress down the perverse forms that colonial prejudice can take. While the obviously racist generals all think that the Blacks had best be kept away, fed bad food, and thrown back into the villages of the colony to be suppressed by guns and taxes, the “good” ones believe that there was hope for them after all. Except that they should extinguish the blackness in them. They must dissolve their identities, merge with the empire, and be secularised. They must become characters in the Liberal Wet Dream, if you will. As Bruno Bauer asks of the Jews at the height of the Jewish question. Or as Ataturk asks of the Turks. And Hamid Dalwai asks of Indian Muslims. So once again to be Black was a sin. This “good” general does not even call Diatta by his name. He refers to him by his French, no, Parisian name “Aloyse”. When “Aloyse” raises the problem of colonialism and shares how his own parents were massacred along with his whole village while he was away fighting in Europe, this “good” general brushes away: “that was the Vichy period”. They were the Nazis.

In this film that too – the Nazi – is reinvented. Sembene goes so far in his attack on colonialism, as to not only compare it to Nazism, but even make his characters ponder if Hitler’s Germany was even that much worse. This may be as trivial as the claim that the kartoffel in the German prison being better than the meals in this camp. More seriously, the “good” general’s invocation of Vichy France elicits a reaction squarely comparing massacres in Europe by the Nazis with those by the French in Africa. The general is of course astounded. There could not be a greater heresy. Yes, indeed how could one compare colonisation of Africa with the colonisation of Europe. The White Continent could only colonise, not be the object of it. The film in subtler ways too walks the risky road of invoking Nazi Germany: the triangle-chinned Sidiki Bakaba, a deranged soldier (he enacts the trope of the wise madman in this film) wears throughout the film a German helmet, presumably one he picked from a dead soldier on a European battlefield. At every encounter between the generals and soldiers in the camp he appears with this helmet – his greatest form of resistance. The German Eagle staring at the outrageous generals. Exposing their racism. And of course the generals are no passive watchers. As the camp inches closer to mutiny mode, they first dismiss and then castigate the Camp as a front and arm of German propaganda and covert action. However calling the Black soldiers “German”-esque, now  that the war is almost over, is only the weaker straw. We see a glimpse of the curse that shall take over soon in NATO’s World Order: “You Communist!”

That imperialism had not changed one bit is revealed bit by bit. But turns full frontal when the army decides to give only 500 CFAs (Central African Franc – this bit seems to have been a liberty taken by the writers of the film; the CFA was instituted in 1945 after the war was over to mitigate the effect of the devaluing of the Franc – that was forced upon France by the US and the Allies – on the colonies) for 1500 Francs that they had been given, for temporary usage in Europe. White Europeans, peninsulares one may say, functioned in Senegalese society with a different exchange rate. And it took only a mutiny – wearing Nazi helmets, getting their own meat (cutting it in a halal way too), capturing the watch towers and all – to make their voice heard. But it is most resounding when they take a senior general hostage, the Black sergeant party to this all. In a specially poignant image, when the captain is forced to sit down and look at the black infantry around, we wonder if this was how all mutinies felt: Haiti in 1790s, India’s Rebellion in 1857-8, and the Algerian War of Independence in the 50s.

Just as we are about to rejoice at the sound of resistance, Sembene reminds us that only nihilism had been warranted ever. And after much celebration and after silence falls upon the relaxed African soldiers, tanks roll in, like the ones that are now liberating Europe from the Axis armies. And as blood flies up and bodies fall flat, the triangle-chinned madman watches with horror. All along, he had been the wise one. Staring the fence with grimness, wearing the German helmet, and watching the tanks roll in with horror.