The Gen

[Moggy]

Tales of valiant African soldiers who fought in the World Wars

By Ciugu Mwagiru (email the author)
Posted Sunday, January 17 2010 at 12:26

Some time towards the end of the last century, a British Airways 747 was flying over Burma at midnight when the pilot — Captain Downey — received an unusual request from a passenger.
The passenger was one John Nunneley, a retired British army officer, a veteran of the Second World War and a leading chronicler of the role the King’s African Rifles played in two World Wars.

Now well into his twilight years, Nunneley was in the flight deck, and wanted the pilot to dip a wing of the massive jet in salute to Tomasi Kitinya, son of Liech, a member of the Kar who died in action in the furious battlefields of Burma during the Second World War.

The intriguing story of Tomasi, how he left his home in Nyanza as a teenager, for the big city — Nairobi, and eventually ended up in the battle field, is one of the best documented in Nunneley’s Tales from the King’s African Rifles. The book was first published in 1998, when its author was 76-years-old. The book which has since been reprinted many times, has become a classic of war history, with particular focus on the contributions of hitherto unsung but extremely brave African soldiers who made the King’s African Rifles one of the most formidable regiments of the British Army.

The roots of what was to later become the Kar were planted by the Imperial East India Company (which heralded the colonial era in major pats of East and Central Africa) during the last decade of the 19th century. To protect its interests, the company set up some regiments which were represented on the ground by distinct agents such as the Uganda Rifles, the Central African Regiment and the East African Rifles.

On January 1, 1902, these regiments were placed under one umbrella to constitute the initial six battalions of the Kar.

Although at its formation the Kar regiment had 4,683 men, among them 104 British officers, it grew into a massive 22 battalions, by July 1918, towards the end of the First World War, made up of 30,658 African soldiers, 1,193 British officers and a further 1,497 non-commissioned ones. And by the time the Armistice was declared in November 1918, the regiment had lost 5,117 men in the ferocious battlefields, while a further 3,039 succumbed to diseases. There were casualties as well — an incredible 15 million people lost their lives and another 20 million had irreversibly lost their health — victims of the advanced technologies that had emerged from the Industrial Revolution (which is also to blame for what is now referred to as weapons of mass destruction.

If the African soldiers gave their all fighting “for King and country” during the two world wars as crucial components of the Kar regiment, whose Colonel-in-Chief was the British King himself, their travails on the different fronts were by any account daunting. Apart from the horrifying casualties and unmarked graves in faraway places, tales of soldiers running amok in the battlefields are ample evidence that participating in the great wars was anything but a walk in the park.

Nunneley aptly captures the devastating effects of inestimable pressures these soldiers endured, in unforgiving terrains far away from home — a combination of stress, ennui, self-deprivation and simple nostalgia. Sustained for too long, these pressures could and often became the last straw that broke the back of a driven African askari >>>>

The East African
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Moggy
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