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WALIKALE, Congo -- While books and films have lionized the last surviving World War II veterans in recent years, a small, hand-painted sign along a dirt road in this remote village is just about all that points to a nearly forgotten group of them. "Camp of Old Soldiers, 1940-1945," the sign reads in French. Passing the late afternoon under the pink blooms of a sprawling pear tree, one of those veterans, Louis Ngumbi, recalled his brutal induction in 1940 into the army of Congo's colonial ruler, Belgium. "I was getting ready to go to the farm," he said, estimating his age at the time at 16. "And then I saw the local leader -- he was Belgian -- coming with the police. He pointed and said, 'Arrest that young boy!' I didn't know where I was going." It was not until after he was beaten, hauled off to the local prison, stripped of his village clothes and outfitted in a crisp uniform of khaki shorts, shirt and white socks that Ngumbi finally realized, "Ah, I'm going into the army." African battlefields figure prominently in the history of World War II. But the story of the hundreds of thousands of African soldiers who served in campaigns mostly for British and French colonial rulers is only beginning to be fully told. Much like African American soldiers who served in a mostly segregated U.S. Army during the war, African soldiers served under racist colonial structures that were at times challenged by the urgencies of war.
