Rebuilding lives, redefining belonging: ex-soldiers, their families and communities in post-war Africa, 1945-60

This is a project about belonging: to a family, to a nation, and to a generation shaped by war. Over 1.2 million African soldiers fought for Britain and France during the Second World War (WWII) while their families survived the instabilities of colonial rule. War temporarily expanded the boundaries of national belonging, as Britain and France depended on and celebrated colonial soldiers. Wartime violence and trauma continued into peacetime, as African soldiers were returned to family life under racial hierarchies. It is unsurprising that questions of citizenship and national belonging surfaced in 1945 and remain vitally important today.
Examining how African soldiers experienced their integration home after WWII enables us to understand the connection between government treatment of veterans, celebration and commemoration of conflict, and feelings of national belonging among marginalised and racialised communities. This project will, for the first time, examine the comparative ways men, women and their families from Zambia, Senegal, South Africa and Congo-Brazzaville rebuilt their lives and created new independent nations after the trauma of WWII. Its timespan of 1945-60 shows how boundaries of post conflict trauma move between family circles and larger societal arenas, impacting on national and transnational issues.
By concentrating on ex-servicemen as political agents, colonial rulers (and some scholars) have assumed that political engagement was male-dominated, an assertion this project challenges. By focusing on home-coming, this project draws women and families into the frame of analysis, asking how global and domestic contexts affected the reintegration of ex-servicemen into their civilian lives; and interrogating how gender shaped the connections between war and independence movements that flourished between 1945-60.
This historical approach is vitally important to understanding processes of decolonisation and how legacies, continuities and reiterations of...