Unmasking colonial crime: Senegal challenges France over forgotten Thiaroye massacre Article by The Africa Report

Paris-based The Africa Report magazine has featured an article illuminating the tragic events that unfolded in Senegal in 1944. Caliber.Az offers the piece to its readers.

The 301-page report submitted to President Faye exposes France’s denial and Senegal’s resolve to seek truth and reparations.

When then-French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron described colonisation as a "crime against humanity" in Algeria in 2017, he probably thought he had exorcised the ghost of France’s presence in Africa.

Macron, born after France’s colonial era, may have viewed last December’s 80th-anniversary commemoration of the Thiaroye massacre as a chance to close that chapter. But he hadn’t foreseen Senegal’s resolve to redefine its ties with France.

On 16 October, six months after it was due, Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko received at the presidential palace a 301-page White Paper. According to the committee of researchers behind it, it was intended to “restore historical truth” about the Thiaroye massacre.

The massacre, which took place on 1 December 1944, involved the mass execution by French colonial troops and gendarmes of African riflemen who had previously been labelled ‘mutineers’. As the Senegalese people might have expected, the data collected and interpreted by the researchers reveal far more than mere inaccuracies by the French authorities.

A French cover-up

The report by historians and archaeologists concludes that the tragedy was at once “premeditated” and “concealed”, executed through “coordinated actions”.

Certain French archives were not only concealed but falsified, including departure and arrival registers from the French town of Morlaix and the Senegalese capital, Dakar.

More specifically, the scholarly findings reveal details that can only be described as genuine revelations.

While French official sources have always reported a maximum of 70 riflemen killed, the White Paper notes that “the most credible estimates put the number between 300 and 400”, based on evidence suggesting that 400 soldiers “vanished”.

Lingering shadows

Excavations in the Thiaroye cemetery, 15km from Dakar, have uncovered graves “subsequent to previously known burials”, as well as skeletons missing bones – skulls, ribs, and spines – or bearing signs of mutilation, notably “iron chains at the lower legs”.

The discovery of bodily remains that had clearly been moved also suggests that the killings extended beyond the Thiaroye camp itself.

The White Paper is anything but the conclusion of efforts to restore historical truth about the Thiaroye events, which remain largely unknown to the French public. With French denial now exposed, shadows persist – particularly concerning the burial sites of the victims.

These unresolved questions have led the current Senegalese head of state, moved by “a certain bitterness”, to demand the declassification of further archives, additional archaeological excavations, and a process of both material and moral reparation.

By Vafa Guliyeva