If One is A Soldier of Our Great Empire There Should Be No Discrimination: Service and Mortality in Britain’s East African Colonial Military

In 2019, it came to light that the Imperial War Graves Commission, the predecessor to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), had left the remains of African and South Asian WWI dead unmarked to ‘revert to nature’. The documentary ‘The Unremembered’ struck a nerve in Britain by demonstrating that the commission had thus failed in its core commitment to equality in death and commemoration. The British government formally apologised for these failings, and the CWGC committed itself to making a comprehensive search of historical records to recover the personal details of non-Europeans who died in the service of the empire so they could be commemorated by name. Recovering the historical past is certainly a worthwhile enterprise. Yet it is naïve to be shocked by the commission’s failure to grant African soldiers equality in death because they did not have equality in life. Expanding the consideration of inequality in colonial military service to include recruitment, fighting, demobilisation, death and commemoration during WWII brings the fundamental exploitation of subject soldiers into sharper focus. Inscribing the names of forgotten war dead on memorials is an easy way to right a past imperial wrong, particularly when WWI is now comfortably remote.