When the French Colonial History Society met in Dakar in the spring of 2006, the final plenary session was on the tirailleurs. The first two rows of the auditorium were filled by aging veterans, all wearing white boubous adorned by a row of military medals. The event underlined the importance of the veterans as a link between France and its former African colonies. It is this relationship and the perceptions that France and the veterans had of each other that Gregory Mann chronicles and analyzes in this lucid study. Other colonial powers recruited and used soldiers from the colonies, but in none did they play as important a role as the tirailleurs in France. British colonial troops died in the jungles of Burma and the sands of Libya while the tirailleurs served in the trenches of northern France, in the fall of France in 1940 and its reconquest four years later. They also served in France's many colonial wars. Mann's book is informed by an intensive study of the veterans of San, a city in central Mali. Most of it, however, is based on archival work in France, Mali and Senegal. While he deals with veterans of different kinds, he gives special attention to career soldiers, who often spent long periods away from home in the service of France. In the first chapter, he discusses the history of a family of professional soldiers from San. Most of the chapter, however, deals with slavery and what it meant for an army that was recruited largely from slaves and former slaves. Though this reliance on former slaves was no longer true during and after the Second World War, Mann argues that the career soldiers were largely from ex-slave families and that the heritage of slavery shaped the development of an ‘elaborate repertoire of obligation and reciprocity’ (p. 37). Mann is very interested in discourse, and in particular in a culture of mutual obligation and the way it was perceived by French and Africans. Mann has a very good understanding of the ambiguities of African slavery and the complexities of Soudanic social structure. Those who served, especially the career soldiers, had an expectation of reciprocity.

This language of mutual obligation shaped struggles in different periods. After the First World War, demobilization was not smooth. Many French administrators feared that veterans of servile origin would prove a disruptive element. They sometimes did, but they also wanted a reward for their service and they did not want to return to their former lives. The administration found that they could be reintegrated not as simple peasants but as employees of the colonial state, but it sometimes discovered this only after some contestation. During the inter-war period, most of the humbler posts in the colonial administration, particularly those of interpreters and guards, went to veterans. Mann does not discuss the omnipresent plantons, who did various menial tasks. Veterans were also granted exemption from the indigenat, the law code that regulated subjects. The French did not at first welcome the associations which they organized, but they proved useful to the administration.

After the Second World War, the support of veterans was sought by both the colonial administration and the nationalist parties. Mann argues that veterans of the First World War and career soldiers tended to be supporters of the canton chiefs and the more conservative political parties. The short-timers from the Second World War tended to support the radical Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, but this varied somewhat by region and colony. To win the support of the veterans, France had to respond to their demands, in particular for pensions. This commitment was much reduced after 1959 but, in 2001, the French Council of State held that African veterans were entitled to the same pensions as their French counterparts. Mann also has an excellent chapter that deals with the military culture and the links of soldiers to their wives and to the communities they left behind. He has several brief but insightful passages on the role of wives. Finally, in the last chapter, he deals with the concept of ‘blood debt’ in the discourse of both the veterans and the French. This leads to a section on the sans papiers, illegal immigrants without papers in France today. At a time when most of the veterans are getting old, the concept of blood debt has been transferred by African critics from an obligation to individuals who served the French state to an obligation to the societies from which these soldiers were conscripted. French public opinion does not concur.

All of this is done with clarity and subtlety. This is a superb book, which is at the same time a contribution to the history of Africa and of France.