Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / Belgium's Invisible War: The Senegalese Tirailleurs
Transcript
- Lucas: We’ve spent the last few episodes tracing the lines of extraction—rubber from the Congo, sugar from Suriname, art looted from Kongo. But there’s another thread, one that connects the Belgian metropole to Africa in a way that isn’t just about taking things away, but about bringing people across an ocean to fight a war that wasn’t originally theirs. Luna: The Senegalese troops fighting for Belgium? Lucas: Exactly. When Germany invaded France in 1940, Belgium was occupied, and the government fled to London. But they didn’t leave all their assets behind. In the Belgian Congo, there was a garrison of colonial troops, and among them were units drawn from French West Africa, specifically the Senegalese Tirailleurs who had been integrated into the Belgian command structure during the interwar period. Luna: Wait, I thought those troops were exclusively French. Lucas: It’s a common misconception because the Tirailleurs are so closely tied to the French Army, but Belgium maintained its own colonial force, the Force Publique, which did recruit from neighboring territories when manpower was low or specific skills were needed. These weren’t volunteers in the modern sense; they were conscripted or indentured, much like the labor systems we discussed earlier, but now they were being sent to defend European soil. Luna: So they ended up fighting in France against the Germans. Lucas: Not exactly. The narrative gets complicated because by the time these units were mobilized in earnest, most of Western Europe was already under Axis control. Many of the Senegalese soldiers stationed in the Congo or transit hubs found themselves cut off from the main Belgian forces in Britain. Instead, they became pawns in a larger geopolitical game between the Vichy French regime, the Free French, and the British. Luna: That sounds incredibly isolating for them. Lucas: It was. We have accounts from soldiers who arrived in Dakar or Mombasa expecting to join the Allied push, only to find their chains of command fractured. Some were interned by the British, others stayed with Vichy authorities. It creates this strange, ghostly presence in the history books—a Belgian colonial unit that never really fought as a cohesive Belgian entity, but existed in the limbo of global conflict. Luna: Did any of them actually make it back to Brussels? Lucas: Very few. The ones who returned after the Liberation in 1945 faced a different kind of battle. They expected recognition for their service, perhaps even citizenship rights, given that they had bled for the King and the nation. Instead, they encountered a society that had barely noticed their absence and was eager to return to business as usual. Luna: Like many other colonial veterans. Lucas: Precisely. But there’s a specific detail here that sets the Belgian case apart. Unlike the French, who had massive populations of North and West African veterans returning home, Belgium’s numbers were small enough that the issue was almost entirely invisible in the public sphere. There were no large parades, no monuments erected in their honor. They simply vanished back into the shadows of Léopoldville. Luna: Erased from the capital's memory. Lucas: For decades. It wasn’t until the late nineties and early two thousands that historians began digging into the archives of the Ministry of Colonial Affairs. They found transport manifests, pension records, and personal letters from soldiers who had died in transit or lived out their days in obscure hospitals in Kinshasa, having never seen the Grand Place they were supposedly defending. Luna: How do you even find a single person in a colony that vast? Lucas: It’s detective work. You track the paper trails. For instance, there’s a file on a soldier named Alioune Diallo, who served in the 1st Battalion of Senegalese Tirailleurs attached to the Belgian forces. He wrote letters to his family in Senegal describing the cold in Antwerp and the confusion of not knowing who he was fighting for. Those letters ended up in a private collection in Dakar, untouched for fifty years. Luna: That must have felt like a lifetime of silence. Lucas: It does. And it highlights the asymmetry of the colonial relationship. Belgium viewed these troops as tools of statecraft, useful for projecting power but irrelevant to national identity once the shooting stopped. The 'civilizing mission' rhetoric used in schools and newspapers didn’t extend to acknowledging their humanity as citizens. Luna: Did the government ever apologize? Lucas: Not formally. The closest thing to an acknowledgment came in the form of small pensions adjusted in the 1970s, but these were administrative fixes, not moral reckonings. The official history of WWII in Belgium remained firmly focused on the resistance fighters and the royal family, leaving the colonial contribution as a footnote, if that. Luna: So the debt went unpaid again. Lucas: In every sense. Financial, emotional, and historical. It’s part of why the current debates about restitution and reparations in Belgium are so charged. People are realizing that the silence wasn’t an accident; it was a policy. By ignoring these soldiers, the state ignored the very real connection between the colony and the motherland. Luna: I want to hear more about how this affects things today. Lucas: Well, before we get to the present day consequences, let me take a quick moment to talk about how this show stays alive. If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know that deep research takes time and resources. A couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. It helps us dig through those archives and find the next story. Luna: Supporting the search for these lost voices. Lucas: Exactly. And thanks to listeners like you, we can keep pulling these threads out of the dark. So, where were we? Ah yes, the modern legacy of these invisible soldiers. Luna: Right, the present-day impact. Lucas: Today, the descendants of these men are pushing for recognition. In Brussels, there have been small ceremonies organized by community groups, but they lack official state support. The debate is now shifting toward education. Should the history of the Senegalese Tirailleurs be taught in Belgian schools? It forces students to confront the idea that Belgium’s role in WWII wasn’t just local, but global and deeply entangled with Africa. Luna: Changing the curriculum feels like a real step forward. Lucas: It is, though it’s slow. Museums in Tervuren have started including panels on colonial troops in their exhibits, moving away from the purely extractive narrative. It’s a small correction, but it matters. It acknowledges that the people who lived in the colonies were not just subjects, but actors with their own agency and suffering. Luna: Giving them back their place in the story. Lucas: That’s the goal. And it ties back to everything we’ve talked about—from the rubber hands to the looted statues. It’s about seeing the full picture, not just the parts that made Belgium wealthy. The Senegalese soldiers are a reminder that the empire was built on human lives, and those lives left traces that are still trying to surface. Luna: Traces that won’t stay buried forever. Lucas: No, they won’t. Every letter found, every archive opened, chips away at the silence. It’s a long process, but for families who have waited generations to hear their ancestors’ names spoken correctly, it’s the only justice available. Luna: It’s a quiet kind of victory. Lucas: Perhaps. But in history, quiet victories often echo the loudest. As we close this episode, I’m left wondering how many other stories are waiting in those same archives, hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone to ask the right question.