1939–1945: (African Soldiers Beyond the Continent — Over 370,000 Africans Serving in the British Armed Forces, Troops from Francophone and Anglophone Zones F…

1939–1945: (African Soldiers Beyond the Continent — Over 370,000 Africans Serving in the British Armed Forces, Troops from Francophone and Anglophone Zones Fighting in Italy and Burma, Returning Veterans Having Killed Europeans and Witnessed European Weakness, and the Myth of European Supremacy Finally Exploded): African soldiers served far beyond the continent itself — troops from Francophone and Anglophone zones fought in Italy between 1943 and 1945, while the British made extensive use of African regiments in Burma, the so-called forgotten war. By the war’s end, over 370,000 Africans were serving in British armed forces alone. Many had become politically acute through their wartime experience, developing heightened awareness of the colonial system and the world in which it functioned. Some professional soldiers would be demobilized and retire peacefully into their communities, but others would have a major influence, drawn to or becoming agents of radical politics and instigators of protest in the postwar period. Returning veterans had a much broader view of the world and a more informed view of Europe — as in the First World War, but on a vastly larger scale, Africans had served alongside Europeans of various classes, killed Europeans, and seen European weakness and failure at close quarters. The myth of European supremacy — moral or otherwise — was finally exploded, and it was this shift in African perceptions of their colonial masters that would prove of enormous and lasting significance. The men who had been sent to fight for empires that denied them citizenship returned home with a dangerous new knowledge — that the emperor had no clothes, that the system could be broken, and that they possessed the discipline and organizational capacity to break it.