The Thiaroye massacre

At the end of November 1944 more than a thousand African soldiers of the French army were waiting at the Thiaroye military camp, a dozen or so kilometres from Dakar. They were Senegalese tirailleurs – most of them veterans of the 1940 campaign who had spent four years in German captivity, been freed by the advancing Allies in the summer of 1944 and sent home. They were demanding payment of their back pay and the allowances due to them. The French command treated their protest as a mutiny. On 30 November the commander of the Senegal-Mauritania Division, Brigadier General Marcel Dagnan, brought up to the camp all the security forces available in the area. The next morning, 1 December 1944, these troops surrounded the camp and opened fire on the assembled tirailleurs.

Many chronologies of the war state under 30 November that on that day “the Thiaroye massacre began”. This needs clarifying. The former prisoners’ protest had already been going on for several days – since their refusal to leave for Bamako on 27 November (25 November according to some studies) and General Dagnan’s stormy visit to the camp on 28 November. The 30th of November was a day of preparation for armed action, and the shooting took place on the morning of 1 December. That is the date that appears today on memorial plaques and in official French and Senegalese documents.

The Senegalese tirailleurs in 1940 and in captivity

The name “Senegalese tirailleurs” (tirailleurs sénégalais) was used for colonial infantry recruited throughout French West Africa and also in Equatorial Africa – not only in Senegal but also in French Sudan (today’s Mali), Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Volta and Chad. During the Phoney War several tens of thousands of these soldiers were shipped to France, and in May and June 1940 they fought in the Battle of France, often on the hardest-pressed sectors of the front on the Somme and the Aisne.

For Black soldiers the defeat of France took a particularly cruel course. Wehrmacht units, steeped in racist propaganda and in the memory of the “Black Shame” – a press campaign against the African soldiers of the French army occupying the Rhineland after 1918 – in many places refused to take them prisoner. The German historian Raffael Scheck estimates that in May and June 1940 at least 1,500, and possibly as many as 3,000, Black prisoners were killed; the best known of these crimes took place on 19–20 June at Chasselay near Lyon. After the Armistice of Compiègne, colonial prisoners – unlike white Frenchmen – were for the most part not taken to the Reich. The Germans held them in so-called Frontstalags in occupied France, citing fear of tropical diseases and a dislike of the presence of Black men in Germany.

At one point some 69,000 prisoners from the colonial forces were held in the Frontstalags, including nearly 16,000 soldiers from West Africa. They were underfed and poorly clothed; some worked in agriculture and forestry, putting aside their small earnings in savings books kept by the camp administration. From 1943 – as part of collaboration – the Vichy government provided the Germans with French officers and NCOs to guard these camps, which the prisoners saw as a betrayal. According to Armelle Mabon, a French historian who has studied the fate of the “native” prisoners, some 2,500 of them escaped. Some of the escapers joined the Resistance: tirailleurs fought in the Vercors maquis, and the Guinean Addi Bâ organised a partisan group in the Vosges and was shot by the Germans in 1943. At the same time many prisoners encountered kindness from the local population in France – an experience in sharp contrast to the everyday racism of the colonial administration in Africa.

Freed, but not paid

After the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris, the prisoners in the Frontstalags regained their freedom. The Provisional Government of General Charles de Gaulle, reshaped in September into a government of national unity, decided to send them back to Africa quickly. In the autumn of 1944 France was rebuilding its army, drafting into it tens of thousands of volunteers from the French Forces of the Interior. At the same time thousands of African soldiers were being withdrawn from General de Lattre’s First Army, fighting in the Vosges – officially because of the winter and supply difficulties, but in the view of many historians also so that the army of liberated France would look “French”. In French historiography this process is called the “whitening” (blanchiment) of the army. The former colonial prisoners had no place in this army – they were to go home.

They were, however, owed a good deal of money. Throughout their captivity they had received no pay, and under French regulations they were entitled to back pay for the period of captivity, a combat allowance, a demobilisation bonus, a severance payment, the return of the savings in the books kept in the Frontstalags, and civilian clothing. The Minister for the Colonies, René Pleven, wanted to put their prisoner-of-war pay on an equal footing with the entitlements of white soldiers, but failed to get his way. Circular No. 2080 of 21 October 1944 ordered a quarter of the sums due to be paid on embarkation and the rest on arrival in Africa. In practice very different amounts were paid out at the transit centres in La Flèche, Versailles and Rennes, and in October each soldier received an advance of 1,500 francs. The exchange rates between the metropolitan franc and the colonial franc used in West Africa were also disputed.

In the end, at the beginning of November 1944 – on 3 November according to most studies, 5 November according to others – 1,635 tirailleurs sailed from the Breton port of Morlaix aboard the British ship Circassia (the figures in military documents vary from about 1,200 to 1,800). Another 300 or so refused to go aboard until they had received their money. On 11 November, the anniversary of the 1918 armistice, the gendarmerie removed them from their quarters by force; several people were injured, and those who refused were interned in camps in Brittany. On board Circassia the paymaster paid out part of the money and issued the soldiers with certificates of the amounts still owed to them. The ship called at Plymouth, Cardiff and Casablanca, and docked at Dakar on 21 November. The soldiers were taken by lorry to the camp at Thiaroye.

Dakar in the autumn of 1944

West Africa was one of the last corners of the French empire to go over to the Allies. In September 1940 the Governor-General, Pierre Boisson, repelled the British and Free French attack on Dakar (the Battle of Dakar), and until the end of 1942 the region remained loyal to Vichy. The cadres of the colonial forces in Dakar largely dated from that period. General Yves de Boisboissel, the highest-ranking soldier in West Africa in December 1944, had opposed the Allied landings in Algeria in November 1942. The colony still lived by the old rules: separate, lower pay and pensions for “natives”, forced labour under the name of prestations, exclusion from establishments run by Europeans, a curfew. The promises of reform announced at the Brazzaville Conference in January 1944 had not yet changed anything in the everyday life of the colony.

The soldiers returning from France had seen the mother country at close quarters – including its poverty, its defeat and the solidarity of ordinary people – and were not inclined to accept these rules without protest. For many colonial officers, in turn, they had been “spoiled” by their stay in Europe, by contact with Frenchwomen and by supposed German propaganda. Such explanations recur again and again in reports written after the massacre. Historians, among them Raffael Scheck, regard them as groundless.

The protest in the camp and the preparations of 30 November

At Thiaroye the tirailleurs merely had the metropolitan francs they were carrying exchanged for colonial money – according to Armelle Mabon, this happened on 28 November. The officers were alarmed that some soldiers had tens of thousands of francs on them, and concluded that the money came from a suspect source. The other matters – back pay, savings, clothing, recognition of ranks earned in the Resistance – remained unresolved. Generals de Boisboissel and Dagnan announced that the soldiers would receive the rest of what was due to them in their own districts, after they had dispersed to their homes. The veterans, who had already heard more than one promise in France, did not want to leave empty-handed.

On 27 November (25 November according to some studies) a group of 549 tirailleurs who were to leave by train for Bamako refused to go until they had been paid in full. The next day, 28 November, General Dagnan came to the camp. According to his report, a crowd surrounded him and blocked his car, and he believed he had come close to being held as a hostage. He got away by promising to consider their demands and to pay out the money. Officially, however, he declared the camp to be in a state of mutiny and the question of pay to be a pretext, and decided to restore obedience by a show of force.

On 30 November, the eve of the operation, Dagnan, in agreement with de Boisboissel, mobilised almost all the security forces in the Dakar area and even from Saint-Louis, more than 250 kilometres away: three companies of the 1st and 7th Senegalese Tirailleur Regiments, gendarmes, a platoon of French NCOs and privates, and armoured vehicles of the 6th Colonial Artillery Regiment – an M3 Stuart light tank, two armoured cars and a carrier. According to the surviving documents, this amounted to more than 1,100 African soldiers and some 120 Europeans. A telegram requesting approval was sent to Paris at one o’clock in the morning; no reply has survived in the archives. The historian Martin Mourre believes the timing was chosen deliberately to present the government with a fait accompli. According to accounts collected in the 1980s, pits were dug near the camp before 1 December, and the fish supplier was told not to come that day. These testimonies have not been confirmed by documents, but General André Bach, a former head of the Army Historical Service, pointed out that after the night-time preparations for the operation there is a “black hole” in the archives – two of Dagnan’s three orders are missing.

1 December 1944

At 6.30 a.m. on 1 December the troops entered the camp and surrounded the barracks. The tirailleurs were assembled on the central square. According to the officers’ reports, the soldiers refused to obey orders and insulted their superiors; at 7.30 one of them reached for a knife, and around 8.45 a shot was fired; at 9.20 warning shots were fired, and at 9.30 fire was opened. Some military reports, however, state that the shot at 8.45 was a volley fired into the air by the security troops. The statements of the arrested tirailleurs agree with one another far more closely: they were ordered to assemble on the square – which they took to mean they were about to be paid – and the firing lasted a few seconds, less than a minute at most. Automatic weapons were used, including those on the armoured cars.

No evidence was found that the mutineers had fired. The reports list one carbine and a few edged weapons as having been seized. The only man wounded on the side of the security troops was hit – as was established during the trial – by a bullet which, according to expert analysis, could not have come from the “mutineers”, probably a ricochet. Three officers were roughed up. General Bach considered it certain that there had been no provocation on the part of the tirailleurs and that the troops had been ordered to shoot “to kill”. Some of the soldiers fled to a nearby village, where the inhabitants helped them. During the day the remaining tirailleurs were rounded up in Dakar and its surroundings. On the same day 300 men were sent by rail to Bamako, and the next day another 660 to various colonies of West Africa.

How many died

A coded telegram from the command in Dakar dated 2 December 1944 reported 24 killed, 11 died of wounds, 35 wounded under treatment and 48 “mutineers” arrested. It added that the “native troops showed absolute loyalty”. This figure – 35 dead – became the official toll for decades to come. On 5 December, however, General Dagnan wrote two reports: in one he repeated these figures, in the other he spoke of 24 killed on the spot and 46 wounded who died in hospital, that is, 70 victims. One of these tallies must therefore be false.

Historians have argued for years about the real number of victims. The Senegalese historian Mbaye Guèye, comparing the number of tirailleurs assigned to units after the massacre with the number provided for in the plans, arrived at 191 dead. Some French researchers – Julien Fargettas, Eugène-Jean Duval – long accepted the official toll of 35 victims. Armelle Mabon, who has studied military, colonial and judicial archives, points to gaps and what she considers deliberate falsifications in the documents. One example is a report of the alleged desertion of 400 tirailleurs during the stop at Casablanca, which may have served to conceal the real losses. Since 2018 Mabon has estimated the number killed at 300–400. Martin Mourre believes that the exact number “will probably never be known”, but that the inaccuracy of the reports suggests that several hundred people died. Veterans spoke of some 300 dead. The victims were buried in unmarked graves. Their burial place has not been established, and no archaeological investigation has ever been carried out at the cemetery in Thiaroye.

The trial of the “mutineers” and the silence

An investigation against the survivors was opened as early as 2 December. On 5–6 March 1945 a military court in Dakar tried 34 of the 48 men arrested, charged among other things with mutiny and refusing to obey orders. The presiding judge and the assessors were officers of the regiments that had taken part in the shooting. The seized weapons were not produced in evidence, and the interpreter knew only the Bambara language. All the accused were sentenced to terms of one to ten years’ imprisonment. Some served them on the island of Gorée, a former centre of the slave trade. Three died in prison. On 17 April 1945 the military court of cassation in Algiers rejected their appeal. The rest were released by 1947 at the latest, most of them under the amnesty law of 16 August 1947. The amnesty, however, did not mean acquittal, and the widows of the dead received no pensions.

Because wartime censorship was still in force in France, the press did not write a word about the massacre. On 4 December the War Ministry issued a circular according to which the former prisoners were to have received everything due to them before the events at Thiaroye, and on 10 December the Minister for the Colonies, Paul Giacobbi, approved the actions of the authorities in Dakar. The government commissioned two administrative inquiries. The report of General Pierre-Étienne de Perier found the tirailleurs to blame and the shooting justified. The report of Inspector Louis Mérat found that the promises of payment had not been kept, but only the first of the two reports was approved. The Dakar lawyer and politician Lamine Guèye, who defended some of the accused, pressed for a parliamentary commission. He was supported by, among others, the deputy for French Guiana, Gaston Monnerville. In March 1946 Lamine Guèye raised the matter in the Constituent Assembly with the support of other deputies from the colonies, among them Félix Houphouët-Boigny. The commission was never set up.

Memory and recognition

In West Africa the massacre was known about from the first day: the survivors dispersed to their villages throughout the federation, and Thiaroye became a symbol of colonial injustice. Léopold Sédar Senghor, himself a veteran of 1940 and a former prisoner in a Frontstalag, dedicated a poem, “Thiaroye”, to the victims, and in 1988 Ousmane Sembène made the film Camp de Thiaroye, which for years was not shown in France. In France the event remained almost unknown until the 2000s. On 12 October 2012 in Dakar President François Hollande still spoke of a “bloody repression” and 35 victims. On 30 November 2014 in Thiaroye he referred to at least 70 dead and handed Senegal copies of part of the military archives.

On 18 July 2024 the French veterans’ office (ONAC) granted six of the tirailleurs who were killed the status of “died for France” (mort pour la France). The Prime Minister of Senegal, Ousmane Sonko, criticised the decision as unilateral. On 28 November 2024 the President of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, announced that he had received a letter from President Emmanuel Macron in which the events of 1 December 1944 were for the first time called a “massacre”. Historians and the victims’ families are still calling for the archives to be fully opened, the burial place to be identified and the sentences of 1945 to be reviewed. In March 2026, according to press reports, the Paris administrative court ruled that the state had failed in its duty to clarify the circumstances of the death of one of those killed, who had earlier been falsely declared a deserter.

Place in the history of the war

The Thiaroye massacre took place while the war in Europe was still going on and French troops were fighting in Alsace and the Vosges. It had no influence on the course of military operations, but it revealed the other side of the empire’s war effort. African soldiers had defended France in 1940 and fought in the ranks of Free France from Chad to Italy and Provence, and yet they were treated as an inferior class of soldier and citizen. Thiaroye belongs to a series of brutal post-war colonial repressions – from the massacres at Sétif and Guelma in May 1945 to Madagascar in 1947. Its memory fed the movements that in 1960 led to the independence of Senegal and other West African countries.