During World War Two, Britain mobilised a huge, now-forgotten, army of African soldiers to fight against the Axis powers in battlefields across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. But when peace came in 1945, the British Empire betrayed these men and subjected them to systematic discrimination.

The Forgotten Heroes of Empire delves into this shameful episode and explores how such colonial-era disregard reverberates to this day. Amazingly, the filmmakers managed to track down some of the last surviving veterans in remote parts of the continent, now aged around 100 years old. Though the passing years have whittled down their numbers, the survivors continue to endure great poverty, hardship and alienation, despite having risked their lives for the Allied war effort.

With a cast of compelling characters, including some extraordinary veterans from Kenya and Zambia, this investigation by filmmakers Jack Losh and Alessandro Pavone finally brings this dreadful injustice to light and raises disturbing questions about the UK’s attitude towards its forgotten African heroes. For the first time, damning evidence of such discrimination is unearthed: policies that based pay on skin colour, secret enforced recruitment by press gangs, and illegal regimes of beatings and public floggings.

Since its release, the film’s testimonies and revelations have prompted senior politicians and a former British Army chief to call on the government to make an official apology, to launch an inquiry and to compensate the last surviving veterans before it is too late.

Film running time: 25 minutes, followed by 1hr panel discussion.

Chair

Christina Lamb is one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents and a bestselling author.  She has reported from most of the world’s hotspots, including numerous conflicts in Africa. She has won major awards, including five times being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year and Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She was made an OBE by the Queen in 2013 and is an honorary fellow of University College, Oxford. She is the author of The Africa House, the story of an extraordinary, colonial-era country estate built in Northern Rhodesia, which features in the film, The Forgotten Heroes of Empire.

Speakers

Jack Losh is a journalist, photographer and filmmaker with a focus on armed conflict and humanitarian issues. He has reported across the Central African Republic, eastern Ukraine, Iraqi Kurdistan and elsewhere, with work shortlisted at the RTS Television Journalism Awards, the One World Media Awards, Reuters’ Kurt Schork Awards and Frontline Club Awards. Jack has produced documentaries for Al Jazeera and The Guardian, and is regularly published by leading UK and US outlets including The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Telegraph, Granta and The Sunday Times Magazine. In 2018, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting awarded him a research grant to cover the civil war in CAR.

Italian-born Alessandro Pavone has been working as a freelance director of photography and producer in current affairs and documentary programming for the past fifteen years. Based in Kabul and then Dubai from 2011, Pavone has filmed conflicts and humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, South Sudan and Somalia. Pavone was also part of the PBS NewsHour team to receive the 2017 Overseas Press Club citation (honourable mention) in the Edward R. Murrow Award for their “The Fight for Iraq” series. Beyond his current collaboration with PBS, Ale works regularly for CNN and BBC, and his work has appeared on Al Jazeera, VICE and The New York Times among others. In 2018 he filmed and produced for the PBS NewsHour a series of news feature stories funded by the Pulitzer Center on the migrants’ abuse and the Islamic State resurgence in Libya.

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is an award-winning social anthropologist and a Senior Lecturer in African Studies at UCL. She gained an MSc and a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford and has carried out fieldwork in Senegal, France and the UK. With teaching interests spanning diasporas, popular culture and migration between Africa and Europe, her research has been awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize in African Anthropology, with a special citation in the De la Torre Bueno Prize, and appeared in books and journals including Africa, African Studies Review, Politique Africaine and Identities.

Rishika Yadav is a PhD student at the Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently re-constructing the war experiences of Coloured, Indian, and Malay soldiers from South Africa in the Second World War. Her research aims to challenge the imperialist trajectory of war memory. She completed her undergraduation at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, and gained her Masters degree in International History from LSE where she was also awarded the Iris Forester Prize for Academic Excellence. She has previously interned at UNESCO MGIEP and the Ministry of External Affairs (Govt. of India), and has worked at the Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Civil Society, frequently contributing to their digital publication ‘Spontaneous Order’.  

Chair: Charles Glass

Glass is an author, journalist and broadcaster specialising in the Middle East and the Second World War. He began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. In 1986, Glass interviewed the hostage crew of TWA flight 847 on the tarmac of Beirut Airport. He broke the news that the hijackers had removed the hostages from the plane and hidden them in the suburbs of Beirut, causing the Reagan Administration to abort a rescue attempt. In 1987, Glass himself was abducted and held hostage for two months before escaping from his Shiite Muslim captors. In 1988, he exposed Saddam Hussein’s then-secret biological weapons program. The U.S. government rejected Glass’s claims, until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. In addition, Glass was the only U.S. television correspondent in northern Iraq covering the entire Kurdish rebellion in 1991. He has covered wars in the Middle East, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia, Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Speakers

Ian Black

Black is the former Middle East editor at the Guardian, where he has worked since 1980 as a reporter. In recent years he has reported extensively on the Arab uprisings and their aftermath in Syria, Libya and Egypt. 2017 marks the publication of Black’s new book, Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, which traces the history of conflict in the region including important milestones such as the Balfour Agreement. Black joined the LSE Middle East Centre as a Visiting Senior Fellow in August 2016.  In 2010, he was awarded a Peace Through Media Award by the International Council for Press and Broadcasting at the International Media Awards in London.

Ghada Karmi

Karmi is a Palestinian doctor of medicine, author and academic. Ghada was born in Jerusalem and was forced to leave her home with her family as a result of Israel’s creation in 1948. They moved to England where Karmi eventually practised as a doctor for many years, working as a specialist in the health of migrants and refugees. Karmi is the author of several books, including her memoir In Search of Fatima, Jerusalem Today, What Future for the Peace Process? and The Palestinian Exodus 1948-1998. She has held a number of research appointments at SOAS and the universities of Durham and Leeds. From 1999 to 2001 she was an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where she led a major project on Israel-Palestinian reconciliation. In 2009, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Currently Ghada Karmi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter.

Lord Leslie Turnberg

Lord Turnberg is a medical professional, author and Labour peer. Leslie Turnberg graduated in medicine from Manchester University in 1957. He was appointed President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1992 and received a knighthood in 1994 Birthday Honours for services to medicine. He continues to be active in medical affairs in the House of Lords and is a member of the Committee on Sustainability of the NHS. He was a Jewish Medical Association (UK) founder patron.  In 2008 Lord and Lady Turnberg, in partnership with the Academy of Medical Sciences, established the Daniel Turnberg Memorial Fellowships. These fellowships are in memory of their late son, a doctor and researcher with a keen interest in fostering links between the UK and the Middle East. In recent years Lord Turnberg has turned his attention increasingly to the thorny problems of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has used his experience in research and in large organisations to analyse the reasons behind the inability of the Zionists and the Arabs to reach a compromise. As a Labour Peer he focuses on the problems that abound in the Middle East in his interventions in debates in the House of Lords. In April this year, Lord Turnberg published his book Beyond the Balfour Agreement marking the anniversary of the landmark letter and the misconceptions surrounding the declaration ever since.

Dr Jacob Norris

Jacob Norris is a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East. He completed his PhD in 2010 at the University of Cambridge where he spent a further 3 years as Research Fellow, before coming to Sussex in 2013. Jacob’s research is mostly focused on Palestine in the 19th and early 20th centuries, albeit within global and transnational frameworks. His monograph, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press.

Featured image: From left to right: Lord Allenby (commander of British forces in Palestine 1917), Lord Balfour, and Sir Herbert Samuel, first British High Commissioner of the Mandate attending the 1925 opening of Hebrew University.

On 3 November at the Frontline Club, photojournalist Greg Constantine spoke to UNHCR’s UK representative Gonzalo Vargas Llosa about Nowhere People, Constantine’s body of ten years of photographic work on the world’s estimated 10m stateless people.

A stateless person “under law is considered no citizen of any country,” said Constantine. “Once citizenship is severed, it opens people up to an array of deprivation of rights.”

The number of global stateless may exceed 10m, according to Vargas Llosa, as “very few governments want to give exact statistics on stateless people inside their borders.”

Constantine’s talk at the Frontline Club comes on the first anniversary of the launch of I Belong, a UN campaign to “end the scourge of statelessness by 2024,” said Vargas Llosa.

Constantine showed images from his meetings with stateless peoples, including the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Malaysia; Nubians in Kenya; Filipinos in Saba, Malaysia; the Dali in Nepal; the Dom in Iraq; ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic; and Roma in Italy.

“Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them” after end of Yugoslavia says @grconstantine @frontlineclub

— Charlotte Beale (@CharlotteAGB) November 3, 2015

Constantine also shared quotes from stateless men and women he had met, including from Jafar, a stateless Rohingya in Bangladesh: “Because we don’t have citizenship, we are like a fish out of water, flapping and unable to breathe. When a fish is out of water, he suffocates.”

“The legacy of colonialism is very much a part of people becoming stateless in Asia and Africa,” said Constantine. “The creation of the idea of ‘others’ that came from French colonialism is responsible for the Ivory Coast’s stateless people… Denial of citizenship is directly attached to Ivorian conflict and the 2002 civil war was borne from a clash of identity – us and them.”

He added: “Most times, you find stateless people are not refugees. Most have never left the country in which they were born.”

“The Rohingya is by far the most extreme example of statelessness in the world today,” Constantine continued, despite them playing a huge role in the economy of southern Bangladesh.

“40,000 Rohingya are living segregated lives in Internationally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps [in Burma],” said Constantine. They are put up in “tents… that psychologically make them think their situation as IDPs is temporary… The conflict has been manufactured by Burmese central government, by 40 years of oppressive policies that pitted communities against each other.”

“The administrative tactics states use to humiliate their stateless fly under the radar of the world’s media,” said Constantine. Discrimination against ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic has been “manifested into policy.”

Vargas Llosa added that in the Dominican Republic, “statelessness is the result of deliberate, well-planned, well-executed policies” by the government.

While “huge strides” have been made in Iraq, which has “some of the most progressive laws in the Middle East,” Domari gypsies still suffer. Similarly, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, “Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them.” Because of certain laws, generations of Roma in Italy “are not afforded opportunities to become citizens,” Constantine said.

“Gender discriminating nationality laws are all over the Middle East and Africa,” added Constantine. He highlighted this with a comment on the situation in Lebanon – a young subject born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless father must inherit her father’s stateless condition. 27 countries globally limit a mother’s ability to pass her nationality onto her family.

A member of the audience pointed out that “the state is often an enemy of the people it is supposed to be administering,” and asked Constantine and Vargas Llosa their opinion of the role of the state in creating statelessness crises.

“What strikes one from Greg’s images is the evil a state can do,” Vargas Llosa agreed. “What happens when the caregiver of human rights ends up being the vehicle which perpetrates the denial of those rights?”

Constantine deplored the “sovereign right of a state to determine who its citizens are and who they aren’t.”

Visit the Nowhere People website to find out more.

On Monday 26 October, renowned Egyptian writer, feminist and activist Nawal El Saadawi joined journalist Wendell Steavenson and a packed audience at the Frontline Club for a discussion that spanned the topics of linguistic philosophy, feminism and globalisation – all of which were explored in the context of El Saadawi‘s own life experiences and recent developments in Egyptian politics.

Sitting in same room as legend #NawalElSaadaei @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/93hzphE6My

— Nahla Al-Ageli (@NahlaInk) October 26, 2015

The discussion began with a focus on the United States’ continued military aid to Egypt. This was something El Saadawi felt passionately against, not just in Egypt’s case but on a global level. “Fair trade, not aid,” she said.

“The 2011 revolution was hijacked by the United States working with Egyptian politicians. Hilary Clinton came to Tahrir Square as soon as the revolution began. Why?”


The conversation then moved onto the subject of globalisation, and how colonising powers have always played the game of “divide and rule.”

El Saadawi expanded: “When Sadat and Reagan came, they brought the Muslim Brothers. Why? They wanted to fragment the country by religion. They wanted to fragment the country by class. They wanted to fragment the army. What is the difference between Syria and Egypt now? Syria is completely fragmented, because the army is fragmented. And this is why we are unified in comparison. This is why the Americans are against Sisi.”

When Steavenson questioned her about the way the Egyptian government has been punishing members of the Muslim Brotherhood with imprisonment and death sentencing, El Saadawi said: “I am against the death penalty. I am against putting anybody in prison. I am against all that. But I am also against a religious state. Whether Islamic, Jewish, or Christian. We cannot have true equality in any religious state, because all religions oppress women.”


She continued by explaining the extent to which gender inequality has been rooted in religion: “In the three major monotheistic religions, Adam was set free as an innocent, while Eve was a sinner because she ate from the tree of knowledge. Women are not expected to be equal. Why do you think I’ve had three husbands? Because they hated my intelligence. They wanted a stupid woman.”


Even though El Saadawi‘s main work and research focus revolves around injustice, she revealed her enduring optimism in the face of adversity. “I am always optimistic. I learned very much about this in the experience of prison. The women I was with were very pessimistic, because Sadat told us he will kill us. So every day they woke up crying, and I started dancing. I told them we will live and be free; just to have that idea gave me hope. When you have hope, you inspire people with hope, and hope is power. In the worst situations, I am hopeful.”


Steavenson asked about the moment when her sense of justice came into being, and why she initially became motivated to challenge injustice.

El Saadawi explained that when she was 7 and 8 years old, she felt something was not right in the way that she was treated in comparison with her brother. Her older brother was lazy and spoilt, whereas she was hardworking and neglected.

“During Eid, I received half the money that my brother received in gifts. I asked my parents why. They said because God said so. They thought they would shut me up by saying ‘God’. So my first letter ever when I was 8 years old was to God, but I still haven’t got an answer!”

A preview screening of Concerning Violence, followed by a discussion with Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson, was held at the Frontline Club on Friday 21 November.

The film is based upon the seminal anti-colonialism book, The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, a Martinique born psychiatrist who became involved with armed anti-colonial struggles, significantly in Algeria.

The production follows segments of archive footage, some extremely graphic, linked throughout by excerpts from the book, read by singer Lauryn Hill. Clips used were from African countries affected by the violence of colonisation in the late 20th century, such as Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Burkina Faso.

Olsson started the discussion by saying: “The film for me was just about the text. For me it’s just like a commercial for Fanon’s thinking.” He felt that the book “hadn’t had its proper place in society” and wanted to use it to illustrate problems of the modern day.

Göran Hugo Olsson in conversation at the Frontline Club

Olsson had originally intended to use modern footage but was fearful of it attracting over-analysis and distracting from the main purpose of the film. However, using archive footage, “every image in this film has a colonial view built into it . . . for me it was interesting to go as far back as possible but still have some quality and sound as you meet some individuals”. He later estimated that he went through 100 hours of footage.

An audience member asked why the Algerian conflict – where Fanon most developed his thought – was not featured in the film. Olsson responded that there was a lack of suitable footage, and that the best film on Algeria had already been made: The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966).

Olsson also commented on his love of the way the text reads rather incoherently, reflecting how it is to live under ‘structural violence’, whether it be colonialism or domestic abuse.

His film is an “appeal to the European people, . . . the people who are living in a society that benefits from this robbery”. He said: “I made this for Europeans to try to be more aware of what’s going on.”

Another question from the audience asked about the origins of Olsson’s motivations for producing work that politicises race, to which Olsson replied that he didn’t know. However, he remembered the news of the 1976 Soweto Uprising as a pivotal moment in his childhood.

There were drawbacks to using archived footage. In one particularly harrowing scene, a female amputee, injured in a bombing, speaks to the camera without a subtitled translation. As the speech was a rare dialect of West African creole, Olsson had not been able to get it translated. He found the clip so disturbing that he did not add it to the final edit until the last possible moment for fear of having to look at it for too long.

He went on to say that the film missed some of the more complex chapters in the middle of the book as he thought that “the images in the film make up those other chapters”, conveying the absent narrative to the audience.

Olsson followed further questions on the political implications of the films by saying “this is a short version of what I think the world . . . should consider”. Neo-colonialism, and its emphasis on free trade, was thought by some audience members to be even more destructive than traditional colonialism. Olsson agreed, commenting: “I think things are worse [now] . . . now they don’t even hire local people.”

Bringing the discussion back to the technicalities of the film, Olsson spoke about its planned translations, with specifically chosen individuals narrating each version. For instance, he plans to have “one of the Pussy Riot girls” narrating the Russian version.

The conversation ended with Olsson saying: “It’s my dream that someone will download this film in the future . . . and put whatever image they think appropriate to it,” thereby redirecting film towards an non-African colonial narrative. He related the concept of structural violence to the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, and wondered how it would affect the next generation there.

“We have to tell these stories over and over again.”

Concerning Violence will on general release from Friday 28 November. For further information, see the film’s Facebook page here.

Based on Frantz Fanon’s landmark 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, Concerning Violence explores the mechanisms of decolonisation. It is a bold and fresh visual narrative on Africa, told through newly discovered archive material of the struggle for liberation from colonial rule in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.

Written over 50 years ago, Fanon’s book is still a major tool for understanding and illuminating neocolonialism today. This continued relevance inspired director Göran Hugo Olsson to visualise the nationalistic struggle for self-determination in an age when European colonial powers began to retreat from the last outposts of their faded empires.

Olsson‘s unique and artful film travels through Zimbabwe, Guinea, Mozambique, Congo, and South Africa. The rich archive material shows the young Robert Mugabe talking about redistribution of land; visits Portuguese platoons in Mozambique caught in the fog of a jungle war with guerrillas who have nothing to lose; and shows searing interviews with white settlers.

Directed by Göran Hugo Olsson
Duration: 85′
Year: 2014

This screening is in partnership with Dogwoof