Of World War One and the Sour Taste it leaves

So then let us address the elephant in the room. Or is it the bullet in the room or the gun or whatever propellant that is in the room. This year was billed as the homecoming of the First World War. Not to the place the war started from, but rather the place that is claimed to have been the last point of conflict. Yeah, adults celebrating a war!

Zambia’s Mbala town, far removed from the origin of the conflict in Europe and whose gentle hills Archduke Franz Ferdinand will never see, with the silent witness of the placid lake Chila, is now being touted as the place for the centenary celebrations to mark the end of the First World War (WWI). In keeping with the theme, huge billboards were erected, adorning the drive into much of Zambia’s Northern Province. Where possible, roads were patched up, t-shirts printed and vehicles branded accordingly. It was clear that this was a promotion of epic proportions and had the added spice of coinciding with Zambia’s Northern Province Tourism and Investment Expo.

The narrative went something like this “come and see where the last shot in the First World War was fired”. This is of course was in reference to Mbala town, then known as Abercorn. During WWI, Mbala formed part of the unsuccessful British military effort to defeat German General von Lettow-Vorbeck’s German army, and British forces were concentrated there. After Germany’s surrender in Europe, von Lettow-Vorbeck formally surrendered at Mbala on 25 November 1918, though he had agreed a ceasefire at the Chambeshi River 250 km south nine days earlier. A memorial marks the spot of the formal surrender about 2 km south-west of the centre of town. Following the surrender ceremony, the German troops were ordered to throw their weapons into Lake Chila and on my last visit to Mbala I learnt that the Zambia army would regularly fish out WWI weapons from Lake Chila. These would then be put on display in Mbala’s Moto Moto Museum. At the time of this article, the curator for Mbala’s Moto Moto Museum confirmed to me that they are of the view that all the weapons that could possibly be retrieved from the lake have since been retrieved.

The spotlight on Mbala for the centenary celebrations marking the end of WWI apart from the all too common pomp and ceremony, brings to the fore a very uncomfortable truth regarding both the first and second world wars. A truth which in my view has not been adequately addressed. As Jackie Bischof notes in the July 2018 edition of Quartz, circa two million Africans were involved in the First World War, fighting a war broached by their colonizers. The reward for these Africans was more colonization once the war had ended. To add insult to injury the role of Africans in WWI has been virtually obliterated from history and is now shrouded in the type of generalized obfuscation that is only good for political speeches. Their part in history relegated to an occasional mention and the ubiquitous black and white pictures one finds on the internet.

The war however left many indelible personal and institutional scars on those who participated in it. At least that is the sense I get each time my grandfather’s story is brought up. He fought in the Great War (as they called it). The war took away the greater part of his youth and never restored it. He was a man troubled, often beset by nightmares and given to volatility of temperament that would make him the sweetest old man in one second and the vilest insolent man the next.

He found solace in local brews. Often leaving home in the early hours of the morning, only to return two days later, staggering, his trousers soggy with urine, having the sickly odour of an unwashed body and belting out war song after war song. He would stand in centre of our village homestead, facing his hut, daring anyone who cared to watch.

“Come we wrestle!” he would shout. “Come we wrestle you sons of bitches, you sons of whores!”

That would continue being his routine. Till the Seventh Day Adventists called one day. He chased them with contempt, but they called again, and again till he listened. He got baptized a few months later and was appointed deacon yet a few months after that.

For a while, it seemed the demons were pacified. Fed the proverbial word of God, bathed in hymns and consoled in prayers. His little hut in the corner of the homestead took on a different demeanor. He would often ask someone to go to his hut and read for him a Bible passage, or mumble some hymn or even recite a prayer. Come Saturday, he would be performing his deacon duties, keeping the church quiet, or collecting offering while walking with the grace of a ballerina from row to row.

Demons however are stubborn entities, particularly those related to something as unpleasant a war. They came back with a vengeance. My grandfather from nowhere decided he was done with church. He had heard that one of his former colleagues in the army had been compensated by the British. He decided to travel from our little village, to Lusaka to go fight for “his money” as he called it. Before leaving, he went on a long winded speech about how all our lives would change once he got the money.

He returned from Lusaka three weeks later a broken man. He once again took to alcohol and solitude. Attempts at coaxing an explanation of his trip out him, drew a blank almost defeatist stare. As if to say “really?” The drunken profanities became more pronounced and louder. Yet when he was sober, you would find him brooding and muttering to himself like a mad man. With each incompressible movement of the lips he would furiously scratch the back of his head.

The rest as they say is history. He died shortly afterwards still dreaming of compensation from the British for whom he fought in a war he knew nothing about.

I often wonder what my grandfather would make of these centenary celebrations. I wonder how many of his colleagues died like him, having sacrificed the best years of their lives. Today their place in history is but a footnote in the much bigger narrative of the First World War. A narrative that has sought to romanticize the hostilities, sometimes even shroud them in fairy tale like light.

Perhaps that is what you get for fighting other people’s wars. While the rest of the World haggles about who fired the last shot, people like me know just how trivial that debate is. Real lives were destroyed here. And no amount of world war one monuments can compensate for that.