French municipalities encouraged to give their streets names of African soldiers

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Municipalities could soon pay tribute to the African soldiers of the Second World War, by giving their streets the names of fighters who died for France from the former colonies. In any case, this is the objective of a booklet which lists the journeys of 100 WWII combatants from the colonies.

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While some call for the debunking of the statues of characters who contributed to colonization, Geneviève Darrieussecq, the Secretary of State to the Minister of the Armed Forces, presented this Wednesday July 1st to a group of parliamentarians a booklet entitled To the combatants of Africa, the grateful homeland .

The idea is to facilitate the reflection of the mayors by giving them the biography of a hundred fighters from Africa so that they can "  contextualize, know where these soldiers ended up in France, also know which countries they came from and to make the link with their territory  ”. 

Soldiers of the French colonial empire

The book is not intended to be exhaustive and includes a sorting by regions. The 100 soldiers mentioned in the booklet come from the French colonial empire in Africa, with a large representation of Senegalese but also fighters from North Africa. Hundreds of thousands of African soldiers were mobilized during the Second World War. 

This initiative comes at a time when the debate on the representativeness of blacks in French society is particularly lively, after the death of George Floyd in the United States, last May 25. In the wake of anti-racist demonstrations around the world, the monuments and statues linked to French colonial history are once again at the center of a memory controversy.

Secretary of State Geneviève Darrieussecq, for her part, believes that history cannot be redone, even if it includes a share of tragedy. She prefers to provide an educational response. "  Rather than unbolt, I suggest you build. Rather than naming, I propose to name,  ”she explained. This is the whole purpose of the book. 

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