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Berlin Exhibition Honors the Forgotten Colonial Soldiers Who Fought for Europe's Freedom

From Frantz Fanon's wartime service to the Thiaroye massacre, this show confronts Europe's debt to the colonial troops it later abandoned. Art and archives bridge past struggles to today's conflicts.

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The image shows a paper with a map of the United States and text that reads "English, French and...
The image shows a paper with a map of the United States and text that reads "English, French and Spanish Possessions: Claims and Occupations at the Beginning of the French and Indian War". The map is divided into different sections, each with a different color, and each section is labeled with a description of the claims and occupations that were taken during the war. The text is written in a bold font and is surrounded by a decorative border.

Berlin Exhibition Honors the Forgotten Colonial Soldiers Who Fought for Europe's Freedom

A Towering Assemblage by Daniel Lind-Ramos Dominates the Exhibition Hall

At the heart of the vast exhibition space, an imposing assemblage by Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos commands attention. Crafted from steel helmets, cooking pots, ammunition crates, barrels, and textile packaging, the towering composition evokes—from a distance—the silhouette of a heavily laden figure, burdened with both civilian and military elements. Though Lind-Ramos has spent decades working primarily with found materials in his homeland, he was only "discovered" by the Western art market in 2019, during the Whitney Biennial, thanks to an assemblage referencing the devastation of hurricanes.

For his Berlin piece, he has embedded a copy of Frantz Fanon's anticolonial manifesto The Wretched of the Earth—a text whose author was himself one of the Caribbean soldiers who fought in French uniform on Europe's World War II battlefields. As the exhibition's subtitle, The Forgotten Soldiers Who Liberated Europe, rightly notes, Fanon played his part in defeating fascism.

Yet he also experienced the layered racism within the French military. At the very bottom of the hierarchy were the tirailleurs sénégalais—infantry units established in 1857, initially deployed to crush uprisings in France's colonies. Above them stood soldiers from North African colonies, and a tier higher, men like Fanon, who, as subjects from overseas territories, were considered French—but never equal to white metropolitan Frenchmen. Though often treated as cannon fodder (euphemistically called the "avant-garde" in military jargon), they were readily sent into battle, suffering devastating losses.

What makes their fate even more harrowing is that these soldiers were frequently denied the promised pay, while their survivors received little to no compensation. In November 1944, when tirailleurs sénégalais demanded their pensions, they were massacred at Thiaroye—a pivotal event referenced in several works here. Binta Diaw, an Italian artist of Senegalese descent, has created an earthen field in the hall, evoking a burial site for the victims. Barthélémy Toguo, from Cameroon, portrays the massacre's victims in large-scale paintings.

The sprawling exhibition also examines the plight of colonial troops in World War I. The artist collective Slavs and Tatars, for instance, reproduces prisoner newspapers in vast mirror panels—propaganda the German Empire used in the Wünsdorf POW camp to incite Muslim prisoners to wage "jihad" against Britain and France.

The show further explores former colonial soldiers' roles in wars of liberation, though it glosses over their involvement in suppressing rebellions on behalf of colonial powers—such as the so-called "pacification" of Morocco just before World War I. Similarly absent is any examination of North African units' role in crushing the Spanish Republic as Franco's auxiliary forces—a glaring omission in this otherwise expansive panorama, which does include works on Asian war zones.

Chief curator and HKW director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung focuses primarily on these soldiers as victims, with a secondary narrative casting them as liberation activists. Their complicity as perpetrators, however, remains largely unaddressed—until a striking final piece. Commissioned by HKW, Dresden-based filmmaker Mario Pfeifer interviews two Cameroonian fighters lured into the Russian army, where they took part in the war against Ukraine. Both emphasize they never received the promised rewards—pay or Russian citizenship. In this, President Vladimir Putin follows the colonial traditions of France. What began as a vital historical exhibition thus gains urgent contemporary relevance.

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