Guilty as charged. We realized that when imagining World War II soldiers, we invariably picture various Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and a few sundry others. With his new project, Afrikan Heroes, Raphael Chikukwa, a Zimbabwean curator, historian, and critic aims to right this wrong by presenting the forgotten stories of sub-Saharan Afrikan war veterans (colloquially called "heroes").
Currently at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in Manchester, Great Britain through 3 December, Afrikan Heroes rescues the photographic images and stories of the fighters who were often pushed to the front lines in service of the British Empire. The exhibition comprises new photographs, archival images from the IWM itself, film footage, and audio recordings. According the the IWM website, Raphael visited war graves across Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Zambia and interviewed heroes still living, in order to capture their stories in their own words for the audio portions of the exhibition. Nearly 120,000 Afrikan troops served in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia fighting the Japanese in Burma.
The exhibition treats not only the historical period of the Second World War, but also the aftermath in which heroes report being neglected and feeling used or even tricked into fighting the war. Chikukwa's effort is one of corroborating the incomplete historical record with the personal records of soldiers and their descendants. As he says, "We should all remember, you cannot abolish memories."
