WEST, NATURAL RESOURCES AND POPULATION CONTROL POLICIES IN AFRICA IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, THE

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2005 by Martin, Guy

Gaud was accused of multiple murders and executions; of having baked a woman alive in an oven. Finally Gaud, with Toque's complicity, was accused of having boiled a human head and given the soup to drink to a man servant and, for good measure, to have blown up a prisoner with a stick of dynamite stuck in his bottom to celebrate 14 July 1903.60

A former French colonial medical officer turned human rights activist, Paul Vigné d'Octon, documents a series of atrocities committed by European colonial troops:

During the actual colonial conquest, we see everywhere the same atrocities committed by supposedly 'civilized' people: (...) massacres, rapes, arson, pillage, land-theft and slave-trading. Once the process of 'pacification' has been completed, the objective becomes to finish the surviving population through alcoholism, syphilis, tuberculosis (...)61

The Voulet-Chanoine mission- part of the Central African Expedition sent by France to secure control of the River Chad's northern bank in 1899--became infamous for its abominable atrocities. This top-heavy mission consisted of nine French officers (including Captain Paul Voulet and Lieutenant Charles Chanoine), 160 Tirailleurs Sénégalais, 400 auxiliaries, 800 porters, and 30 interpreters and agents; it had eventually grown to 1,600 persons and 800 animals. On 9 January 1899 in Say (Niger), in retaliation for the death of a few soldiers, Voulet had twenty mothers with their babies still breast-feeding taken a few yards away from the camp and killed with spears. On 13 January, for no apparent reason, the mission burned to the ground Sansane-Hausa, a thriving commercial town of 10,000 inhabitants and massacred 101 men, women and children. On 17 January in Libore, the section's Tirailleurs Sénégalais brought to their commanding officer, Captain Voulet, two freshly-cut hands; from then on, the habit of bringing the hands from the corpses of Africans killed-against a reward-became the rule. On 24 January, in hot pursuit of Africans who had killed six of his men, captain Chanoine stumbled upon a neighboring village, and took 20 villagers hostage; in retaliation, he had 10 of them killed, and their heads planted on sticks. On 13 July, Voulet had 150 women and children executed as punishment for the death of two of his soldiers during an attack on a nearby village. Lieutenant-Colonel Klobb, sent by the French government to find Voulet and remove him from his command of the mission, found the bodies of 13 women hanging in the trees in the village of Tibiri, 120 miles west of Zinder (Niger). Tired of these excesses, the mission's Tirailleurs Sénégalais eventually mutinied and killed both Voulet and Chanoine.62

French and German officers seemed to compete in their quest for the most cruel possible form of 'entertainment:'

One night, some French officers set up an ambush and captured not an animal, but a ten-year old girl, whom they placed on top of an anthill. The poor child screamed until she was eventually killed by the terrible black ants (...) German officers in southern Togo were in the habit-as entertainment during their siestas-to have little girls strip-naked being whipped until they bled (...)63