The first shot fired by a soldier in British service in the First World War was not fired in Belgium or France. It was fired in German Togoland, by a soldier of the Gold Coast Regiment. Over the next four years, tens of thousands of West Africans fought and carried for Britain in Africa, and many of the dead were never named.
British schoolbooks start the First World War with the British Expeditionary Force crossing to France and the first skirmish near Mons. For West Africa it started earlier. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, and within days, African soldiers of the Gold Coast Regiment had crossed into the German colony of Togoland, today's Togo. By the end of the month the colony had surrendered.
From Togoland the West African regiments moved to the long, hard campaign in German Kamerun, today's Cameroon, and then thousands of miles east to German East Africa, today's Tanzania. There they fought until the very end of the war. Behind every soldier walked several carriers: men who hauled ammunition, food and the wounded on their heads through bush and swamp, because there were no roads and pack animals died of disease.
Britain did not remember them equally. More than a century later, an official inquiry confirmed that many African dead had never been commemorated by name at all. This page tells their story and shows where in Britain you can stand and remember them.
The West African Frontier Force was created in 1900 out of several colonial constabularies and local units. Its first job was to secure British rule in its own colonies: in Ashanti, in Northern Nigeria and in the Sierra Leone hinterland. In other words, before it fought Germany, it fought Africans who were resisting British conquest. That history belongs in the story too.
When the war began, the force had roughly 7,500 men. The Nigeria Regiment, formed on 1 January 1914 by merging the Northern and Southern Nigeria regiments, was by far the largest. The Gold Coast Regiment had its headquarters at Kumasi, with its cantonments around the old British fort. Sierra Leone contributed a battalion, and The Gambia a company. Sierra Leone was also home to the West African Regiment, a separate unit run by the War Office to guard the naval station at Freetown.
The rank and file were African. Many were recruited in the north of their colonies, among peoples that the British labelled "martial races". The officers and most senior non-commissioned officers were white British. No African could hold the King's commission. By the end of the war, the regiments had grown to nine battalions in Nigeria and five in the Gold Coast.
German Togoland was a small colony squeezed between the British Gold Coast and French Dahomey. It had no German army, only a police force of a few hundred African police under a handful of German officers. It mattered because of one thing: the huge wireless station at Kamina, near Atakpamé, which linked Berlin with Germany's colonies and its ships in the South Atlantic.
Britain and France invaded from both sides. A Gold Coast patrol advancing on Lomé came under fire from the German-led police near a factory at Nuatja, and Lance Corporal Alhaji Grunshi fired back. He is generally credited as the first soldier in British service to fire a shot in the First World War. Most accounts date this to 7 August 1914; some, including a National Archives presentation, give 12 August. Either way, it was about two weeks before the cavalry clash near Mons that British accounts long treated as the start of the war.
His name has a story of its own. "Alhaji" indicates a man who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and "Grunshi" was the British rendering of the Gurunsi, a people of the north-eastern Gold Coast and today's Burkina Faso. He fought through three African campaigns, rose to Regimental Sergeant Major, and was decorated with the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal.
The campaign also produced another first. At Chra, on the way to Kamina, Lieutenant George Masterman Thompson of the Royal Scots, attached to the Gold Coast Regiment, is generally recorded as the first British officer killed in action in the war. The Germans blew up the Kamina transmitters on 24 August, and Togoland surrendered to the British and French on 26 August 1914.
Kamerun was a much harder target: a large German colony of mountains, rainforest and savannah, defended by the Schutztruppe, Germany's African colonial army. In September 1914 the Nigeria Regiment supplied the shock troops of the British invasion force, and most of the Gold Coast Regiment sailed from Lomé to join it. The British and French took the port of Duala within weeks. Then came eighteen months of fighting inland, in the heat and the rains, against an enemy who knew the country.
Battle honours from those months read like a map of northern and western Cameroon: Duala, Garua, Banyo. Sierra Leonean soldiers of the West African Regiment served there too, and eight of them were mentioned in despatches, although as members of a War Office unit they were not eligible for the West African Distinguished Conduct Medal. The German garrison finally escaped into the Spanish colony of Río Muni in early 1916. The Gold Coast Regiment returned to Kumasi on 11 April 1916 after twenty months of continuous active service.
Back home, the war was not popular everywhere. Uprisings broke out in parts of Nigeria during the war, some serious enough to force the British to pull troops back from the Cameroons. The idea that West Africa rallied loyally and unanimously to the Empire is a later invention.
The rest was short. On 5 July 1916 the Gold Coast Expeditionary Force assembled at Sekondi: 1,428 men under Lieutenant-Colonel R. A. de B. Rose, including carriers and medical staff. They sailed the next day on the transport Æneas, round the Cape to East Africa. Nigerian battalions followed, and the Nigeria Overseas Contingent entered the campaign in Tanganyika in December 1917.
Their opponent was Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, whose German-led African askari fought a guerrilla war that tied down vastly larger British forces until after the Armistice in Europe. The West Africans fought at Kikirunga Hill, at a ridge later called Gold Coast Hill, and at Nyangao, where Nigerian battalions took heavy losses in October 1917. The Gold Coast Regiment then followed the Germans into Portuguese East Africa, today's Mozambique. Disease killed more men than bullets did, and at the end of a supply line thousands of miles from home, hunger was constant.
Sir Hugh Clifford, the Governor of the Gold Coast, published the regiment's official history in 1920. It is still readable today. It is a book written by a colonial governor, full of admiration for "his" soldiers and of the attitudes of its time, and it should be read as both.
No account of the war in Africa makes sense without the carriers. In country without roads or railways, where tsetse fly killed horses and mules, everything an army needed moved on men's heads: ammunition boxes, food, water, telegraph wire, stretchers. A single soldier at the front could need several carriers behind him.
Some carriers enlisted voluntarily and were paid. Many more were "recruited" through chiefs, who were given quotas to fill, and the line between recruitment and forced labour was often blurred. Even officials at the time could not agree on how to tell "enlisted" carriers from "porters" and "labourers". Historians still cannot give a reliable total. For the whole African theatre, estimates of dead carriers, porters and followers run to around 200,000. In East Africa alone, close to 26,000 Kenyan carriers are believed to have died. West African carriers died in the Cameroons and in East Africa alongside them.
At sea, West African merchant seamen were serving and dying too, on ships such as the Elder Dempster liners Falaba and Apapa. Their story is on our page about Kru seamen and the Elder Dempster Line.
After the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission set out to give every fallen soldier an individual grave or a name on a memorial. For white soldiers, that is largely what happened. For many Africans it did not. In East and West Africa, the dead were often commemorated only by generic memorials without names, or not at all.
A 2019 Channel 4 documentary forced the issue into the open. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, as the body is now called, set up a Special Committee, which reported in April 2021. It found that about 116,000 First World War casualties, mostly African and Middle Eastern, were not commemorated by name or possibly not at all. A further 45,000 to 54,000 were commemorated unequally. It named pervasive racism among the causes, alongside the practical problems of records and terrain. The CWGC and the British government apologised and accepted the committee's ten recommendations. Research since then has recovered thousands of names, and new memorials have been built in Africa, but most of the missing will never be named.
Soldiers who came home expected something for what they had done, and often received very little. Their experiences helped shape the next generation's demands. They had seen British officers fall ill, panic and die like anyone else, and they had travelled further than most of their colonial rulers had expected. Historians of Nigeria have traced how veterans of the First World War became part of the early nationalist movement, even if their role was quieter than that of the Second World War veterans whose protests in 1948 opened the road to Ghanaian independence.
The regiments themselves lived on. They received royal patronage in 1928, fought again in East Africa and Burma in the Second World War, and became the foundations of the Ghana Army, the Nigerian Army, and the armies of Sierra Leone and The Gambia after independence. That part of the story is on our planned page on West African soldiers in Burma, and on Ghana-Net at the 1948 Christiansborg crossroads shooting.
Britain has no single museum of the African war, but London has the key places, and they fit into one day.
Planning a London trip? Start with our first-time-in-London practical guide and the London hub. From West Africa, see flights from Africa to the UK and UK visa and entry from Africa.
Our tour partner offers guided tours of London and the UK, and tours around Accra and the Ghanaian coast for those travelling to Ghana. Entrance fees are included in the tour price where a tour visits paying sites. Tips are not included but are always welcome.
The 81st and 82nd West African Divisions in the Second World War.
The West African sailors of Liverpool's great shipping line.
How Britain treated Black seamen and soldiers once the war was over.
An honest guide to Britain's national war museum.
The hub for every Britain and Africa history page on this site.
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