When Isaac Fadoyebo joined the British colonial military, the Second World War was already changing the world around him. He was sixteen years old. For Fadoyebo, however, military service appears to have been motivated less by imperial loyalty than by employment, travel and adventure. He would eventually find himself thousands of miles from Nigeria, fighting in Burma against the Japanese. His story raises a question of what did the Second World War look like from Nigeria, and how did that view differ from the war experienced by Nigerians who fought overseas?

The answer depends on whose account we examine. Most newspaper reports presented one version of the conflict. British military planners had another. Soldiers encountered the war at ground level, often far removed from the strategic calculations that had sent them there. Their experiences were then remembered, preserved or recovered in the decades that followed.

For some Nigerians at home, newspapers were an important way of encountering the war. Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo, a Hausa-language newspaper established in 1939, reported regularly on international and local affairs. Its surviving wartime issues provide an indication of how the conflict was presented to a northern Nigerian audience. Issues from late 1941 and early 1942 show how rapidly the war was becoming global. Issue 48, published on 10 December 1941, carried reports and images relating to fighting in North Africa and elsewhere, including a photograph of Ethiopian soldiers. Issue 49, published on 24 December, reported Japan's attacks on British and American forces following Pearl Harbor, alongside developments involving Russia, Tobruk and China. Issue 50, published on 7 January 1942, continued with reports on Japan, Russia and the fighting around Tripoli, as well as maps illustrating developments in East and Southeast Asia (Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo, Issues 48–50).

The newspaper presented the war as a rapidly expanding international conflict rather than simply a European one. Yet Nigerian soldiers do not occupy the centre of the wartime narrative in these issues. African soldiers appear, but the Nigerian soldier is not consistently presented as a principal actor. This does not tell us what Nigerian readers believed about the war. It tells us what this newspaper chose to place before them.

The distance between the newspaper reader and the battlefield became much smaller when Nigerian men entered the colonial military. Their reasons for doing so were varied. Fadoyebo's experience complicates the idea of the African soldier as primarily motivated by imperial loyalty. Barnaby Phillips's later research described military service as an opportunity for employment, adventure, and personal advancement. For a young man in colonial Nigeria, the army could represent a practical opportunity rather than an ideological commitment to Britain.

Fadoyebo was not necessarily unusual in this respect. David Killingray and Martin Plaut have noted that African soldiers entered British military service for various reasons, including employment, wages, adventure, travel and the possibility of acquiring skills. Imperial loyalty could form part of the picture, but it was not the only explanation. Other recruits also experienced forms of pressure in entering military service.

The British Empire had its own reasons for recruiting African troops. As Japanese forces advanced through Southeast Asia, Britain needed additional manpower for the Burma campaign. British commanders considered West African troops useful partly because they believed them accustomed to tropical environments and capable of operating with porter transport through difficult terrain. In 1942, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell argued that West African troops could be valuable in Burma because of their experience in jungle conditions and porter-based logistics.

This reveals an important distinction. The Nigerian recruit could enter the army because it offered a job or an adventure, while British planners viewed the same recruit in terms of the military requirements of an imperial war. The two perspectives could coexist without being the same.

However, at the battlefield level these calculations became much less abstract. Fadoyebo's experience in Burma involved difficult terrain, combat, injury, separation from his unit and the struggle to survive behind enemy lines. In 1944, he was badly wounded during an encounter with Japanese forces. Separated from his comrades, he survived with the assistance of local villagers who sheltered and helped him while he remained behind Japanese lines. His account was eventually published as A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck in 1999, edited by David Killingray.

The memoir is valuable because it changes the scale at which the war can be understood. Military records can describe campaigns and troop movements. A soldier's account shows what those campaigns meant when reduced to the level of an individual trying to survive.

Other Nigerian veterans interviewed by Daily Trust decades later recalled the contrast between expectations surrounding military service and the reality of war. Their accounts describe men attracted by adventure or employment who subsequently encountered fear, casualties, unfamiliar environments and the physical demands of combat. One veteran, Tsok Dakwo, recalled that in the forest, distinctions between African and white soldiers seemed less important among ordinary troops because they faced the same dangers, while senior officers continued to enjoy privileges that ordinary soldiers did not (Bivan et al., 2015).

These accounts should not be treated as identical experiences, nor should Fadoyebo's memoir be treated as an uncomplicated transcript of the past. Oliver Coates argues that A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck is better understood as life-writing: a retrospective narrative shaped by memory and by Fadoyebo's later attempt to make sense of his life. Its value therefore lies not only in what it tells us about Burma, but also in how a Nigerian veteran remembered military service decades after the war.

The return of the soldiers also created practical questions about their place in postwar Nigerian society. A 1947 issue of Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo reported on former servicemen, including those who had found employment or returned to farming, and discussed agricultural training for ex-servicemen (Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo, Issue 220, 31 December 1947).

The surviving record also reveals an imbalance in what is accessible to researchers. Official military records provide extensive information about African troops, while individual African voices are less readily encountered. Fadoyebo's story reached a wider audience because his memoir survived in an archive, was published, and was later rediscovered by Barnaby Phillips.

This makes the different sources important because none provides the whole picture. In Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo, the war appears as an international crisis being explained to Nigerian readers. In British military planning, African soldiers appear as manpower with particular strategic uses. In Fadoyebo's memoir, the war becomes a story of movement, injury, isolation and survival. In later veterans' interviews, it becomes a memory of military service whose place in Nigerian historical memory has received relatively limited attention.

The Nigerian soldier of the Second World War was therefore neither simply an instrument of British imperial policy nor simply an imperial loyalist. Many entered military service for immediate and practical reasons: employment, adventure, wages, travel or opportunity. Once deployed, however, they became participants in a war whose strategic purposes had largely been determined beyond Nigeria.

References

Bivan, Nathaniel, Shehu Abubakar, Lami Sadiq, and Maryam Ahmadu-Suka. 2015. “Meet Nigerian Soldiers Who Fought in World War II.” Daily Trust, 5 September 2015.

Coates, Oliver. 2015/2016. “Narrative, Time, and the Archive in an African Second World War Memoir: Isaac Fadoyebo's A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51(3).

Fadoyebo, Isaac. 1999. A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck. Edited by David Killingray. Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison African Studies Program.

Killingray, David, and Martin Plaut. Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War. Oxford: James Currey.

Phillips, Barnaby. 2014. Another Man's War: The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten African Army. London: Oneworld.

Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo. Issues 48–50, December 1941–January 1942. Endangered Archives Programme, EAP485.

Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo. Issue 220, 31 December 1947. Endangered Archives Programme.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ayobami Okunjoyo is a Nigerian writer and a History and International Studies graduate of Federal University Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE). His interests include African history, geopolitics, international relations, and security, with particular attention to how historical experiences continuously shape contemporary political realities.

His writing explores questions of power, statecraft, and the relationship between individuals and larger political structures. He is particularly interested in African experiences that have received limited attention in broader historical narratives, as well as the value of primary sources in recovering those experiences.

His work on Nigerian soldiers in the Second World War examines African military service through the intersection of colonial rule, wartime experience, and historical memory.