Ordinary African men and women are largely missing from grand narratives of the Second World War. Most histories of the global conflict pay scant attention to Africa and Africans because they focus primarily on the European and Asian theaters, but this lacuna is also due in part to the imperial powers' explicit efforts to downplay and obscure the extent to which they relied on their African subjects to fight and win the war. Faced with severe manpower shortages as the Axis overran much of Europe and Asia between 1939 and 1942, British and French military planners desperately looked to their African colonies to supply combat troops, military laborers, and specialist units. As the tide of the war turned in their favor after 1943, the British and Free French used African formations to augment their overextended forces. Their goal was to “win the peace” by restoring their national honor and reclaiming lost imperial territories before they could fall into the American or Soviet spheres of influence. Mindful that the brutality of the Axis version of imperialism and the egalitarian promises of the Atlantic Charter had made formal empires less reputable after the war, the African imperial powers had good reason to understate the extent to which they had drawn subject populations into a war that did not directly concern them. African soldiers, and the women who interacted with them, are therefore usually consigned to the footnotes of the official histories of the Second World War.

In reality, ordinary Africans were deeply involved in every major theater of the war. Indeed, colonial African troops played central roles in two of the major conflicts that historians conventionally date as preceding the formal outbreak of the conflict in 1939. The Italian forces that invaded Ethiopia in 1935 included approximately 40,000 Somalis, Eritreans, and Libyans. One year later, Francisco Franco began his attempted coup d'état against the Spanish Republican government by sending Moroccan soldiers from the Armée d'Afrique to Spain. Some 62,000 Moroccans had fought on the Fascist side by the end of the civil war, and British and French military observers estimated that they suffered a staggering 40 percent casualty rate.