The Gary American

FRENCH TO USE
OVER MILLION OF
AFRICAN TROOPS

By NANCY CUNARD

PARIS, France, Nov. 22--(ANP)--"L'Afrique Occidentale Francaise -- French West Africa," the officially controlled French radio finally told us, "is able to furnish one million black troops." These men are of course not yet translated into soldiers, but the count having been made there the first figures of the sort of number of Negro fighters who will defend France are now available to the public. This number, note, is only that for the French colonies on the West African coast, the lands of the Senegalese, the Ivory-Coastians, the Dahomeans, the Sudanese.

Declaring, "We know the Germans since our childhood! We know just what they are!" a large number of Cameroonian men flocked a few days ago to the list sent out by the head chef of Yaounde who asked leave of the French government to found a Cameroonian legion to fight on the French front. He has been a professor in the school of Oriental Languages in Berlin!

Cameroon will never forget, and never forgive what the Germans did there in the years before the World war--floggings and executions, imprisonments, and murders; all of these while the country was independent. Although passing, by these very means, into the power of Germany.

The eldest son of King Rudolph Manga Bell (paramount chief of the whole country, who was shot by the Germans just before the great war) was the first to volunteer. Legally speaking, since Cameroon was never conquered he should at present be the king of the Duala division of his country.

Money, too, is coming to France from French West Africa: the latest contribution for national defense being the sum of 150,000 francs sent by a group of foreign tradesmen established there.