Performance Puts Forgotten African WWI Laborers Center Stage

The history of World War I is often told through its European battlefields - the trench warfare in France and Belgium, the more than eight million soldiers who died, and the war's aftermath, which saw four imperial empires collapse. But the war reached far beyond Europe, drawing in colonies and communities across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

More than two million Africans, for example, were conscripted by European forces, often through force or coercion. Some fought in colonial armies, but most served as porters, hauling food, ammunition and equipment. Tsetse flies, disease and rough terrain made pack animals impractical across much of the East African campaign, leaving armies reliant on African porters. While their labor was essential for the war, their experiences and contributions were rarely recorded.

South African multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge turns his attention to their stories in The Head & the Load, presented by Cal Performances in its West Coast premiere at Oakland's Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts on Nov. 12-15. A sprawling 90-minute procession of song, dance, projected imagery and shadow play, the production unfolds in European and African languages, weaving texts by anticolonial writers and Dada poets with fragments of the colonial archive - maps, film clips and lists of the dead.

"Kentridge is constantly making us rethink what history means, how it's told and how memory persists," said Debarati Sanyal, a professor of French and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at UC Berkeley. "He's a visionary artist."

Sanyal, who will join Kentridge for a pre-performance conversation on Nov. 13, explores similar questions about whose stories get told and how in her research. Her 2025 book, Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe's Edges, examines how Europe's colonial past continues to shape its racialized border regimes and treatment of migrants today.

Ahead of their conversation, UC Berkeley News spoke with Sanyal about how Kentridge's art rethinks history and memory - and the connections between colonialism, war and displacement today.

When did you first encounter William Kentridge's artwork, and what about his approach to history and memory interests you?

I discovered Kentridge about 15 years ago. There was this retrospective at SF MoMA and my colleague took me, and I was just completely blown away. He expresses himself in so many different modalities - the multimedia, the experimental form, dealing with apartheid, authoritarianism, surrealism.

Then, in 2018, I was involved in a conference at the Wits Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kentridge was a speaker, and he invited us to his artist studio, where I saw the charcoal drawings of porters, soldiers, landscapes and other images that became part of the projections for The Head & the Load. It was extraordinary.

Him being a Jewish South African observing and witnessing and experiencing apartheid from that point of view, it really speaks to me as a diasporic Indian who's been interested in the Holocaust on one hand and who's also invested in understanding something like the "great replacement theory" or right-wing narratives that are xenophobic and racist. I'm interested in the conditions of complicity and solidarity.

Like Kentridge, you think a lot about displacement and whose lives are deemed worth protecting and whose aren't. What can the experiences of colonial conscripts in the world wars teach us about how empire uses colonized people's bodies while denying them recognition and belonging?

I'm fascinated by the suppression of the history of colonial conscripts in both world wars. Like when Paris was liberated after World War II, the French military actually removed the West African conscripts who made up about two-thirds of the Free French forces from the Paris-bound troops, whitewashing the liberation of Paris. These conscripts were often tricked or coerced into joining European forces through pressure from colonial administrators and local African chiefs. Communities that resisted recruitment could face brutal reprisals, including massacres.

It's such a paradox: fighting for a homeland that is not yours, sacrificing your body in hopes of gaining recognition or rights, while remaining a colonial subject.

In fact, my colleague Karl Britto wrote what I think is one of the best articles about this - "L'Esprit de Corps: French Civilization and the Death of the Colonized Soldier," a chapter in Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds - about how, for the so-called gift of civilization, you have to sacrifice your body while colonialism continues to oppress you.

Like the removal of West African conscripts from the liberation of Paris, there were broader efforts by colonial and imperial authorities to minimize or erase colonial soldiers from official histories and public memory. That erasure matters because it shows how empire could demand their lives and labor while denying them recognition, rights or belonging.

You say that The Head & the Load - which gets its name from the Ghanaian proverb, "The head and the load are the troubles of the neck" - is less about giving voice to the dead than about resurrecting an archive. What do you mean by that?

These African porters died by the tens of thousands, usually of disease, exhaustion, malnutrition and inadequate medical care. There is no official count of how many died, and in that sense the piece is really about the gaps in the colonial archive - the lives and experiences it failed to record.

The Head & the Load doesn't recover testimony that the colonial archive made sure did not exist. Instead, it puts the archive itself on stage - the ledgers, maps and statistics that reduced these men to numbers - while performers bring their own languages, songs and bodies into the space and animate the archive.

That tension matters. The projections show an arithmetic of extraction and disposable life, but the living, moving, singing and shaking bodies on stage resist being reduced to statistics. The work gives us a sensory understanding of pain, suffering and perhaps resistance, without claiming to speak for the porters.

You recently saw a screening of The Head & The Load. Is there a scene or moment that has stayed with you?

It was just so overwhelming and chaotic that I wouldn't even be able to reconstruct what I saw. But I will say that breakdown seems to be a big theme in the piece. There's a breakdown of meaning, and at one stage it's the mutual incomprehension of the colonized and the colonizer.

You see the colonizers' attempt to craft the bodies and gestures of the colonial porters or conscripts - the military goose step breaks down. There are these really beautiful moments where the conscripts' hands are shaking and they can't quite do a salute. That's this kind of collapse, a refusal and an inability to actually step into the colonial machinery of war. All of that gives you a sensory, haptic understanding of the pain, the suffering, the exhaustion, but also perhaps the resistance. I can't wait to see it again.

What can this colonial history teach us about migration and displacement today, and what questions should we be asking about the stories and images we encounter in the news?

We're constantly being sold a story of a crisis, but what history is missing from this story? And what longer histories would change how we read it? Long histories of racial and colonial violence are at work in contemporary borders, wars and displacement.

Kentridge's work also helps us think about the connections between fascism with its various forms of detention and encampment, and coloniality. In his play The Great Yes, The Great No, there's a boat full of refugees fleeing Vichy France, the French regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany, into Martinique, which was itself under Vichy rule. It's playing with the idea that fascism is, in fact, the violence of colonialism that's boomeranged back to Europe. This is what Martinican poet Aimé Césaire argued after World War II, as did German philosopher Hannah Arendt: Nazism was a "choc en retour" - colonial methods turned back on Europeans.

There's also something in Kentridge's work about counting versus naming in this kind of arithmetic of disposable life. In the news today, we have so much tallying of migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean, and of deaths in Gaza or Sudan. Counting can be a form of mourning, but it's also a form of managing people, and sometimes it's both.

I think it's important to ask ourselves: Which suffering gets a close-up? Which suffering gets a crowd shot? Who made the image, and for what? Does the image document violence, or does it perform it?

Kentridge's approach to history through collage, rather than narrative, helps us resist the linear history told by the victors. And in my own work, I'm interested in how migrants themselves theorize migration - through how they speak about what they are moving from and what they are moving toward.

This interview has been condensed and edited.