BURMA BOYS

“I am standing under a pagoda, deep in the jungles of Burma. The monsoon rains are relentless and water comes cascading down through the trees. A troop of monkeys huddles for shelter above me. I am waiting for a family I have never met to arrive.

This is the culmination of a journey that has taken me across three continents, eight decades and into the horrors of an almost-forgotten chapter of the Second World War. It is a story about the collapse of the British Empire, but also about heroism and courage I could never have imagined. Now I need to repay a debt of gratitude, still strong after 67 years.”

When Al Jazeera correspondent Barnaby Phillips first started researching the story of West Africans who fought in the war in aid of the British, he meant to document it all in a book – until Al Jazeera commissioned his findings for a documentary.

The Burma Boy is a documentary that sees Phillips travelling to Nigeria to meet up with Isaac Fadoyebo, who formed part of the British troops who fought against imperial Japan and survived the jungles of Burma to tell his story.

Not to be confused with the novel (Burma Boy is based on a true story of a child soldier who fought in the same war), “The title The Burma Boys is really one I used due to its generic reference to the troops that went to fight in the war. It is a name that was given to these troops on their return,” says Phillips.

“I was always very interested to learn more about the Burma Boys story. I spent some time in the Imperial War Museum and looked at many memoirs preserved by British troops. I eventually found the whole process frustrating, because the information was pretty much one-sided – I wasn’t finding anything from the Africans’ perspective. I only really got lucky when I came across Isaac Fadoyebo’s memoir.”

Isaac’s account grabbed Phillips for a number of reasons. It was the first well-written African perspective on and account of the war. Isaac also happened to be one of the few living troops who had survived – and the way in which he survived in the jungle was extra-special.

“Isaac was barely 16 when he signed up to join the war. It wasn’t a must that they join, but the war really was a way in which Britain got a chance to exercise its imperial power.”

In the documentary, we find out some of the reasons these Africans would have joined the fight.

“I needed to ask someone other than troops why the Africans would have fought a war so far removed from their reality. Many of them, just like Isaac, were young when they joined and couldn’t possibly have comprehended the reasons behind the war to begin with. They also wouldn’t have been able to give me that informed breakdown in the documentary, which is why I had to find the officials who supervised them.”

British officials who appear in the documentary reveal that Africans would have signed up because of a sense of adventure and the need to travel outside their little villages, rather than any sense of patriotism.

“Britain’s imperialist power was undermined after the war, when the very troops they had shipped out to fight for them returned with a more informed sense of worldliness – they had seen during the war that there’s no real difference between black and white, that we are all the same,” says Phillips.

Phillips also travels to Tokyo, Japan, to try to get the opposition’s perspective.

“It was really difficult to get hold of anyone to speak on behalf of the Japanese troops, because they really lost many men in that war. I managed to find a few through a really good Japanese researcher whose own father was a veteran.”

This is a well-documented journey that makes one respect researchers such as Phillips for taking an unbiased stance.

“I have always loved history. I think it’s very important for us to understand the way the world is today. To a large extent, the war has been written from a British and American point of view and that makes way for negligence of pivotal information and accounts.

“It’s important to tell these stories so we can understand why Africa and Britain are the way they are today.”

zintlem@thenewage.co.za

The Burma Boys airs on Al Jazeera (DStv channel 406) at 8pm