Black Tommies: British Soldiers of African Descent in the First World War, by Ray Costello

Black British soldiers played a significant, yet poorly understood, role in Britain's First World War.Costello's well-researched and engagingly written study shows clearly how, while small in numbers, British born or naturalised black soldiers contributed to the war itself, as well as to life in British ports, and British officers' perceptions of race during the war years.The book is primarily envisaged as a contribution to the British historiography of the war, yet it also has much material that will interest Africanists.In particular, it provides a muchneeded metropolitan context to a growing body of research on African military service that is often conducted in isolation from the wider history of black soldiering across the Atlantic.A minority of African soldiers enrolled not in Africa, but in Britain itself, and the history of these men is often marginal to Anglophone African historiography.Costello's study excels in bringing individual stories and voices to the fore; the lives of his subjects frequently traverse continents, moving between Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.Dating from before the Great War, the case of one 'Mustapha' serves as a case in point; taken as a boy to be a mascot of the Durham Light Infantry following the Battle of Ginnis in the Sudan, Mustafa was officially enrolled into the Infantry at Mandalay in 1898 under the name James Durham, before moving to Aldershot, England, in 1902 and finally to Cork in 1905 (47).Volunteers for wartime service reveal further trans-continental ties; Melrose Goda Sishuba left his native South Africa to be educated first in New York, in 1910, before moving to Nashville, and then volunteering to fight in the South Lincolnshire Regiment during the war, before later returning to the USA, giving at least one public lecture, and then moving to South Africa to become a leader of the Ethiopian Church of South Africa (81).The global connections of African First World War volunteers were sometimes not what they seemed; one implication of Costello's study is the variety of ways in which individuals in America and Europe imagined a wider 'black' identity during the war.Joseph Howard Lee was born in Baltimore in 1887, working as a travelling entertainer and choosing a new name of Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn LoBagola, while claiming to have been a West African Jew who fled his home continent for Glasgow in 1896.Lee/ LoBagola joined the United States Army in August 1918, before being discharged and subsequently enlisting in the British Army, as part of a New York-based recruiting drive to find Jewish soldiers for the 38th, 39th, and 40th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers (82-3).Lee/ LoBagola's multiple identities hinge on his putative West African origin, but also encompass the United Kingdom, the changing position of Jewish sol-

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