Hanging the Gardener

I’ve picked up some interesting, darkly humorous, snippets of information from an article by Stacey Hynd of Exeter University in the latest issue of the Journal of African History. Headed Killing the Condemned it deals with the administration of capital punishment in British colonial Africa.

Although public hanging was banned in Britain in 1868 colonial administrators retained the practice for as long as they could, holding to the principle that in Africa justice must be seen to be done. When they finally gave way to pressure from London predicted results followed. Local superstition meant that people did not believe the condemned to be dead, not having seen them die. Instead they were assumed to have been protected by magic or even turned into hyenas. These kinds of belief were so prevalent that the British had to co-opt people from the condemned man’s village to witness the hanging.

Surprisingly the regime of the condemned was remarkably relaxed. They were even allowed to mix with the general population. In one case a condemned man in Rhodesia in the 1930s was allowed to work as a gardener for some eighteen months prior to his execution. He was well-liked by his fellow prisoners, who had no idea that he was under sentence of death, though he was a very bad gardener. When he was finally hanged the prison authorities were surprised they could get no volunteers to fill the vacancy. On further investigation they discovered that it was believed that he had been executed because of his inferior abilities in the garden!

Days of Glory, no, Indigènes!

Days of Glory is a French-language film directed by Rachid Bouchareb. Released in 2006, it won the best actor award that year at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film, but lost out on the day to The Lives of Others, a worthy opponent. It was broadcast on BBC 4 a few days ago, when I saw it for the first time.

The focus is on four men in particular: Said, Yassir, Messaoud and Abdelkader. They fight through campaigns in Italy, southern France and on to Alsace. They fight with courage and bravery but they are treated shabbily; they are discriminated against by the nation and the army they serve, forms of discrimination both petty and grand, from denying them tomatoes to refusing leave and promotion. It upset me. I can imagine how those men must have felt, risking their lives when their lives had such little apparent value.

The first thing I have to say is that the English title in retrospect made me angry, a vacuous cliché so lacking in imagination, one that says little or nothing about the movie itself, about what the director was trying to say. Who decides these things, I wonder? Do the film makers themselves have any input? I saw the movie advertised when it first came out but decided not to go because I thought it was just another ‘war movie’, another Saving Private Ryan, and I’m not all that keen on war movies as such. It’s not; oh no, it is not. The original French title is Indigènes, meaning Natives, more appropriate in every sense, as I will explain below.

Indigènes tells the story of the men of North Africa, the ‘natives’, who were recruited in the Second World War by the Free French to fight against the Germans in Europe. They volunteer for all sorts of reasons; because they believe in the cause, because they want to escape poverty, because the want to come to a ‘homeland’ they have never seen, because they are looking for a better life; all sorts of reasons.


The discrimination did not end when the war ended. When the nations of North Africa and the other French colonial territories became independent the French government discontinued payment of war pensions. A long legal battle ensued but it was only after the release of Indigènes that this was reversed and veterans paid what they were due. What a powerful medium for justice cinema continues to be, when it chooses to be.