ABSTRACT
Isaac Fadoyebo left his home village in South-Western Nigeria early in 1942 after enlisting in the Royal West African Frontier Force, one of over 500,000 African soldiers to serve the British Empire in the Second World War. These men may well have expected to end up fighting the Germans: Roald Dahl recalled in his memoirs how, working for Shell in East Africa at the outbreak of the war, he explained it to his Tanganyikan servant as a struggle against ‘Bwana Hitler who wishes to conquer the world’ (Dahl 2008: 236). But 16-year-old Fadoyebo and 120,000 others instead made the long sea voyage to India and thence to Burma to fight the Japanese. In February 1944, while breakfasting on the banks of the Kaladan river, Fadoyebo’s platoon was ambushed by the Japanese; his right femur was shattered by a bullet and, grievously wounded, he was left for dead. Local villagers – Muslim Rohingya – then saved his life. Emerging from the jungle, they brought food and water and bandaged his wounds; when Fadoyebo was well enough to be moved he was sheltered in the house of a local farmer, at considerable personal risk. Fadoyebo, together with another surviving soldier, was protected by the Rohingya for nine months until British Ghurkha forces finally recaptured the area in December 1944. Fadoyebo was hospitalised and then repatriated, going on to enjoy a successful post-war career as a civil servant. His remarkable story of survival was rediscovered in 1989 when the BBC Africa Service broadcast a series of programmes to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Fadoyebo sent his manuscript memoir to the BBC, which led to its publication, and he was subsequently the subject of a documentary film. The film-maker delivered a letter of thanks from Fadoyebo to the family of the farmer who had sheltered him just before the Nigerian died in 2012. 1
