The ‘Africa Blue Books’ at Versailles

Abstract

This chapter tells the story of the silencing of crimes committed against Africans from international criminal law’s founding moment at Versailles in 1919. While British ‘Atrocity Blue Books’ were central to the call for criminal prosecutions of Germans after the war, the two Blue Books concerning crimes committed against Africans were inexplicably excluded from the report of the Commission on the Responsibility for the Authors of the War. This chapter explores the conditions of their erasure—both at Versailles and in the subsequent histories of the First World War and international criminal law—and considers what might happen if they were included within the fields’ dominant historical narrative. In both respects C.S. Forrester’s 1935 novel The African Queen and its myriad afterlives, in fiction, non-fiction, and film, prove a productive analogue as these texts intersect in interesting ways, both in content and form.