For the last stage of his five-day visit to France, the president of the Gabonese transition, Brice Oligui Nguema, is going this Sunday, June 2 to Airaines, in Picardy, north of Paris to participate in a ceremony honoring the captain Charles N’Tchoréré. This Gabonese soldier, French officer, was assassinated by the Nazis in this town on June 7, 1940 during the Second World War. He was 44 years old. Taken prisoner after three days of fighting, he refused to be separated from other French officers because of his skin color.
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Charles N’Tchoréré was born in Libreville in 1896. A volunteer fighter in the First World War, he then served in Morocco and Syria, where he was injured, in the 1920s.
Having become an officer, he commanded a company of riflemen in Kati in Mali, then a regiment in Saint-Louis in Senegal, where he also directed the school for troop children, a first for an African. The prestigious prytaneum still bears his name, a sign of a memory shared between the FranceSenegal and Gabongreets his biographer, the Gabonese academic Flavien Enongoué.
Captain at the triggering of the Second World War, Charles N’Tchoréré asks to go to the front with a battalion of Gabonese volunteers. It was at the head of the 53rd Senegalese mixed colonial infantry regiment (RICMS) that he defended Airaines for three days, from June 5 to 7, 1940.
Short of ammunition, he surrendered: the Germans refused him the right to stay with the other French officers. He is killed by a bullet in the head, a tank crushes his remains. A stele was erected in his honor at the Airaines cemetery in 1953.
Joined in Libreville, Flavien Enongoué, former Gabonese ambassador to France who coordinated the biography Charles N’Tchoréré – The past of a future (2022, éditions Descartes & Cie), believes that this visit allows us to reappropriate the figure of Charles N’Tchoréré, a “ French hero » who fought for France, but above all for universal values. “ When freedom and justice are threatened somewhere, we stand up for all of humanity. The fact that he is of Gabonese origin is enough for us to be able to appropriate [s]in memory », Estimates Flavien Enongoué.
Brice Oligui Nguema is the first Gabonese leader to go to Airaines since Léon Mba in the 1960s. In February 2024, the Picardy municipality signed a partnership with Libreville, on the promise of cultural and memorial exchanges.
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