ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how both government and press efforts to popularise commemoration relied upon the emergent romance of the deserving ex-serviceman and, in doing so, effaced the very real material challenges that ex-servicemen faced. It argues that this narrow and depoliticised understanding of ex-servicemen became hegemonic in official propaganda and colonial press reporting focused on Remembrance Day. Commemoration in late-colonial Nigeria was first and foremost a practical affair: its object was ex-serviceman and their lack of resources. Military service had established an expectation of reciprocal, patrimonial support between ex-servicemen and the colonial government. This was not purely a consequence of official designs but also an outcome of the fact that there was very little public interest in events of the Second World War. Commemoration had become almost totally detached from any attempt to represent events in the past and instead became an instrumental discourse that deployed references to the war to determine access to resources in the present.
