The Black Terrorist

The Black Terrorist is a fictional account built around the true, extraordinary, but little-known story of Addi Bâ. Addi Bâ was born in Guinea about 1916, brought to France in the late 1930s, and became a riflemen in the Twelfth Regiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais (African soldiers from French colonies) fighting for France during World War II. Captured after the Battle of the Meuse, Addi escapes from German forces, wanders in the forests, before finding refuge in a village in the Vosges, where he encounters the French Resistance and becomes a leader of a Resistance network. However, Addi is captured, tortured, and executed in December 1943. His military exploits against the Germans earned him the name “the black terrorist.”

The story of Addi Bâ is told sixty years later from a number of perspectives, though largely from Germaine Tergoresse, who was a young girl during the war, now eighty years old relating her memories to Bâ’s nephew. But who betrayed Addi Bâ? One of its many lovers? A professional collaborator? Or just the rivalry between the Tergoresses and the Rapennes, two families who have been feuding since the First World War? This African and Muslim fighter of Free France was awarded the Medal of the Resistance in 2003, sixty years after his execution. The Black Terrorist (Le terroriste noir) was awarded the Erckmann-Chatrian Prize in 2012, and both the Palatine Grand Prize and the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize in 2013.