The Centenary of the First World War saw a new focus in official commemoration, cultural production and broader scholarly and public discourses on the figure of the colonial soldier, the tirailleur. In this intervention, I argue that, while a welcome break with Eurocentricity, the focus on the tirailleur has somewhat obscured the multiplicity of experiences of the war among colonized populations and ignored the potential of these pasts to inform memory activism in the present. By considering three significant groups of colonial subjects who were active participants in the war – military porters, women and resisters – I point to the importance of histories that stand outside the logics of reciprocal if uneven obligation that shaped the relationship between the tirailleur and the state and ask how these pasts might be used in the present.