Keep in mind that, like the Gurkhas, French [ and British] African troops would have been very familiar with coupe-coupe / machete type blades from rural agricultural life. When my students arrived at the boarding school in Nigeria where I taught [late '70s] they brought a bucket, mosquito net if they could afford it and a 'cutlass'. The latter was a strip of steel from am old oil drum, about .5 metres long with one edge sharpened and a strip of plastic wrapped round one end as a handle. Every Saturday some classes went out and cut grass around the compound.
The original 'cutlass' was a larger, heavier and sharper tool used for clearing brush and would also make a fearsome weapon in hand to hand combat. Read any account of sectarian riots in rural Africa or Asia and 'machete' / cutlass /' bolo' turn up regularly. A nineteenth century European 'pioneer' [soldier] carried a brush hook / bill hook which would do damage on people as well as on tree limbs. But, by the stilted logic of 1900, these were 'savage' weapons and their weilders were to be treated as less than human!