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Marrying into the Military

Colonization, Emancipation, and Martial Community in West Africa, 1880–1900

TIRAILLEURS SÉNÉGALAIS’ CONJUGAL TRADITIONS COHERED AT A TIME in which France intensified and expanded its military presence in West Africa. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, locally recruited troops across the African continent played important roles in the escalation of everyday violence, social destabilization, and the operation of colonialism. Their presence in the ranks of the European-commanded armies influenced local expressions of militarization and colonial rule. In West Africa, soldiers participated in France’s violent conquest of regions extending from the Senegal River basin to the shoreline of Lake Chad and along the coasts of what would become Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Dahomey. French colonization coincided with, and exacerbated, regional conflicts led by politicized Muslim leaders in the West African savannah and Sahel. Tirailleurs sénégalais fought in pitched battles with the adherents of Mamadou Lamine Drame in Bundu, Samory Touré across his Wassulu Empire, and Ahmadu Seku Tall in Segu—the capital of the Tukulor Empire. The French military eliminated opposition to colonial rule with superior military technology and tirailleurs sénégalais. Via tirailleurs sénégalais, France incorporated West African territories into the nascent colonial state. Subsequently, these soldiers assisted in initiating processes and introducing institutions meant to foster postconflict stability. Empowered by the colonial state, African soldiers influenced changes in important sociocultural traditions, including slavery and marriage. They simultaneously engaged in conjugal practices that would serve as the foundation for tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions.

The earliest manifestations of the French colonial state and military depended on West African women and the households they created with tirailleurs sénégalais.¹ The importance of women in these institutions has not been adequately addressed in the historical literature on colonial armies in Africa. Early publications focused on military technology, battles, and political power, as well as relying on the troublesome dichotomies of colonizer versus colonized and/or narratives of collaboration versus resistance.² Unintentionally, these works produced political histories of conquest that disregarded the subtle (and not so subtle) effects of militarization across African sociocultural landscapes. In the past decade, Africanist military historians have begun to locate women’s experiences in Europe’s conquest of the continent, as well as to map gendered results of colonial and postcolonial militarism.³ This chapter examines how women and gender were consequential to the early iterations of the French colonial military and state. Women participated in military campaigns stretching from Atlantic coastlines into southern Saharan towns. West African communities experienced the tragedies of war and profound transformations in gerontocratic and gendered authority. Colonial militarization altered local institutions that gave social order to West African societies—armies, slavery, and marriage. With conquest, the colonial military and its African soldiers brought heteronormative marriage and slave emancipation under their jurisdiction, which had wide-ranging effects on conjugal behavior and marital legitimacy within the tirailleurs sénégalais. Military records concerning tirailleurs sénégalais’ households during colonial conquest allow historians to track changes and continuities in West African marital traditions before civilian administrators set up indigenous court systems in the early twentieth century. West African women, soldiers, and the French colonial military contested marital customs within military spaces, where masculinity and paternalism weighed on decisions concerning legitimate marriage and divorce. Tirailleurs sénégalais’ emergent conjugal traditions would later inform civilian administrators about West African marital rites.⁴

Warfare, slave emancipation, and marriage were processes that influenced how African women became tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal partners and/or auxiliary members of the French colonial army. Conjugal traditions cohered in military contexts, but were informed by precolonial West African and French marital and martial customs. In order to track their origins and transformations, this chapter pays careful attention to the relationship between slavery, emancipation, and military service. Precolonial states and the French colonial state relied heavily on enslaved and/or formerly enslaved men to fill the ranks of their armed forces. Relatedly, the dynamic relationship among female slavery, emancipation, and marriage informs our understanding of how West African women, across the colonial divide, came to be affiliated with military men. The trial of Ciraïa Aminata, detailed below, illustrates how colonial agents obscured the distinction between female slave and wife in colonial African military households. Militarization increased women’s vulnerability and reduced their social ties and status within their natal communities. When colonial soldiers were involved, nineteenth-century West African communities lost their authority over the marital rites and traditions that provided legitimacy to conjugal relationships in West Africa.

MAP 1.1. French West Africa. Map by Isaac Barry

French conquest introduced new mechanisms and institutions that provided displaced West African women and men with gendered pathways toward emancipation and marriage. Military officers created Liberty Villages, which tripled as safe havens, spaces of emancipation, and sites of labor recruitment for the colonial state. Men became soldiers and women became their wives. Similar to Mamadou Lamine Drame’s conjugal partners (described in the introduction), West African women experienced “emancipation” from slavery and “marriage” to tirailleurs sénégalais as analogous or coterminous processes. Military marriages, when paired with emancipation, served to liberate men into the public sphere and women into the private sphere or household.⁵ Efforts to eradicate slavery through military conquest gendered the emancipation process—masculinizing the colonial state and its employees.⁶ The French military’s support of these gendered processes made West African women crucial to recruitment efforts and labor stabilization within the tirailleurs sénégalais. Female West Africans—slave or not—transformed into colonial subjects and mesdames tirailleurs.⁷

The French colonial military expected mesdames tirailleurs to provide their husbands with domestic labor, as well as to provide other troops with essential services like food preparation and laundering services. Active soldiers campaigned with their families and/or established new households near war fronts while serving state interests. African military households conformed their traditions of familial reciprocity and patron-client relationships to the hierarchical structure of the colonial military.⁸ Tirailleurs sénégalais households depended on each other and the colonial state. They reproduced precolonial sociocultural hierarchies and relationships of exchange while adapting to the colonial military’s systems of redistribution and its allocation of resources to their military families. West African conjugal traditions evolved within French conquest. African military households on the frontiers of the colonial state result from dramatic transformations in gendered power in nineteenth-century West Africa.

SLAVES AND SOLDIERS: INDIGENOUS AND COLONIAL MILITARY TRADITIONS

During the 1880s and 1890s, the French military benefited from recruitment practices that constrained African men’s liberty and put them to work for the nascent colonial state. Slavery and coerced labor were key features of the French colonial military and African military households in the late nineteenth century. Governor Louis Faidherbe created the tirailleurs sénégalais in 1857 in response to several contingent nineteenth-century processes—a renewed and growing presence of French concessionary companies along West African coastlines and waterways, colonial state expansion, and the protracted abolition of slavery. French colonization in late nineteenth-century West Africa occurred through military conquest. The French military recruited West African men for extensive inland campaigns. Many tirailleurs sénégalais were former slaves who had secured their freedom by enlisting in the colonial military. At the front lines of French colonization, these slaves-turned-soldiers assisted in liberating and protecting other recently emancipated slaves. The French colonial military’s dependence on slaves and former slaves paralleled indigenous West African military practices. Nineteenth-century French colonial labor schemes—laptots, engagé à temps, rachat—employed enslaved laborers, who were also channeled into the tirailleurs sénégalais.⁹ Additionally, Liberty Villages served as entry points into military service. French colonial officials and village chiefs compelled able-bodied men in these sites of refuge to enlist in the tirailleurs sénégalais.

The military conquest of inland West Africa followed France’s universal declaration of slave abolition in 1848 and the Third Republic’s (1871–1940) commitment to eradicating forms of slavery in empire. In the 1880s, the emancipation of domestic slaves was a formal objective of colonization, which would deeply entangle military officials in processes of emancipation, recruitment, and conjugal affiliation. Forms of domestic slavery were pervasive to the processes that produced African soldiers and military households.¹⁰ Domestic slavery describes a continuum of forms of human bondage that were subtler, if no less brutal, than the chattel slavery affiliated with the plantation colonies of the Americas. Scholars have described domestic slavery as a transitional process, where outsiders were incorporated into new kinship groups/communities through an initial phase of enslavement.¹¹ French civilian and military administrators believed in this assimilationist model and argued it was standard to African and Muslim forms of slavery in West Africa.¹² Through transgenerational social integration, enslaved people would become full community members and gradually efface their slave origins or foreign status. Domestic slavery enabled powerful lineages to accumulate dependents and secure labor. Nineteenth-century French observers viewed domestic slavery as essential to the social fabric of West African societies.¹³ They were hesitant to enforce wholesale emancipation in their West African territories because they feared it would create social upheaval and inhibit their ability to manage recently acquired territories. Instead, early colonial officials fostered institutions that moderated the enforcement of emancipation and accommodated local practices dependent upon slavery. The military used emancipatory mechanisms that assimilated marginalized West Africans into the nascent colonial state and provided them with limited opportunities to achieve social mobility. Membership in the tirailleurs sénégalais provided former slaves with circumstances in which they could accumulate resources and acquire conjugal partners and dependents. The gradual amelioration of their low social status during their military careers extended to their offspring. In this way, the tirailleurs sénégalais’ measured integration into the colonial state was analogous to the ways in which the French believed non-casted domestic slavery functioned in West Africa.

The colonial state’s incorporation of enslaved men and men with slave ancestry into the tirailleurs sénégalais resembled aspects of precolonial West African military recruitment practices.¹⁴ Many West African societies valorized martial skills. Men (and in some cases women) in those societies were trained in military skills at various stages of maturation.¹⁵ The Bamana kingdoms of Ségou and Kaarta exemplified warrior-based states in nineteenth-century West Africa.¹⁶ Some societies designated specific lineages or castes to specialize in martial skills. Martial lineages or castes were affiliated with slave status, like the ceddo of the Wolof kingdoms. Although affiliated with slave status, soldier castes often held privileged positions among the slave classes.¹⁷ Expansionist states absorbed prisoners of war and refugees into their military forces. Many of Samory’s sofas, or soldiers, were captives prior to their conscription into his army.¹⁸ Sofas acquired, employed, and incorporated slaves into the expansionist Samorian state as groomsmen, attendants, and orderlies. Enslaved women, who provided domestic and auxiliary military services, were among sofas’ wives and dependents.¹⁹ Many new recruits in the tirailleurs sénégalais were refugees or former sofas looking for new patrons. They lacked the ability to return home and reclaim their homes or farms. Enlisting in the tirailleurs sénégalais provided these men with the opportunity to earn wages, as well as to secure access to other types of resources provided by the colonial military state. Sofas-turned-tirailleurs sénégalais also continued Samorian practices of acquiring wives on campaign.²⁰ The colonial military allocated rations to soldiers and allowed them to set up family homesteads adjacent to military posts. In some cases, the colonial military assisted tirailleurs sénégalais in locating and liberating their dispersed kin.²¹

The French colonial military’s methods of recruitment and retention of soldiers expanded upon earlier nineteenth-century colonial labor schemes. Laptots provide a historical through line, which connects Atlantic African forms of slavery with French colonial labor systems that include the tirailleurs sénégalais. Laptots were men employed on limited-term contracts to crew and provide security on French merchant and military ships between trading posts in the Senegambia. Laptots first appeared in the colonial record during the early eighteenth century, when they worked for French royal charter companies participating in the transatlantic slave trade. In the nineteenth century, laptots hailed from a variety of ethnolinguistic groups and included free men, slaves, and former slaves. Emancipation could occur before, during, or after laptots’ period of employment. In some cases, representatives of the French state freed the slaves that became laptots. In other examples, slave owners hired out their slaves to work in laptots corps. In this type of arrangement, masters received enslaved laptots’ enlistment bonus and part of their wages. This practice existed contemporaneously with engagé à temps, a labor scheme in which French merchants or state employees rented slaves and/or contracted non-slave laborers from local populations.²² Working in the laptot corps provided men with the ability to accumulate resources, manumit themselves, and become merchants and/or slave owners.²³ Financial independence provided enslaved and formerly enslaved laptots with the means to marry, support multiwife households, and become full members of their communities.²⁴

The rachat, or repurchasing, system was another means through which enslaved men entered the laptots corps. French recruiters initiated this process of gradual emancipation by purchasing slaves from their masters. After ten to fourteen years of contracted labor, these former slaves were free of their obligations to their masters and the French colonial state.²⁵ The rachat labor system conflicted with the Second French Republic’s abolition of slavery in its colonial territories.²⁶ The 1848 declaration of universal emancipation was intended for France’s agricultural plantation and settler colonies in the Caribbean, which may explain why the French military continued using rachat in West Africa into the late 1880s. In 1857, the same year that Faidherbe inaugurated the tirailleurs sénégalais, local French administrators circulated a confidential note outlining the 1848 legislation’s relevance to West Africa. The decree of emancipation affected the regions that had already been incorporated into the colony of Senegal at the time of the declaration on 27 April 1848—nine years earlier. This meant that the decree applied to Gorée, Saint-Louis, and the military posts along the Senegal River. All of the West Africans living outside of those specified zones became subjects of France. As subjects, they retained the right to hold and trade in slaves.²⁷ French military leaders in West Africa accommodated slavery because local political leaders and slave owners supplied them with enslaved men for military service into the late 1880s.²⁸ After 1857, the rachat system and other emancipatory mechanisms steered male slaves and former male slaves away from the laptots corps and into the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais.²⁹

Liberty Villages were another colonial institution involved in the production of emancipated slaves, tirailleurs sénégalais, and their conjugal households. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph-Simon Gallieni established the first Liberty Villages in Kayes and Siguiri in the 1880s. These villages sheltered West African refugees—displaced people, prisoners of war, and fugitive slaves—following regional conflicts triggered by French conquest as well as conflicts initiated by local religious and political leaders.³⁰ Samory Touré’s sofas razed conquered villages in his expansionist wars south of the Niger River. Ahmadu Seku Tall and Mamadou Lamine Drame attempted to maintain and expand their influence in Segu and Bundu, respectively. Colonel Henri Frey’s overzealous punitive actions against the Soninke villages allied with Mamadou Lamine Drame resulted in large numbers of Soninke (some of whom were former laptots and tirailleurs sénégalais) seeking sanctuary in the Liberty Villages.³¹

The French colonial military established Liberty Villages adjacent to military posts in the Senegal and Niger River watersheds. This proximity to the state provided residents with limited protections and provided a space in which French military officials could recruit soldiers and reward veterans for previous service. French military officials and their West African military and civilian employees regulated access and residency in these villages. Liberty Village inhabitants acquired certificates of liberty through a protracted process that began when they registered with the village’s administrator on the day of their arrival. Within ninety days, villagers could obtain their liberty certificate, which protected them from enslavement or reenslavement.³² Liberty certificates, and the record of their receipt, were admissible evidence in the ad hoc colonial tribunals formed in military posts, Liberty Villages, and recently conquered towns. Military officials, village chiefs, and other colonial personnel presided over these tribunals, which had jurisdiction over civil suits concerning individuals’ slave status. During the three-month period of liminal emancipation, refugees worked for the local administration in order to pay for the rations and resources supplied to them by the colonial state. Men predominantly provided manual labor in construction and farming. Women gathered firewood, fetched water, cooked, and participated in other domestic services. During the ninety-day waiting period, masters could reclaim runaway slaves residing in the Liberty Villages. This clause upheld slave owners’ rights to their slaves, as well as contravening the abolitionist imperatives of the French Third Republic. However, the French established themselves as the ultimate authority that adjudicated slave ownership in their conquered territories. Tribunal officials required masters to present witnesses and testimony in order to verify their ownership of Liberty Village residents. If a master successfully reclaimed a runaway slave at a Liberty Village, they were required to reimburse the local administrator for the resources consumed by their slave, at a rate of fifty centimes per day.³³

Male residents in Liberty Villages had greater opportunity than female residents to shield themselves from former masters. If they joined the tirailleurs sénégalais, former masters could only reclaim them within thirty days of their enlistment. This option could have been attractive to fugitive slaves, but it came with some of the same conditions as rachat. Men enlisting in the tirailleurs sénégalais in Liberty Villages were expected to serve for ten to fourteen years in order to guarantee their freedom.³⁴ If they survived the length of their service, the French colonial state offered veterans employment opportunities that ameliorated their socioeconomic status. Some tirailleurs sénégalais veterans returned to their ancestral villages, some reenlisted, and others took administrative positions in the expanding colonial state.³⁵ Former tirailleurs sénégalais also secured chieftaincies in newly established Liberty Villages. In this way, former slaves-turned-soldiers gained authority and responsibilities that would have been inaccessible to them as slaves or low-status individuals. Liberty Village chiefs assigned new arrivals usufruct rights to land for farming, allotted them materials to build homesteads, and presided over marriage ceremonies.³⁶ To potential recruits, these colonial soldiers-turned-chiefs were paragons of the social and political mobility that could result from colonial military service. Liberty Village headmen also acted as recruitment agents who encouraged newly incorporated male villagers to enlist in the tirailleurs sénégalais. Liberty Village chiefs performed many of the same tasks as other West African headmen, but their authority depended on their relationship with the colonial state—not on claims of traditional legitimacy or community sanction.

EMANCIPATING MESDAMES TIRAILLEURS: FORMER FEMALE SLAVES AND THE BONDS OF MARRIAGE

Colonial labor schemes and Liberty Villages provided refugee, enslaved, and formerly enslaved women with fewer postemancipation possibilities than men. The French did not protect former female slaves’ liberty by offering them employment in the colonial state. Instead, military administrators encouraged women to marry West African colonial employees, predominantly tirailleurs sénégalais, in order to protect them from enslavement or reenslavement. Marriage was also thought to stabilize the colonial military’s labor force and increase stability in postconflict areas.³⁷ Enslaved women were emancipated into the bonds of marriage and many became mesdames tirailleurs. From the perspective of the French military, African military households provided hierarchical and gendered organization to biological and social reproduction within the military and along the colonial frontier. Tirailleurs sénégalais could absorb and channel French colonial authority into their households. Marriage provided a platform through which the nascent colonial state could reinforce patriarchal authority and male prerogatives, as well as efface women’s and men’s slave origins.³⁸ An administrator in Siguiri argued that male slaves could not attain liberty until they had taken a wife and begun a family.³⁹ Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships initiated new forms of female subjugation and dependency in the nascent French colonial era. In doing so, the colonial army maintained and altered gendered aspects of domestic slavery within African military households in a postemancipation landscape.⁴⁰ The emancipation of male slaves did not automatically extend their newfound liberty to wives and children. Female household members could not attain the same degree of liberty as their husbands.⁴¹ Their “free” status was not protected outside of the domestic households and their limited liberties were further constrained by their husband’s authority. The gendered effects of militarization and emancipation were bound up in tirailleurs sénégalais’ nineteenth-century conjugal traditions.

African military households perpetuated female domestic slavery. The majority of domestic slaves in nineteenth-century West Africa were women.⁴² For many French observers of that time, being female in West Africa connoted subservient status. If women were not slaves, they were the wards or dependents of their husbands or other male relatives.⁴³ Like many other former female slaves in early colonial Africa, mesdames tirailleurs often became “political minors in the postslavery landscape.”⁴⁴ Military officials viewed mesdames tirailleurs as the responsibility of soldiers. The sanctity of marriage and the presumed patriarchal authority operating within African military households deterred most French administrators from intervening in their domestic affairs. French colonial officials perpetuated freed West African women’s inferior status by “excluding marriage from . . . antislavery policies,” which “reinforced the patriarchal family” within the colonial military.⁴⁵

Some tirailleurs sénégalais and mesdames tirailleurs grew up in matrilineal societies. They confronted and conformed to new iterations of gendered familial authority in the army. Administrators upheld patriarchal and patrilineal claims to wives and daughters in the interest of maintaining regional political stability.⁴⁶ In the 1880s, tirailleurs sénégalais households accompanied troops on campaign. This mobility isolated mesdames tirailleurs from broader West African kin networks, which increased their responsibilities in the conjugal home and increased husbands’ authority over them. These women lacked nearby kin who could compel husbands to comply with the expectations and obligations typical to legitimate marriages. Mesdames tirailleurs also lacked familial networks necessary for access to agricultural land, assistance in childrearing, and other necessities normally fulfilled by reciprocal kin-based relationships. Their ability to acquire resources hinged upon the rank and/or status of their husbands within the French colonial military.

French colonial administrators imagined tirailleurs sénégalais households as nuclear-family households that conformed to male-breadwinner models of economic distribution. Both had little precedent in nineteenth-century West Africa.⁴⁷ The male-breadwinner economic model assumed that senior male family members were the unique wage earners within a household made up of their heteronormative partners and offspring. The wages and other resources that male heads of household acquired were subsequently redistributed to other household members.⁴⁸ Most West Africans, irrespective of gender, consumed what they produced and used local and long-distance trade networks for scarce or luxury goods.⁴⁹ French military officials believed that women’s labor contributed to an economy circumscribed by the needs of their households and extended families. These private spheres of economic domesticity were ostensibly discrete from the public sphere, where the colonial economy existed. To the contrary, women across West Africa participated in the production of crops and artisanal goods as well as selling their wares in daily or weekly rotating markets. Extensive and overlapping modes of resource redistribution existed among extended matrilineal and patrilineal kin. Foodstuffs, goods, and gifts moved through and around conjugal households. Despite some familiarity with the complex web of familial relations and the ubiquity of market women, French colonial observers characterized their African soldiers as the conduits through which the colonial economy reached the members of their households.⁵⁰

The French military sanctioned tirailleurs sénégalais’ acquisition of wives through means that paralleled concubinage and enslavement. In order to avoid the language of slavery, French military observers deployed the language of matrimony and legitimacy in describing vulnerable women’s incorporation into the tirailleurs sénégalais community. One of the most striking examples of this process, referenced in the introduction, occurred after the capture of seventeen of Mamadou Lamine Drame’s conjugal partners. Lieutenant Colonel Gallieni oversaw the redistribution of these women to his most distinguished tirailleurs sénégalais. Gallieni made the exceptional violence involved in forced conjugal association mundane by depicting the transfer of women from one man to another as a West African “tradition.” He blurred the distinctions between slavery and marriage by equating husbands, in this case tirailleurs sénégalais, with masters.⁵¹ French colonial military historical documents are replete with examples of code switching between the language used to describe gendered roles in African military households and the language used to describe the gendered dynamics between enslaved women and male slave owners.

Mainland French abolitionists and journalists became aware of the gendered paradoxes of emancipation in West Africa in June 1887. They scandalized metropolitan France by accusing the French colonial military of trafficking female sex slaves among the tirailleurs sénégalais. Colonel Henri Frey defended the allocation of liberated women to tirailleurs sénégalais as a necessary step in protecting their freedom.⁵² The different vocabularies used in the reporting and defense of these practices reveal the degree to which the French military believed in tirailleurs sénégalais’ entitlement to family life, irrespective of whether or not their marriages perpetuated forms of domestic slavery. The processes through which vulnerable women wed tirailleurs sénégalais were less than ideal. Mesdames tirailleurs located on campaign often suffered brutality and humiliation during their incorporation into soldiers’ households. When Gallieni distributed Drame’s conjugal partners to his most distinguished tirailleurs sénégalais, he labeled the last woman to be chosen as the “ugliest” of the seventeen women. Gallieni later granted a divorce to the tirailleur sénégalais who had lived a brief, disagreeable marriage with her.⁵³

French administrators believed that, despite the perfunctory nature of African military nuptials, former slave women would be better off once they “adjusted” to living with tirailleurs sénégalais.⁵⁴ Mesdames tirailleurs habituated themselves to the duties of military wives, while tirailleurs sénégalais obtained the status of married men, fathers, and patrons. The French colonial military protected soldiers’ rights to wives acquired through forced conjugal association. Once married, the colonial state reinforced soldiers’ authority over women made vulnerable by militarization across West Africa. As emancipated men and household heads, tirailleurs sénégalais engaged in strategies that improved their social status.⁵⁵ In the early years of the colonial era, male members of African military households had greater opportunity to reinvent themselves; some even took European names while in the military.⁵⁶ Marriage and making households were crucial to their reinvention.

FEMALE SLAVERY, PRENUPTIAL IDEALS, AND MARITAL TRADITIONS IN WEST AFRICA

Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices followed and diverged from legitimate marital customs in West Africa. Marital practices in West Africa encompassed rites and rituals that conferred legitimacy on conjugal unions and their offspring. Legitimate marriage had great significance in organizing many spheres of the human experience. Marriage provided a mechanism through which to extend and monitor kinship networks, forge or maintain economic connections, and encourage social and physical reproduction. Marital traditions varied from community to community in West Africa. Social status, spiritual beliefs, family dynamics, and a host of other factors influenced processes of betrothal, marriage, and the community’s ongoing support of a marriage throughout its duration. In ideal circumstances, West Africans aspired to marry with the consent and approval of their parents and guardians. Public celebrations of weddings aimed to acquire the support of the broader community, which brought honor to newlyweds’ unions and legitimated their future children. West African communities expected postpubescent individuals to marry and procreate. Youth often could not meet all cultural expectations or obey socially imposed constraints on premarital intimate interactions. Community elders superintended the heterosexual relations of youth and exercised gerontocratic authority over prenuptial rites. Young women were subject to greater surveillance and moral sanction than male youth because of proscriptions against pregnancy out of wedlock. Elders’ supervision protected the virtuousness of pubescent women, which further preserved the honor of families and future generations. Various household and lineage members participated in the marital unions of individuals and pressured youth to accept arranged marriages. Young men had greater flexibility regarding when and whom they married. They also had greater autonomy in choosing their second or third wives. Aside from the rare exception, women could not marry more than one spouse at a time, but often had greater authority over choosing new husbands after divorce or the death of their first spouses.⁵⁷

Many West African communities practiced polygyny. Family constellations extended beyond nuclear families through matrilineal and patrilineal hereditary lines. Households could consist of a husband, several wives, and their immediate descendants, as well as extended relations. Senior women in multiwife households organized shared domestic work among wives. Women gained prestige among their peers and within their families with live births and children that survived infancy. Marriage was a conduit through which lineage members could access the labor of their descendants. Children provided predominantly agricultural and pastoral communities with labor.⁵⁸ Marriage enhanced economic stability because it was crucial in determining who could farm arable land or have access to grazing land. Kinship ties facilitated long-distance trade because merchants extended credit and the welcome mat to distant relations.

The accumulation of dependents and resources enabled extended families to acquire greater economic, social, and political status. In some regions of West Africa, the accumulation of resources led to the development of socioeconomic classes and lineage-based castes that specialized in specific trades and the production of artisanal goods. Marriage figured prominently in maintaining these social distinctions, as well as ensuring that elite lineages retained prestige and economic resources. Through marriage, already powerful elite families reinforced their social and political power and also shored up sociocultural status through the exclusion of other classes and castes. Economic elites and noble lineages developed symbiotic relationships with their lower-class counterparts through patron-client relationships. Marriage and concubinage served as vehicles to incorporate foreigners, slaves, or members of other castes and classes into prominent families. Powerful elite families maintained their status through intermarriage and the redistribution of their wealth through the customary exchange of gifts surrounding marital ceremonies.⁵⁹ The value and abundance of these gifts publicly displayed these families’ wealth and prestige, as well as the degree to which they esteemed their future in-laws.

French colonial documents tend to portray bridewealth as the mobilization of valued goods or labor from the groom’s kin to the family of the bride. Bridewealth symbolized the sociocultural value of a bride and the groom’s family’s respect for and admiration of their future in-laws. The absence of bridewealth exchange often indicated an individual’s low social status or community disapproval of the union. Prolonged conjugal affiliation without marriage—concubinage—signaled the low social position of one or both unmarried romantic partners. Concubinage resided at the intersection of slavery and marriage and occurred between free men and slave women or among enslaved people.⁶⁰ Communities condoned these romantic relationships in order to incorporate low-status women and their children into kin groups. Concubines also bolstered the prestige of important men by increasing their responsibilities and dependents. The social status of individual marital partners influenced their obligations and responsibilities to each other and the conjugal home. Concubines performed the same duties as wives, but they lacked the rights and privileges that accompanied legitimate marriage.⁶¹

French colonial authorities regarded bridewealth as the most salient feature of legitimate marriage in West Africa. Simultaneously and contrarily, they also associated bridewealth with female slave trafficking. In either interpretation, French colonial observers stripped bridewealth of its profound sociocultural meaning and reduced it all too often to a transactional value. French officials’ position toward bridewealth grew ever more paradoxical in their sanction of romantic unions between tirailleurs sénégalais and female slaves or prisoners of war. Military observers labeled these conjugal unions “marriages,” despite their consummation without the exchange of bride-wealth. Concubinage was an integral component of early tirailleurs sénégalais marital traditions. The French sanctioned these unions for many of the same reasons that West African communities accepted concubinage—greater social stability, bolstering the prestige of men, and the incorporation of vulnerable women into the protection of the community and/or state.⁶²

Militarization and French colonization altered the ways in which West Africans achieved marital legitimacy. Tirailleurs sénégalais had elevated status and power because of their employment in the colonial military. The expansion of colonial authority across West Africa enabled these men to assert their conjugal prerogatives and simultaneously dodge local social prescriptions pertaining to marriage. Military officials—French and West African—acted as powerful lineage members who backed tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal behaviors. Military authority also constrained the ability of female spouses’ kin to consent to the union or ensure that tirailleurs sénégalais observed appropriate premarital rites. Without the participation of extended communities in prenuptial rites, bridewealth became increasingly transactional. Unlike extended relatives in West Africa, the military did little to ensure that tirailleurs sénégalais’ marriages were enduring or successful. Nineteenth-century military officials viewed West African soldiers’ marriages as temporary arrangements that benefited soldiers and the army. Commanding officers supported soldiers’ polygynous and polyamorous conjugal behaviors because they paralleled other colonial conjugal arrangements in West Africa.

French Atlantic forms of conjugal cohabitation and concubinage evolved in the nineteenth century. As France’s colonial presence expanded beyond the West African Atlantic littoral, the term mariage à la mode du pays traveled with the colonial military—retaining some of its former meaning as well as acquiring new significance as military officials applied the term broadly to encompass relationships between military personnel and civilian women.⁶³ Significant changes in the term’s usage included an emphasis on the temporary nature of sexual relationships, which no longer included an investment in shared domestic living or recognizing paternity of children. Within the military’s usage at the end of the nineteenth century, mariage à la mode du pays no longer uniquely referred to conjugal relationships between European men and African women. Officials came to refer to tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal and sexual relationships with female prisoners of war and former female slaves as mariage à la mode du pays, which simultaneously and ambivalently portrayed these heteronormative relationships as marriage and not marriage. This questionable legitimacy remained a dominant feature of tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions into the interwar years.

THE AFFAIR OF CIRAÏA AMINATA

The affair of Ciraïa Aminata provides a snapshot of the dynamic confluence of militarization, colonization, emancipation, and marriage in nineteenth-century West Africa. Aminata’s brief appearance in the historical record illustrates the ways in which French conquest destabilized West African communities and how early institutions of the colonial state opened and closed gendered pathways toward emancipation and prosperity. The military asserted its political and juridical authority over West Africans’ sociocultural practices and traditional institutions in newly colonized spaces. There are many excellent historical studies that examine the operation of the colonial state’s juridical power over slavery and marriage in West African colonial court records.⁶⁴ Ciraïa Aminata’s day in the ad hoc military tribunal exemplifies how military officials’ intervention into the conjugal affairs of tirailleurs sénégalais households inscribed paternalism and masculine authority into the institutions of the nascent colonial state. Militarization coincided with the articulation of juridical authority over African women’s liberty and marital status.

Ciraïa Aminata appeared before a hastily assembled tribunal in Siguiri’s Liberty Village in March 1888. Three different men brought forward competing claims of ownership and/or spousal authority over Ciraïa Aminata. Her day in court provides intimate details of one woman’s survival in the volatile borderlands of Samory’s Wassulu Empire and French Empire in contemporary northeastern Guinea-Conakry. In the years preceding the trial, Aminata’s lived experiences demonstrate how militarization of the region caused the rise of masculine authority over women and increased women’s vulnerability to male authority.⁶⁵ Emboldened men, particularly men affiliated with armed forces, took advantage of sociopolitical instability to advance their household strategies outside of normative conjugal traditions. Ciraïa Aminata became affiliated with three different men through processes that blurred the distinctions between enslavement, forced conjugal association, and marriage. In court, military officials wielded the colonial state’s new juridical power and provided the ultimate authority over the marital status of Ciraïa Aminata. The colonial state shored up the power of tirailleurs sénégalais over vulnerable women, while condoning conjugal practices that contravened colonial imperatives to eradicate slavery. Military officials blurred the discrete categories of slave women and wives, which created an ambiguity about the status, rights, and obligations of female members of tirailleurs sénégalais’ households.⁶⁶

Gallieni recorded the trial concerning Ciraïa Aminata’s matrimonial and slave status in 1888.⁶⁷ Aminata’s story began with an abduction while she collected water from a stream near Baté in the Milo River valley. According to Gallieni, Ciraïa Aminata’s captor subsequently married her by force. Gallieni referred to her captor as a “ravisher,” which indicated that the conjugal relationship began with an act of nonconsensual sex. Gallieni acknowledged that Aminata’s marriage to her captor circumvented the standard rites and procedures preceding local marital custom. Despite this, Gallieni used the language of matrimony, which indicates he believed that forced conjugal association could be a precursor to legitimate marriage. Alternatively, Gallieni may have believed that the mere act of sexual intercourse provided a degree of legitimacy to West Africans’ conjugal unions. His observations evince widely held beliefs among colonial officials that West African women’s consent to sex or marriage was unnecessary in legitimizing conjugal unions. By sanctioning the marriage while casting doubt upon the prenuptial process, Gallieni provided himself with the cover to later delegitimize this marriage when adjudicating Ciraïa Aminata’s case at Siguiri’s tribunal.

Ciraïa Aminata’s captor, referred to by Gallieni as her first husband (premier mari), was captured by a sofa serving in Samory Touré’s army. The sofa sold Ciraïa Aminata’s first husband into slavery in Kaarta to a Tukulor from Kouniakry and then replaced the original captor as Ciraïa Aminata’s second husband (deuxième mari). The sofa, who was an active member of Samory Touré’s army, participated in battles against the French near Bamako. Ciraïa Aminata followed her new husband on these campaigns and likely provided domestic and auxiliary military support to her husband and his fellow soldiers. Afterward, the second husband left Samory’s army in order to set the couple up in a small village in Wassulu. Fearing forced reenlistment in Samory’s armies, the couple left Wassulu and relocated to Siguiri. In Siguiri’s Liberty Village, the demilitarized sofa and Ciraïa Aminata could expect a degree of French protection from Samory’s recruitment agents.

By seeking refuge in the Liberty Village, the couple surrendered some of their sovereignty to the legal and bureaucratic authority of the colonial state. Their temporary sanctuary provided the setting for the unraveling of their union. The disintegration of their marriage resulted from the intervening authority of the colonial state. Liberty Village chiefs and French administrators presided over the processes of marriage and divorce among inhabitants of Liberty Villages. In Siguiri, two different men used Gallieni’s tribunal to challenge the retired sofa’s matrimonial claims to Ciraïa Aminata. The first was her captor from Baté, who Gallieni labeled her first husband. After his enslavement in Kaarta, he had eventually manumitted himself and enlisted in the Seventh Company of the tirailleurs sénégalais. The Seventh Company was under the command of Gallieni and encamped in Siguiri in March 1888. He caught sight of Ciraïa Aminata in the adjacent Liberty Village when he returned to Siguiri from campaigning in Manding. The second plaintiff was Ciraïa Aminata’s original master. This man, referred to by Gallieni as her premier maître (first master), claimed to have proprietary rights to Aminata that predated her abduction near Baté. This original master had come to Siguiri, fleeing Samory, in order to access arable land in the Liberty Village. By happenstance, he had crossed paths with Ciraïa Aminata in the village and attempted to seize her. Gallieni’s interpreter brought Ciraïa Aminata and the three men with matrimonial and/or ownership claims to her before the tribunal.

In the late nineteenth century, French administrators and their local interlocutors possessed a great deal of latitude in adjudicating cases according to their interpretation of local custom, the applicability of French legal norms, and restorative justice. As demonstrated above, members of the colonial state had conflictual and deeply ambivalent ideas about marital legitimacy and female slavery in West Africa. Gallieni used maître (master) and mari (husband) synonymously to describe Ciraïa Aminata’s ostensible husbands. His conflation of these two terms was symptomatic of an extensive belief held by French colonial officials regarding the interchangeability of these terms. Each of the men making claims on Ciraïa Aminata had experienced displacement and had become a client of the colonial state. Any one of these men could have successfully argued their entitlement to Ciraïa Aminata’s conjugal labor. If Ciraïa Aminata had resided in the Liberty Village for less than ninety days, the original master would have had the right to reclaim his former slave. The retired sofa, or second husband, could have argued that his marriage to Ciraïa had occurred along the same principles and processes central to tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions. However, it was the first captor from Baté, turned tirailleur sénégalais, who walked out of the tribunal with Ciraïa Aminata on his arm.

Gallieni presided over the tribunal. In newly colonized spaces in West Africa, military authorities asserted their jurisdiction over civil affairs and tipped the scales toward their soldiers. The original master would have likely had the strongest claim over Ciraïa Aminata in terms of ownership. In his description of Ciraïa Aminata’s history, Gallieni delegitimized the process through which the first husband/ravisher had acquired Ciraïa Aminata as a wife. This abductor-turned-tirailleur sénégalais may have also had the weakest case when viewed through local understandings of slave ownership and marital tradition. Yet the first husband’s transformation from abductor to tirailleur sénégalais positively influenced his case in the eyes of the colonial state. The retired sofa, or second husband, may have had the most viable claim over Aminata as a wife because they had set up homesteads in Wassulu and in Siguiri’s Liberty Village. The presence of children could have influenced the outcome of the tribunal, but there were no details concerning paternity in the account.

Ciraïa Aminata’s ability to determine her possible future was circumscribed by the colonial state’s narrow vision of emancipated women’s destiny as wives. Gallieni claimed that Ciraïa Aminata’s status as a resident of Siguiri’s Liberty Village gave her the freedom to choose her husband from among the three successive masters/husbands. By framing her act as one of choice, Gallieni perpetuated the myth that West African women obtained liberties through the emancipatory processes on offer in Liberty Villages, when, in fact, Ciraïa Aminata’s only “choice” was marriage. Ciraïa Aminata “chose” the tirailleur sénégalais who was her first abductor/ravisher and first husband. She elected to become a madame tirailleur as opposed to the wife of a civilian. Upon leaving the tribunal with Ciraïa Aminata, her tirailleur sénégalais husband purportedly commented, “women always prefer handsome tirailleurs sénégalais to civilians.”⁶⁸ Captured for posterity in Gallieni’s Deux campagnes, the words of a gloating braggart signal several assumptions made by colonial soldiers and their commanders: martiality, affiliation with the colonial state’s authority, and access to its resources made African colonial soldiers ideal spouses. For Gallieni, the affair of Ciraïa Aminata was an allegory for the “benevolent” power of military colonization.

There are other reasons that may explain why Ciraïa Aminata chose the tirailleur sénégalais over the other men. The possibility of economic and social stability would have been appealing to her, having recently experienced a rapid succession of life-altering events and intimate affiliations. She may have recognized that the tirailleur sénégalais’s gainful employment held more promise than the other men, who were refugees in an increasingly crowded Liberty Village. Marriage to a tirailleur sénégalais could safeguard against future reenslavement because the colonial military protected soldiers and their conjugal partners from former and potential future masters. Ciraïa Aminata may have also been aware of the fact that Gallieni donated domesticated animals and grains to new military households. Membership in an African military household made mesdames tirailleurs eligible for regular rations and gave them preferential access to land.⁶⁹ Ciraïa Aminata’s choice of husband corresponds with the historical arguments regarding the “strategies of slaves and women” in politically tumultuous regions. Marriage to important men or colonial employees was an avenue through which women could reduce their vulnerability to reenslavement or forced conjugal association.⁷⁰ However, marriages between West African women and tirailleurs sénégalais were not simply the result of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of vulnerable women. Physical and emotional attraction certainly influenced how women maneuvered through the postslavery landscape of militarism and colonialism. Remarkably, Ciraïa Aminata chose a husband that Gallieni had labeled an abductor and a sexual assailant. Her “choice” may indicate that Gallieni misunderstood that day near the stream in Baté. If Ciraïa Aminata was a slave when she was collecting water near the Milo River, she could not marry without the authority of her master.⁷¹ The task of gathering water would have given her brief reprieve from the mindful and authoritative eyes of her master and his household. In those precious unescorted moments, she may have absconded with her abductor—who could have been her liberator and lover. Abduction, or perhaps elopement in this case, would have been a means for two people of low social status to circumvent normative marital practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African societies.⁷²

Gallieni portrayed Ciraïa Aminata as a woman capable of making choices within the constraints of war, colonization, and emancipation. He used her story to illustrate the success of the tirailleurs sénégalais and Liberty Villages as colonial institutions that facilitated processes of slave emancipation and postconflict social stability. Yet Ciraïa Aminata’s experience at the Siguiri tribunal was exceptional when compared with other women who became mesdames tirailleurs in nineteenth-century West Africa. Historical evidence suggests that West African women partnering with tirailleurs sénégalais “had little choice” in the matter and that freed slave women needed the protection of colonial soldiers because they “would be enslaved again by the first man who came along.”⁷³ However, Ciraïa Aminata broadens our understanding of the complex processes that preceded mesdames tirailleurs’ partnerships with colonial soldiers. Love and emotional investment are difficult to historicize in the gendered silences of the nineteenth-century French colonial historical record. However, the absence of evidence portraying emotional attachment does not eliminate it as a motivating factor for women to join African military households.⁷⁴ These households became part of a tirailleurs sénégalais military community that cultivated its own marital traditions where West African and colonial societies overlapped.

MEMBERS ONLY: EXPLORING FAMILY LIFE IN TIRAILLEURS’ MILITARY COMMUNITIES

Someone sent them reinforcements: ten tirailleurs flanked by their families, wives, children, captives, monkeys, cats, chickens, parakeets, each dragging behind him Noah’s Ark.

—Paul Vigné d’Octon, Journal d’un marin⁷⁵

A curious spectacle to some, tirailleurs sénégalais households became a common feature of the French West African military landscape at the end of the nineteenth century.⁷⁶ Mesdames tirailleurs lived as wives and military auxiliaries in the violent swirl of French colonial conquest. From the 1880s, household migration was an important feature of colonial soldiers’ conjugal traditions. Once in the French military community, mesdames tirailleurs and tirailleurs sénégalais adjusted their domestic responsibilities to the daily rhythms of camp life and military campaign. The military promoted its own hierarchical organization, but it did not replace West African social organization—caste, slave ancestry, ethnicity—with meritocracy. West African military households conformed their traditions of familial reciprocity and patron-client relationships to the ranks and divisions of the colonial military. The French colonial military became an extended family, or kinship network, that provided newlyweds with basic resources and social security. African military households depended on each other and created fictive kin relationships within their regiments. The military allocated resources to them, which fueled these relationships and made these households reliant on the colonial state. Unlike French soldiers serving in the army, tirailleurs sénégalais brought wives and children with them on campaign and in their frequent garrison changes.⁷⁷ These practices untethered tirailleurs sénégalais households from specific geographies, communities, and familial kin, while strengthening their ties to the French colonial military.

Above, I highlighted how civilian women became soldiers’ wives through conflict and emancipation. Civilian women living near tirailleurs sénégalais encampments were also incorporated into the military community without the violence affiliated with war. The French colonial military did not enforce boundaries between soldiers and civilians. Sometimes, with little formality, civilian women became soldiers’ wives. West African campaigns depended on the continual incorporation of civilians into the military community. Campaigning regiments relied on local villages to provide spaces for bivouacking and basic foodstuffs. Villages supplied female laborers, often enslaved women, to perform domestic tasks for campaigning soldiers that ranged from pounding millet to sexual services.⁷⁸ Military encampments constructed near urban centers were busy sites of commerce and exchange. Local female and male merchants found ready consumers for basic and luxury goods among tirailleurs sénégalais households. Military encampments were also sites of civilian labor recruitment. French officers and West African infantrymen hired women and men to supply their regiments as they crossed West Africa.⁷⁹ Market women and hired women’s protracted presence in tirailleurs sénégalais’ encampments could make them members of the African military community and/or specific households.

Mesdames tirailleurs acutely experienced the structural transformation of West African households in the colonial military. These women followed regiments with the disassembled components of their homesteads and their husbands’ effects (excluding rifles and bullets) loaded on their heads, while bearing young children on their backs.⁸⁰ They made temporary homes among the piles of equipment and provisions on the decks of French military river barges.⁸¹ On campaign, mesdames tirailleurs constructed temporary and semipermanent homes in open-air bivouacs. Where possible, mesdames tirailleurs constructed their households on the margins of military and administrative spaces in order to create a distance between their households and French officialdom.⁸² From this distance, these women raised children, pounded millet, prepared rationed food, and laundered their husbands’ uniforms.⁸³ Mesdames tirailleurs’ innumerable responsibilities were central to the functioning of this mobile colonial military community. They participated in the refashioning of ancestral social, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies within the context of the French military community.

The rank of individual tirailleurs sénégalais could influence their households’ social status among their peers, but ethnolinguistic tensions and caste hierarchies influenced intra- and inter-household relations.⁸⁴ The continuing salience of slave ancestry in the military community curbed former slaves’ aspirations for social mobility in the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais. French officials avoided promoting former slaves because they believed these men had “an innate mentality for servitude,” which made them ineligible for leadership roles in the military.⁸⁵ African soldiers of free status would not obey the command of petty officers who had slave ancestry. They also refused to serve under men who were slaves—for example, the men serving in the tirailleurs sénégalais through the engagé à temps system.⁸⁶ The colonial military did not foster meritocratic advancement in the tirailleurs sénégalais and former slaves rarely achieved the stripes of a corporal or a sergeant.

African military households’ ethnolinguistic groups and lineage affiliations affected social relationships among members of the military community. France’s conquest of Bundu occasioned the liberation of many Bamana and Malinké female slaves. These captives were subsequently integrated into the tirailleurs sénégalais serving in the region. According to military observers, these liberated women fortuitously found their countrymen among the tirailleurs sénégalais, some of whom had grown up in the same villages. These common geographical and ancestral ties facilitated a number of conjugal relationships within the tirailleurs sénégalais.⁸⁷ Ethnic diversity and tensions within the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais also hampered troops’ discipline and confidence. The history of El Hajj Umar Tall’s Tukulor conquest of the Bamana states of Kaarta and Segu embittered Bamanakan toward Tukulors serving side by side in ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais. These feelings also incited quarrels between Bamana and Tukulor mesdames tirailleurs. In Bafoulabé (contemporary southwestern Mali), a French commander incarcerated two particularly bellicose women at the police station for a twenty-four-hour period in order to set an example for the “feminine world” in the military community.⁸⁸ This was a rare example of French officials directly disciplining mesdames tirailleurs.

As with many West African households, senior infantrymen and African officers displayed their status and wealth through their belongings and the comportment of their wives. Some tirailleurs sénégalais had multiwife households that included numerous other dependents—orderlies, slaves, and children. Larger households evidenced the greater prosperity of tirailleurs sénégalais and their wives. Military wives exhibited their household’s wealth with their clothing, accessories, and comportment. On a steamer traveling up the Senegal River, Aïssata, the wife of sergeant N’gor Faye, posed for a photo displaying a remarkable quantity of jewelry and other ornaments.⁸⁹ Outside of Koulikoro (northeast of Bamako), mesdames tirailleurs accessorized themselves picturesquely, wearing beautiful wraparound skirts (pagnes) and long flowing dresses (boubous), with their hair tucked under light handkerchiefs. Jewelry covered their hands, arms, ears, noses, ankles, and toes. Many wives cosmetically altered their nails’ color with henna and wore antimony (kohl) on their lips.⁹⁰ Through ornamentation, cleanliness, and propriety, mesdames tirailleurs distinguished themselves from civilian women on campaign and in town.⁹¹

Men’s and women’s gendered roles in the maintenance of the military community complied with military exigencies while cherry-picking from and conforming to gendered expectations affiliated with West African village life. In the bivouacs shaded by enormous baobabs or in the military camps adjacent to arid Agadez, gendered work and leisure organized the activities of African military households.⁹² Mesdames tirailleurs were responsible for maintaining households, preparing meals, and raising children. They also provided sexual services to their soldiering husbands. Many tirailleurs sénégalais spoke of their wives while away on campaign and anticipating returning to them.⁹³ The pull of domestic life led many married tirailleurs sénégalais to spend their leisure time with their households, which provided a site to entertain guests and maintain families.⁹⁴ Married soldiers’ leisure differed from that of unmarried tirailleurs sénégalais, who engaged in homosocial male activities like consuming dolo (a fermented beverage made from sorghum), smoking pipe tobacco, engaging in convivial conversations, and seeking romantic partners in nearby civilian populations.⁹⁵

Tirailleurs sénégalais and mesdames tirailleurs wanted their conjugal unions to map onto local traditions so that their marriages gained a semblance of legitimacy. In the absence of the tirailleurs sénégalais’ lineage elders, military officials provided the authority to welcome newlyweds into the extended family of the tirailleurs sénégalais community. By the end of the nineteenth century, the French military offered potential recruits enlistment bonuses in order to supply soldiers with the means to pay bridewealth for their future wives.⁹⁶ Ranking officers provided infantrymen with opportunities to locate new wives on campaign and in camp. French military officers acted as officiators in Christian marriage ceremonies.⁹⁷ Officers supplied domesticated animals for sacrifice and consumption in Muslim and pagan marital celebrations occurring near military camps.⁹⁸ Brides of indigenous officers and favored infantrymen could expect gifts of cloth or other household items that would assist newlyweds in establishing households. The French colonial military accommodated the increasing number of tirailleurs sénégalais families residing near posts by establishing separate married housing by the end of the 1890s.⁹⁹

In some exceptional instances, French officials acted as intermediaries or extended kin in their soldiers’ conjugal affairs in life and death. Their power to shape the contours and sanctity of marriage buoyed the prerogative of their soldiers over local tradition and against traditional authorities. In one case, Samba, a marabout and a military interpreter for the tirailleurs sénégalais, married a woman of noble lineage in Manding.¹⁰⁰ The interpreter had not completed bridewealth payments to his father-in-law. After the death of the couple’s first child, the father-in-law threatened to dissolve the marriage. French officer Marie Étienne Péroz intervened on the behalf of his interpreter and sent an expedited message to the father-in-law saying that he would regulate the affair in person.¹⁰¹ In addition to intervening in family affairs, military officials made limited efforts to support widowed mesdames tirailleurs. French officials liberated female slaves who were the wives of fallen tirailleurs sénégalais in acts of emancipation that followed local and Muslim practice.¹⁰² Family allowances and widow’s pay were not standardized in the nineteenth century, but the military awarded limited and inconsistent benefits to tirailleurs sénégalais’ widows and orphans. Some widowed women remarried within the military community, which became an accepted practice that shared characteristics with “levirate” marriage. This marital tradition encouraged widows to marry male relatives of their deceased husbands in order to maintain lineage connections and familial wealth.

The relationship between the French colonial state and mesdames tirailleurs was ill-defined. Mesdames tirailleurs were not official employees of the French colonial army. As members of the tirailleurs sénégalais community, they were expected to withstand hardship without complaint and obey military discipline.¹⁰³ In an extreme example of the degree to which mesdames tirailleurs complied with military discipline and authority, the wife of soldier Moussa Traoré gave birth while marching on campaign. She went into labor while following a regiment from Sikasso to the Mossi region. The commanding French officer left two tirailleurs sénégalais with her while the rest of the regiment continued to their destination. The new mother arrived a couple of hours later. In order to maintain her affiliation with her husband and the military, she had walked the final stage of the march with her newborn in her arms.¹⁰⁴

As accepted and recognized members of a growing military community, wives acquired food rations, housing, and a degree of social security. In the vein of the breadwinner model, the colonial military transmitted orders and disciplinary measures to mesdames tirailleurs via their husbands. They also channeled rations and resources into military households via soldiers. When husbands were away on lengthy assignments, these women lacked the resources normally allocated to them via their husbands. A group of mesdames tirailleurs protested before Colonel Combes because they lacked the basic means of survival. Colonel Combes threatened to whip them if they did not disperse. The mesdames tirailleurs fled, then regrouped and brought their grievances before Gallieni. Eventually, the gendarmerie broke up the protesters and military officers dispatched couriers to their campaigning husbands.¹⁰⁵

French military officials rarely intervened in the domestic affairs of African military households. One official claimed that “conjugal correction” was the responsibility of tirailleurs sénégalais.¹⁰⁶ Patriarchal prerogatives could transgress the bounds of proper decorum, but the line between domestic discipline and abuse was hard to locate. French observers wrote about the extreme lengths that tirailleurs sénégalais took to ensure the fidelity of their conjugal partners. One group of tirailleurs sénégalais built a small earthen enclosure with chest-high walls, where they left their wives guarded while they were away on campaign. Suspicious of the guard, tirailleurs sénégalais supplied their wives with chastity belts. Another group of West African soldiers stationed in Zinder kept their conjugal partners hidden in a house, guarded by an old blind man, in an unfrequented part of the city. These efforts shielded conjugal partners from the sexual advances of French officers and other tirailleurs sénégalais. Read another way, soldiers’ female conjugal partners were prisoners. By physically restricting their mobility, tirailleurs sénégalais prevented newly acquired conjugal partners from returning to their home communities. In his memoir, French sergeant Charles Guilleux recounted these activities and cited a Nigerien male civilian who believed that “Senegalese and Soudanese soldiers are liars and thieves, who take our women from us.”¹⁰⁷ French observers witnessed these behaviors and in condoning them made them part of African colonial soldiers’ conjugal practices.

Gender-based violence was an accepted component of tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions. French observers generally overlooked soldiers’ mistreatment of civilian women because forced conjugal association did not contravene military order and corresponded with the paternalistic authority accompanying colonial rule. French commanding officers interfered in conjugal abuse when the women were known members of the military community. Abusive behaviors needed to reach egregious levels—like attempted murder—before commanding officers reprimanded and disciplined tirailleurs sénégalais. Indigenous corporal Hannah Ramata, stationed in Matam (present-day Senegal), stabbed his wife below her right breast in a fit of jealousy. Ramata’s superiors sentenced him to fifteen days of imprisonment in irons. His commanders reduced his diet to biscuits and water.¹⁰⁸ French commanders took responsibility for the families of imprisoned soldiers and ensured that they continued to receive rations while the “head” of family served his sentence.¹⁰⁹

French commanding officers were poor substitutes for familial, village, or community leaders. The French military’s distribution of justice and social welfare was insufficient for maintaining a moral economy. They were not invested in curating the reproduction of their military community. Nevertheless, the community affiliated with the tirailleurs sénégalais had the potential to become an extended family united by uniform, common resources, and trials faced on campaign. Once in African military households, women and men could build communal ties, reduce their outsider status, and increase their socioeconomic worth despite slave origins. Women’s membership in the colonial military community provided them with access to resources often unavailable to women unaffiliated with tirailleurs sénégalais. These possibilities came with the hardships affiliated with life on the road with the tirailleurs sénégalais. The patriarchal and misogynist culture of military conquest created gendered inequities and increased risk for mesdames tirailleurs.

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After her marriage to a tirailleur sénégalais in March 1888, Ciraïa Aminata exited the written historical record. As a madame tirailleur, she may have participated in Samori Touré’s capture, the fall of Dahomey, or conquest in Madagascar. She, and other West African military wives like her, experienced the onset of colonization in the most intimate realms of human experience—in their conjugal relationships and within their households. Many mesdames tirailleurs experienced emancipation and marriage simultaneously. The French colonial military encouraged, expedited, and sanctioned these unions without fully legitimating them. By most West African customs, mesdames tirailleurs’ marriages shared characteristics with concubinage or lacked the prenuptial rites that would have made them legitimate. Within the military community, the conjugal practices of nineteenth-century West Africa served as the foundation for marital traditions that traveled with the tirailleurs sénégalais as they deployed to new frontiers of colonial conquest. Marriage, once a mechanism to protect vulnerable women from social instability, became a vehicle through which West African women acquired resources, gained membership in an extended colonial family, and migrated long distances to the frontiers of French Empire in Africa. By the time West African military employees deployed to Congo and Madagascar, their households were a sacrosanct feature of the colonial military landscape. In 1911, one French observer commented, “Ce qu’il y a de précieux chez le tirailleur, c’est sa femme” (That which the tirailleur holds precious is his wife/woman).¹¹⁰