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Colonial Conquest “en Famille”

African Military Households in Congo and Madagascar, 1880–1905

For the last twenty years, the colony of Senegal has supplied the contingents of all the missions and expeditions formed for the conquest of Africa . . . private industry and foreign colonization alike have drawn their elements from Senegal.

—Governor-general of French West Africa to the minister of the colonies, Saint-Louis, 26 July 1899¹

FRANCE HAD HISTORICAL TIES TO CONGO AND MADAGASCAR through its participation in global oceanic African slave trades. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, France converted its nominal presence in these regions to formal colonial rule. Tirailleurs sénégalais and other West Africans participated in France’s colonial expansion into the Congo and Ubangi-Shari River basins of Equatorial Africa and across the mountainous spine of Madagascar. Congo and Madagascar are understudied episodes in tirailleurs sénégalais’ historiography and neglected regions of African and French colonial history.² This chapter examines these regions in parallel because they showcase how different, yet contemporaneous, nineteenth-century contexts shaped the formation of African military households. In Congo and Madagascar, tirailleurs sénégalais and their conjugal partners continued and modified conjugal practices imported from West African campaigns. These military households challenged local traditions of marital legitimacy.

West Africans maintained and expanded their households while carrying out the work of empire in radically different political and geographic settings. In the Congo River basin, West Africans participated in a series of exploratory missions led by Savorgnan de Brazza during the 1870s and 1880s. The earlier missions were funded by the Geographic Society of Paris and the International African Association. De Brazza encountered multiple chiefdoms and signed trading treaties with them. In 1880, at the Malebo Pool, Chief Makoko of the Bateke/Tio kingdom ceded land for a French trading post, which became the foundation for Brazzaville. French public and private organizations funded the formal establishment of trading and military posts throughout the Congo region. Ultimately, imperial and capitalistic interests would parcel the region into large privately owned concessions. Around the same time, West African laborers in Congo shifted from being primarily carpenters and porters to serving as soldiers. These soldiers defended French interests when challenged by local authorities and by the expansionist maneuvers of the nearby Belgian Congo Free State.

France’s gradual conquest of Congo through trade ambitions and its limited use of martial forces starkly contrasts with the concerted and coordinated military campaigns of the 1890s in Madagascar. France’s military conquest of the large island followed decades, if not centuries, of Europeans’ participation in Indian Oceanic trade and regional affairs. In the early nineteenth century, the Merina Kingdom—under the monarchical power of Radama I and his successor Queen Ranavalona I—expanded and consolidated its authority over much of Madagascar. During their rule, increasing numbers of foreign diplomats, travelers, and missionaries relocated to the island. France launched several military incursions into Madagascar with varying goals and results. The campaign of 1883–85 ended with a treaty placing the Merina Kingdom/Madagascar under a French protectorate. From 1885, a French resident oversaw the terms of the peace deal and Madagascar’s payment of postconflict indemnities to France. In subsequent years, the Merina Kingdom faltered in its ability to maintain political continuity and hegemony over the island. French expeditionary forces arrived in the 1890s to improve social stability and enforce France’s formal domination of Madagascar. Military campaigns included seasoned tirailleurs sénégalais as well as West African laborers serving in auxiliary capacities.

West Africans performed a variety of functions in France’s colonization of Congo and Madagascar. The origins, identities, and titles of West African colonial employees and their conjugal partners multiplied as they circulated among imperial ports and military campaigns. Governor Louis Faidherbe recruited the original regiment of the tirailleurs sénégalais from the northern region of Senegambia. By the campaigns of the 1880s, recruitment expanded to incorporate more men from the Niger River basin—particularly Bamanakan—making tirailleurs sénégalais a misnomer within a generation of its inauguration. West Africans shipping out to Equatorial Africa and Madagascar served France as tirailleurs sénégalais, laptots, and miliciens—militiamen predominantly hired to accompany civilian exploration missions. In French African empire, Congolese and Madagascan communities transformed the terminology and monikers used to identify the foreign Africans accompanying conquest. The distinction between military and civilian colonial employees blurred as West Africans completed their labor contracts and remained in Congo or Madagascar to work in the industries accompanying colonialism. Irrespective of origin or employment status, once in Congo or Madagascar, local officials and populations often referred to these diverse West Africans as “sénégalais.” West African men working abroad took up and modified tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices and marital traditions.

West Africans’ conjugality appeared in debates concerning the articulation and future of French colonialism. Their conjugal practices traveled to new destinations and evolved alongside colonial conquest. In late nineteenth-century West Africa, tirailleurs sénégalais’ ability to establish and build households was an expected benefit affiliated with military service. In Congo and Madagascar, West African employees arrived with their West African wives and/or sought local conjugal partners. Tirailleurs sénégalais brought their conjugal practices to campaigns in foreign Africa. French officials condoned soldiers’ conjugal behaviors in West Africa, but hesitated to do so in Congo and Madagascar. Geographic and sociocultural differences gave military officials pause in ascribing marital legitimacy to soldiers’ inter-African households. In Congo and Madagascar, French officials recorded episodes of sexual violence, female abduction, and forced conjugal association perpetrated by West African colonial employees.

Race and other forms of sociocultural difference appeared in empire-wide debates concerning “sénégalais” conjugality and marital legitimacy. These discussions began among administrators in West Africa and Southeast Asia regarding the possibility of deploying tirailleurs sénégalais in Vietnam. These far-flung officials supported West African soldiers’ access to women’s domestic and sexual labor, but debated the ideal racial composition of their households—West African women and men or Vietnamese women and African men. These discussions also occurred in Congo and Madagascar, but relied on slightly different sociocultural taxonomies and fumbled through the broad racial categorizations that served to organize and distinguish populations in French Empire. Evidence from Congo and Madagascar suggests that local officials made more nuanced distinctions. They readily recognized the legitimacy of West African military households in Congo and Madagascar. Conversely, they struggled to legitimize conjugal relationships between “sénégalais” and congolaise (Congolese) or malgache (Madagascan) women. These households transgressed sociolinguistic and geographical boundaries in Africa, which prompted officials and local populations to question consensuality and legitimacy. The gendered violence affiliated with colonial militarism threw the distinctions among West Africans, Congolese, and Madagascans into stark relief. West African men’s relationships with congolaises and malgaches catalyzed new debates in the colonial administration about female slavery, forced conjugal association, and the colonial military’s tolerance of “sénégalais” exploitation of women in foreign colonial territories.

Historical actors and historians have struggled to locate the most accurate and appropriate terminology to identify sociocultural organization and its transgressions on the African continent. Race, tribe, ethnicity, clan, and lineage groups are popular and contested categories that fail to capture the dynamism of social organization and lived experiences in Africa and beyond. However, these differences have consequences—particularly in matters related to sex and social reproduction. Grand schemes of French colonial racial order lumped all sub-Saharan Africans into one category of blackness, or noir. Achille Mbembe has argued that “the racial unity of Africa has always been a myth.”³ Recent historical publications have qualified his assessment by examining interracial and multiracial communities that resulted from colonial encounters inside and outside of white settler colonies.⁴ The conjugal relationships between West African men and congolaises or malgaches challenge persistent misconceptions of Africa’s racial homogeny and demand that we employ concepts and terminology that accurately describe these heterogeneous African colonial military households. In the introduction, I argued for the application of “interraciality” beyond the colonizer/colonized divide. In this chapter, I use “inter-African” for mixed African military families to highlight the deep cultural divides between women and men from different regions of Africa who formed households on the frontiers of French Empire.

GOING THE DISTANCE: WEST AFRICANS IN FRENCH EMPIRE

West African soldiers’ conjugality played a prominent role in determining where they deployed in nineteenth-century French Empire. Household composition and tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices featured in administrative discussions about the effectiveness of West African troops in other regions of French Empire—French Indochina (contemporary Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), French Congo (contemporary Republic of Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic, and Chad), and Madagascar. Discussions about tirailleurs sénégalais’ utility in empire began in Southeast Asia, but they did not deploy to Vietnam until 1948. Mesdames tirailleurs were consequential to these deferred actions. Military officials believed that tirailleurs sénégalais’ West African households were sacrosanct to French colonial military campaigns and Indochinese officials did not. Officials disagreed about whether tirailleurs sénégalais should serve en famille (with their West African households) in Vietnam or should deploy as single men who could participate in prolonged conjugal unions or temporary marriages with Indochinese female colonial subjects. Household migration and local conditions in Vietnam, Congo, and Madagascar influenced the degree to which West African women and/or local women became legitimate members of “sénégalais” households.

A decade after the creation of the tirailleurs sénégalais, administrative officials in southern Vietnam broached the possibility of employing tirailleurs sénégalais as part of a permanent security force in French Indochina. Vietnamese officials specified that a small percentage of soldiers could bring their West African wives and recommended that most soldiers locate temporary local wives.⁵ The initial request in 1867 went unmet. Conversations regarding the use of West African soldiers in Southeast Asia periodically resurfaced over the next forty years. French officials in Indochina explicitly connected West African soldiers’ martial utility with their sexuality and conjugal practices. Officials wrote of West African men’s carnal desires and paternalism as if these were inveterate qualities. Indochinese officials queried tirailleurs sénégalais’ preferences for West African women and their desire to maintain racially homogenous households. These officials regarded the presence of West African women in Vietnam as a potential threat to the conjugal conventions that French colonial occupation had created in Southeast Asia. Since colonization in 1862, French soldiers stationed in Vietnam developed traditions of temporary conjugal and/or transactional sexual relationships with local women.⁶ If West African soldiers deployed to French Indochina, officials expected them to abandon aspects of their conjugal and marital practices to conform to local precedent.

Administrators in Indochina and West Africa agreed that West African soldiers required access to women’s conjugal and domestic labor, but disagreed on the importance of shared racial origins and nuclear household models for tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices. These debates continued into the 1890s, when it became clear that Indochinese officials no longer considered the presence of mesdames tirailleurs in their colony viable. By the turn of the twentieth century, an official requesting one hundred Senegalese or Soudanese tirailleurs for policing purposes in Laos unambiguously stated that these soldiers “must come to Laos without their families” and should “take one or several wives in-country.”⁷ In this proposed scheme, married tirailleurs sénégalais could leave their households in West Africa and engage in polygynous, extramarital, and polyamorous relationships with local women while deployed in Southeast Asia. Officials predicted that these soldiers would repatriate to West Africa after two or three years of service in Laos. There was no mention of their Laotian conjugal partners or potential children accompanying them home. This Indochinese official thought little of West African soldiers’ fidelity to their conjugal households on the home front. French soldiers’ widespread practice of temporary conjugality in Vietnam may have led administrators in Southeast Asia to assume that tirailleurs sénégalais could adapt to the same sexual practices. Following, there is a sense in the documents that these officials were unconvinced that mesdames tirailleurs were legitimate wives. Therefore, mesdames tirailleurs could be replaced with local Indochinese women who could perform similar conjugal labors without committing adultery. Indochinese military officials endorsed conjugal strategies in which tirailleurs sénégalais entered into temporary conjugal relationships at a time when West African military officials encouraged soldiers’ domestic stability in the form of racially homogenous mobile African military households.

Administrators across empire differed in how they viewed soldiers’ household integrity and the role of West African women in colonial conquest. They were unable to agree on how to define these conjugal unions—marriage, casual romantic liaison, temporary marriage, or concubinage—because of disagreements over where West African troops should locate romantic partners and how the military would support them. West African administrators lauded mesdames tirailleurs as essential to troop retention and stabilization on colonial campaigns. A West African administrator described tirailleurs sénégalais’ households as monogamous strongholds held together by enduring bonds. Another argued that prolonged separation would adversely affect tirailleurs sénégalais’ households.⁸ There was overwhelming West African–based administrative support for mesdames tirailleurs’ participation in the military expansion and maintenance of empire. These strong beliefs defeated a proposal to create a local committee in Senegal to maintain West African wives during their husbands’ active service in Indochina. The rejection of this proposal buttressed an implicit nineteenth-century belief—the military was not obligated to support tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal partners if they did not live within mobile military units. Despite these extensive imperial debates, tirailleurs sénégalais and their military households did not deploy to French Indochina until the mid-twentieth century. However, these debates illustrate how the French colonial military transformed a “tacit” understanding into a defensible privilege—tirailleurs sénégalais became entitled to wives while they served in French Empire.⁹

CONGO

Beginning in 1875, French military leaders, civil servants, and entrepreneurs collectively expanded France’s heretofore modest presence on the right bank of the Congo River. By the turn of the twentieth century, French Congo encompassed a territory that includes the contemporary countries of Gabon, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic, as well as regions of Cameroon and Chad. Beginning in 1875, Savorgnan de Brazza, a French-Italian aristocrat with an elite military school pedigree, led several West African missions into Equatorial Africa. These missions explored the Ogowe, Congo, Sangha, and Ubangi River basins with the intention of acquiring trading rights and increasing French entrepreneurs’ access to land and locally produced resources. Twelve laptots from coastal Senegal were members of the first mission, which explored the Ogowe River basin from 1875 to 1878. West Africans’ presence in Congo increased with each subsequent mission led by de Brazza (1879–82 and 1883–85). At the height of European conquest of Africa, de Brazza became the general commissioner of Gabon and Congo in 1886. A dozen years later, France carved Equatorial Africa into enormous parcels of land and awarded them as concessions to private commercial investors.¹⁰ West African military laborers were integral to these processes.

MAP 2.1. French Congo / French Equatorial Africa. Map by Isaac Barry

State-sponsored and privately hired agents recruited West African men for security forces and other skilled professions needed in de Brazza’s missions and other commercial enterprises in Congo. By the third West African mission, de Brazza had recognized the incomparable and irreplaceable talents of West Africans serving in Congo. Sergeant Malamine Camara was celebrated above all others. The only indigenous sergeant in the laptots corps, he single-handedly defended France’s territorial claims on the right bank of the Congo in 1881. Camara stared down Belgium’s hired hand, Henry Morton Stanley.¹¹ Sergeant Camara was also instrumental in recruiting 169 West African laptots for de Brazza’s third mission in March of 1883. This expedition included a panoply of West Africans, including former tirailleurs sénégalais and Krumen recruited from coastal areas spanning contemporary Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire.¹² In addition to tirailleurs sénégalais regiments and laptots corps, West African men signed up to serve in Congo as miliciens (militiamen), muleteers, porters, construction workers, and railway men. Despite these diverse origins and titles among these recruited laborers, once in Congo, French colonial employees and autochthonous populations referred to this heterogeneous group as “sénégalais.”¹³

The “sénégalais” in nineteenth-century Congo were a diverse and mobile population managed by a variety of authorities. These West Africans blurred distinctions between military employee and civil contractor. They changed employment frequently, swapping state-funded contracts for private enterprise. West African laptots and tirailleurs sénégalais were institutionally distinct, yet in Congo these titles could refer broadly to armed West Africans affiliated with French and other European agents.¹⁴ Some of these men were military employees, but many were civilians recruited specifically for exploration and infrastructure projects. At the conclusion of their contracts, laptots, tirailleurs sénégalais, and miliciens transitioned into noncombatant employment in Congo. They deployed myriad strategies to remain in Congo. These men integrated into local communities through marriage, hired themselves out as guides to foreign merchants, and became successful traders in their own right.¹⁵ Due to budgetary shortfalls, a ministerial decree disbanded the garrison housing laptots and tirailleurs sénégalais in 1891. Decommissioned soldiers became an integral part of local militias recruited by private enterprises in the Congo basin.¹⁶ West African military and civilian employees in French Congo traversed colonial boundaries in search of better-compensated work. Men abandoned their contracts with the French and sought higher-paying work across the river in the Belgian Congo Free State.¹⁷ The Congo Free State also recruited “sénégalais” directly from French territories in West Africa—with and without the approval of French colonial authorities.¹⁸ Once they arrived in Belgian Congo, these laborers, hired for road building and rail laying, found themselves press-ganged into military service.¹⁹ Deserters fled west across the Congo River in search of French administrative assistance and return passage to West Africa. Others sought work within the French colonial state or as security forces for concessionary companies.²⁰

Soldiers, civilians, and colonial officials from West Africa had a heavy hand in the colonization of Congo. They brought tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal traditions with them. At different moments in conquest, French officials encouraged their West African employees to travel en famille and/or to seek local conjugal partners. West African women were not listed in the inventories of employees in the first three West African missions.²¹ Colonial records rarely included soldiers’ female conjugal partners as official members of military campaigns and scientific missions. Their absence in the official record does not indicate that West African women were not present in these colonial endeavors. However, occasional references to West African men poorly executing domestic chores, which would have otherwise been allocated to their female domestic partners, suggest that mesdames tirailleurs did not have a large presence in Congo during the 1870s and 1880s. Biran Fall, a “sénégalais” serving in de Brazza’s second West African mission, was removed from kitchen duty because he washed dishes with spit, then wiped them dry with soiled socks.²² West African servicemen’s families began traveling with them to Equatorial Africa in the mid-1890s.²³ In June 1894, the wives of a tirailleurs sénégalais battalion sent to Congo were erroneously left behind in Saint-Louis. In order to remedy the situation, a local official proposed that the military earmark a portion of their husbands’ pay in order to support their abandoned families in Saint-Louis.²⁴ This proposal came at a time in which administrators across French Empire debated the conjugal and marital proclivities of tirailleurs sénégalais. Despite West African officials’ overwhelming support for the mobility and integrity of African military households, the majority of West African female conjugal partners remained on the home front. Most of the “sénégalais” serving in Equatorial Africa at the end of the nineteenth century sought female conjugal partners among local populations. French officials encouraged and supported their West African employees’ access to and unions with Congolese women.

West African and inter-African military families coexisted in Congo. There is evidence from the twentieth century that speaks to their durable presence. West Africans and congolaises set up their domestic households adjacent to military posts and colonial trading centers. Some West Africans chose to remain in Equatorial Africa after the conclusion of their contracts and established family compounds in growing colonial towns like Libreville, Franceville, and Brazzaville. By 1905, African military households had established their own village at the edge of Brazzaville.²⁵ At the beginning of the First World War, urban colonial officials channeled most West Africans into Poto-Poto, the “African” neighborhood of Brazzaville. Poto-Poto has an avenue named for Sergeant Malamine Camara and continues to serve as a locus for West African migrants today.²⁶ The West Africa populations residing in contemporary Poto-Poto are seldom the descendants of tirailleurs sénégalais and mesdames tirailleurs households. An official decree in 1905 withdrew government assistance for the relocation of mesdames tirailleurs to Congo. Even so, there was an inquiry from Kayes in 1906 regarding whether locally recruited miliciens could bring all, or some, members of their families to Congo.²⁷ By 1909, the prohibition on mesdames tirailleurs’ travel to Equatorial Africa influenced some potential male labor recruits to remain in West Africa and seek work locally.²⁸ West African men continued to travel to Congo as independent entrepreneurs and contractors. If so inclined, they would have sought conjugal partnership among local populations.

MADAGASCAR

French colonization of Madagascar brought significant numbers of West Africans to the Indian Ocean island. Formal colonization in Madagascar occurred gradually in the early nineteenth century and came to challenge the dominion of the Merina and Sakalava kingdoms in the latter half of the century.²⁹ In the 1890s, France accelerated its conquest of Madagascar and brought military forces to the island, which included a variety of mainland Africans whose origins extended from Saint-Louis to Brazzaville. Some of these tirailleurs arrived with their families. Troop and household composition reflected France’s military conquest of West and Equatorial Africa in earlier and contemporaneous years. France’s violent incorporation of Madagascar into French Empire shared casts and characteristics with previous episodes of mainland African conquest. Large-scale revolt in the mid-1890s brought General Joseph-Simon Gallieni, former commander of the tirailleurs sénégalais in Western Soudan, to Madagascar to assume military and civilian leadership of France’s newest colony. Gallieni relied on West African women and men to impose military order and then encouraged them to remain as civilians on Madagascar. “Sénégalais” gained a reputation on the island as violent colonial intermediaries. Senegalese soldiers serving in Madagascar were rumored to kill men, reduce women to slavery, and pull the hearts out of children.³⁰ It is not clear whether tirailleurs sénégalais were exceptionally violent in Madagascar in comparison with their previous exploits in West Africa and Congo. These rumors could indicate widespread disapproval of foreign Africans participating in the violence accompanying French colonial conquest.

MAP 2.2. French Madagascar. Map by Isaac Barry

In December 1894, the French landed expeditionary forces at the strategic ports of Toamasina and Mahajanga. From these coastal enclaves, French troops marched into the highlands toward the Merina capital to enforce France’s prerogative over the island. Ten percent of the fifteen thousand French troops entering Antananarivo on 30 September 1894 were West and North African soldiers.³¹ The West African troops serving in this campaign were labeled haoussa tirailleurs. Haoussa soldiers were a motley crew that had been recruited from disbanded tirailleurs sénégalais battalions and new recruits from contemporary Benin/Nigeria borderlands. Some had served as tirailleurs sénégalais in Congo in the early 1890s.³² In 1891, two companies of tirailleurs sénégalais left Congo for Dahomey in order to participate in France’s conquest of the kingdom.³³ Behanzin, the leader of Dahomey, surrendered in 1894 to a French African colonial army that included troops recruited from the Senegal and Niger River basins, West and Central Africans previously residing in Congo, and a potpourri of troops recruited from Dahomey and its environs. The French had begun recruiting this final group in 1893 and labeled them haoussa soldiers. The traditional homeland of Hausa speakers is located north of the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers. The French recruited haoussa soldiers from across the border in Yoruba-speaking areas under British colonial control in neighboring Nigeria. There were likely a minority of Hausa speakers among the haoussa troops and the French military’s use of the term is misleading and misrepresents the ethnolinguistic origins of their soldiers. These mislabeled haoussa servicemen from the Dahomeyan campaign were among the first troops to serve France in Madagascar.³⁴ Evidence from the Madagascan campaign suggests that conjugal partners were with these haoussa soldiers, but it is unclear whether these women traveled with West African tirailleurs to Madagascar or were malgache women whom soldiers had incorporated into colonial regiments during their march from coastal ports to Antananarivo.³⁵ Hundreds of porters and muleteers from the Senegal and Niger River basins were also among these forces, but these militarized civilian employees rarely brought their households into French Empire.³⁶

After the initial French troop buildup in Madagascar, leaders of the Merina Kingdom—Queen Ranavalona III and Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony—signed a treaty with France on 1 October 1895. This treaty unambiguously made Madagascar a French protectorate state. France faced a range of thorny social and political issues on the island. Merina state control over low-status men had faltered as their system of forced labor, the fanompoana, devolved in the 1890s. The fanompoana had channeled these men into state infrastructure projects and the Merina military. The destabilization of the monarchy prompted many imperial Merina subjects to flee conscription and engage in banditry on the margins of Merina’s empire.³⁷ The capitulation of the royal family weakened the state military and strengthened marauding bands whose membership began to include defecting soldiers and former slaves. In a context of increasing instability, the Menalamba uprising began in earnest during November 1895. Menalamba refers to the red shawls that the participants wore. These women and men sought to violently remove foreigners and foreign influence from Madagascar.

The French inadvertently bolstered the number of Madagascans participating in the Menalamba uprising by abolishing slavery in August 1896. This decree occurred in tandem with the formal designation of Madagascar as a French colony. The estimated number of slaves in Madagascar at the moment of emancipation varies from five hundred thousand to one million slaves—on an island with a population of two and a half million.³⁸ The French fueled social chaos in Madagascar by untethering at least 20 percent of the islands’ residents from their former masters and the Merina state. Former slaves joined the ongoing uprising in order to survive without their former patrons.³⁹ As the numbers of Menalamba participants grew, the nascent French colony responded by consolidating military and civilian power in the hands of recently promoted General Joseph-Simon Gallieni.