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
