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
