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
