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
