French military river barges.81 On campaign, mesdames tirailleurs constructed temporary and semipermanent homes in open-air bivouacs. Where possible, mesdames tirailleurs constructed their households on the margins of military and administrative spaces in order to create a distance between their households and French officialdom.82 From this distance, these women raised children, pounded millet, prepared rationed food, and laundered their husbands’ uniforms.83 Mesdames tirailleurs’ innumerable responsibilities were central to the functioning of this mobile colonial military community. They participated in the refashioning of ancestral social, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies within the context of the French military community.
The rank of individual tirailleurs sénégalais could influence their households’ social status among their peers, but ethnolinguistic tensions and caste hierarchies influenced intra- and inter-household relations.84 The continuing salience of slave ancestry in the military community curbed former slaves’ aspirations for social mobility in the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais. French officials avoided promoting former slaves because they believed these men had “an innate mentality for servitude,” which made them ineligible for leadership roles in the military.85 African soldiers of free status would not obey the command of petty officers who had slave ancestry. They also refused to serve under men who were slaves—for example, the men serving in the tirailleurs sénégalais through the engagé à temps system.86 The colonial military did not foster meritocratic advancement in the tirailleurs sénégalais and former slaves rarely achieved the stripes of a corporal or a sergeant.
African military households’ ethnolinguistic groups and lineage affiliations affected social relationships among members of the military community. France’s conquest of Bundu occasioned the liberation of many Bamana and Malinké female slaves. These captives were subsequently integrated into the tirailleurs sénégalais serving in the region. According to military observers, these liberated women fortuitously found their countrymen among the tirailleurs sénégalais, some of whom had grown up in the same villages. These common geographical and ancestral ties facilitated a number of conjugal relationships within the tirailleurs sénégalais.87 Ethnic diversity and tensions within the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais also hampered troops’ discipline and confidence. The history of El Hajj Umar Tall’s Tukulor conquest of the Bamana states of Kaarta and Segu embittered Bamanakan toward Tukulors serving side by side in ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais. These feelings also incited quarrels between Bamana and Tukulor mesdames tirailleurs. In Bafoulabé (contemporary southwestern Mali), a French commander incarcerated two particularly bellicose women at the police station for a twenty-four-hour period in order to set an example for the “feminine world” in the military community.88 This was a rare example of French officials directly disciplining mesdames tirailleurs.
As with many West African households, senior infantrymen and African officers displayed their status and wealth through their belongings and the comportment of their wives. Some tirailleurs sénégalais had multiwife households that included numerous other dependents—orderlies, slaves, and children. Larger households evidenced the greater prosperity of tirailleurs sénégalais and their wives. Military wives exhibited their household’s wealth with their clothing, accessories, and comportment. On a steamer traveling up the Senegal River, Aïssata, the wife of sergeant N’gor Faye, posed for a photo displaying a remarkable quantity of jewelry and other ornaments.89 Outside of Koulikoro (northeast of Bamako), mesdames tirailleurs accessorized themselves picturesquely, wearing beautiful wraparound skirts (pagnes) and long flowing dresses (boubous), with their hair tucked under light handkerchiefs. Jewelry covered their hands, arms, ears, noses, ankles, and toes. Many wives cosmetically altered their nails’ color with henna and wore antimony (kohl) on their lips.90 Through ornamentation, cleanliness, and propriety, mesdames tirailleurs distinguished themselves from civilian women on campaign and in town.91
Men’s and women’s gendered roles in the maintenance of the military community complied with military exigencies while cherry-picking from and conforming to gendered expectations affiliated with West African village life. In the bivouacs shaded by enormous baobabs or in the military camps adjacent to arid Agadez, gendered work and leisure organized the activities of African military households.92 Mesdames tirailleurs were responsible for maintaining households, preparing meals, and raising children. They also provided sexual services to their soldiering husbands. Many tirailleurs sénégalais spoke of their wives while away on campaign and anticipating returning to them.93 The pull of domestic life led many married tirailleurs sénégalais to spend their leisure time with their households, which provided a site to entertain guests and maintain families.94 Married soldiers’ leisure differed from that of unmarried tirailleurs sénégalais, who engaged in homosocial male activities like consuming dolo (a fermented beverage made from sorghum), smoking pipe tobacco, engaging in convivial conversations, and seeking romantic partners in nearby civilian populations.95
Tirailleurs sénégalais and mesdames tirailleurs wanted their conjugal unions to map onto local traditions so that their marriages gained a semblance of legitimacy. In the absence of the tirailleurs sénégalais’ lineage elders, military officials provided the authority to welcome newlyweds into the extended family of the tirailleurs sénégalais community. By the end of the nineteenth century, the French military offered potential recruits enlistment bonuses in order to supply soldiers with the means to pay bridewealth for their future wives.96 Ranking officers provided infantrymen with opportunities to locate new wives on campaign and in camp. French military officers acted as officiators in Christian marriage ceremonies.97 Officers supplied domesticated animals for sacrifice and consumption in Muslim and pagan marital celebrations occurring near military camps.98 Brides of indigenous officers and favored infantrymen could expect gifts of cloth or other household items that would assist newlyweds in establishing households. The French colonial military accommodated the increasing number of tirailleurs sénégalais families residing near posts by establishing separate married housing by the end of the 1890s.99
In some exceptional instances, French officials acted as intermediaries or extended kin in their soldiers’ conjugal affairs in life and death. Their power to shape the contours and sanctity of marriage buoyed the prerogative of their soldiers over local tradition and against traditional authorities. In one case, Samba, a marabout and a military interpreter for the tirailleurs sénégalais, married a woman of noble lineage in Manding.100 The interpreter had not completed bridewealth payments to his father-in-law. After the death of the couple’s first child, the father-in-law threatened to dissolve the marriage. French officer Marie Étienne Péroz intervened on the behalf of his interpreter and sent an expedited message to the father-in-law saying that he would regulate the affair in person.101 In addition to intervening in family affairs, military officials made limited efforts to support widowed mesdames tirailleurs. French officials liberated female slaves who were the wives of fallen tirailleurs sénégalais in acts of emancipation that followed local and Muslim practice.102 Family allowances and widow’s pay were not standardized in the nineteenth century, but the military awarded limited and inconsistent benefits to tirailleurs sénégalais’ widows and orphans. Some widowed women remarried within the military community, which became an accepted practice that shared characteristics with “levirate” marriage. This marital tradition encouraged widows to marry male relatives of their deceased husbands in order to maintain lineage connections and familial wealth.
The relationship between the French colonial state and mesdames tirailleurs was ill-defined. Mesdames tirailleurs were not official employees of the French colonial army. As members of the tirailleurs sénégalais community, they were expected to withstand hardship without complaint and obey military discipline.103 In an extreme example of the degree to which mesdames tirailleurs complied with military discipline and authority, the wife of soldier Moussa Traoré gave birth while marching on campaign. She went into labor while following a regiment from Sikasso to the Mossi region. The commanding French officer left two tirailleurs sénégalais with her while the rest of the regiment continued to their destination. The new
