and the military, she had walked the final stage of the march with her newborn in her arms.104
As accepted and recognized members of a growing military community, wives acquired food rations, housing, and a degree of social security. In the vein of the breadwinner model, the colonial military transmitted orders and disciplinary measures to mesdames tirailleurs via their husbands. They also channeled rations and resources into military households via soldiers. When husbands were away on lengthy assignments, these women lacked the resources normally allocated to them via their husbands. A group of mesdames tirailleurs protested before Colonel Combes because they lacked the basic means of survival. Colonel Combes threatened to whip them if they did not disperse. The mesdames tirailleurs fled, then regrouped and brought their grievances before Gallieni. Eventually, the gendarmerie broke up the protesters and military officers dispatched couriers to their campaigning husbands.105
French military officials rarely intervened in the domestic affairs of African military households. One official claimed that “conjugal correction” was the responsibility of tirailleurs sénégalais.106 Patriarchal prerogatives could transgress the bounds of proper decorum, but the line between domestic discipline and abuse was hard to locate. French observers wrote about the extreme lengths that tirailleurs sénégalais took to ensure the fidelity of their conjugal partners. One group of tirailleurs sénégalais built a small earthen enclosure with chest-high walls, where they left their wives guarded while they were away on campaign. Suspicious of the guard, tirailleurs sénégalais supplied their wives with chastity belts. Another group of West African soldiers stationed in Zinder kept their conjugal partners hidden in a house, guarded by an old blind man, in an unfrequented part of the city. These efforts shielded conjugal partners from the sexual advances of French officers and other tirailleurs sénégalais. Read another way, soldiers’ female conjugal partners were prisoners. By physically restricting their mobility, tirailleurs sénégalais prevented newly acquired conjugal partners from returning to their home communities. In his memoir, French sergeant Charles Guilleux recounted these activities and cited a Nigerien male civilian who believed that “Senegalese and Soudanese soldiers are liars and thieves, who take our women from us.”107 French observers witnessed these behaviors and in condoning them made them part of African colonial soldiers’ conjugal practices.
Gender-based violence was an accepted component of tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions. French observers generally overlooked soldiers’ mistreatment of civilian women because forced conjugal association did not contravene military order and corresponded with the paternalistic authority accompanying colonial rule. French commanding officers interfered in conjugal abuse when the women were known members of the military community. Abusive behaviors needed to reach egregious levels—like attempted murder—before commanding officers reprimanded and disciplined tirailleurs sénégalais. Indigenous corporal Hannah Ramata, stationed in Matam (present-day Senegal), stabbed his wife below her right breast in a fit of jealousy. Ramata’s superiors sentenced him to fifteen days of imprisonment in irons. His commanders reduced his diet to biscuits and water.108 French commanders took responsibility for the families of imprisoned soldiers and ensured that they continued to receive rations while the “head” of family served his sentence.109
French commanding officers were poor substitutes for familial, village, or community leaders. The French military’s distribution of justice and social welfare was insufficient for maintaining a moral economy. They were not invested in curating the reproduction of their military community. Nevertheless, the community affiliated with the tirailleurs sénégalais had the potential to become an extended family united by uniform, common resources, and trials faced on campaign. Once in African military households, women and men could build communal ties, reduce their outsider status, and increase their socioeconomic worth despite slave origins. Women’s membership in the colonial military community provided them with access to resources often unavailable to women unaffiliated with tirailleurs sénégalais. These possibilities came with the hardships affiliated with life on the road with the tirailleurs sénégalais. The patriarchal and misogynist culture of military conquest created gendered inequities and increased risk for mesdames tirailleurs.
* * *
After her marriage to a tirailleur sénégalais in March 1888, Ciraïa Aminata exited the written historical record. As a madame tirailleur, she may have participated in Samori Touré’s capture, the fall of Dahomey, or conquest in Madagascar. She, and other West African military wives like her, experienced the onset of colonization in the most intimate realms of human experience—in their conjugal relationships and within their households. Many mesdames tirailleurs experienced emancipation and marriage simultaneously. The French colonial military encouraged, expedited, and sanctioned these unions without fully legitimating them. By most West African customs, mesdames tirailleurs’ marriages shared characteristics with concubinage or lacked the prenuptial rites that would have made them legitimate. Within the military community, the conjugal practices of nineteenth-century West Africa served as the foundation for marital traditions that traveled with the tirailleurs sénégalais as they deployed to new frontiers of colonial conquest. Marriage, once a mechanism to protect vulnerable women from social instability, became a vehicle through which West African women acquired resources, gained membership in an extended colonial family, and migrated long distances to the frontiers of French Empire in Africa. By the time West African military employees deployed to Congo and Madagascar, their households were a sacrosanct feature of the colonial military landscape. In 1911, one French observer commented, “Ce qu’il y a de précieux chez le tirailleur, c’est sa femme” (That which the tirailleur holds precious is his wife/woman).110
2
Colonial Conquest “en Famille”
African Military Households in Congo and Madagascar, 1880–1905
For the last twenty years, the colony of Senegal has supplied the contingents of all the missions and expeditions formed for the conquest of Africa . . . private industry and foreign colonization alike have drawn their elements from Senegal.
—Governor-general of French West Africa to the minister of the colonies, Saint-Louis, 26 July 18991
FRANCE HAD HISTORICAL TIES TO CONGO AND MADAGASCAR through its participation in global oceanic African slave trades. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, France converted its nominal presence in these regions to formal colonial rule. Tirailleurs sénégalais and other West Africans participated in France’s colonial expansion into the Congo and Ubangi-Shari River basins of Equatorial Africa and across the mountainous spine of Madagascar. Congo and Madagascar are understudied episodes in tirailleurs sénégalais’ historiography and neglected regions of African and French colonial history.2 This chapter examines these regions in parallel because they showcase how different, yet contemporaneous, nineteenth-century contexts shaped the formation of African military households. In Congo and Madagascar, tirailleurs sénégalais and their conjugal partners continued and modified conjugal practices imported from West African campaigns. These military households challenged local traditions of marital legitimacy.
West Africans maintained and expanded their households while carrying out the work of empire in radically different political and geographic settings. In the Congo River basin, West Africans participated in a series of exploratory missions led by Savorgnan de Brazza during the 1870s and 1880s. The earlier missions were funded by the Geographic Society of Paris and the International African Association. De Brazza encountered multiple chiefdoms and signed trading treaties with them. In 1880, at the Malebo Pool, Chief Makoko of the Bateke/Tio kingdom ceded land for a French trading post, which became the foundation for Brazzaville. French public and private organizations funded the formal establishment of trading and military posts throughout the Congo region. Ultimately, imperial and capitalistic interests would parcel the region into large privately owned concessions.
