These soldiers defended French interests when challenged by local authorities and by the expansionist maneuvers of the nearby Belgian Congo Free State.
France’s gradual conquest of Congo through trade ambitions and its limited use of martial forces starkly contrasts with the concerted and coordinated military campaigns of the 1890s in Madagascar. France’s military conquest of the large island followed decades, if not centuries, of Europeans’ participation in Indian Oceanic trade and regional affairs. In the early nineteenth century, the Merina Kingdom—under the monarchical power of Radama I and his successor Queen Ranavalona I—expanded and consolidated its authority over much of Madagascar. During their rule, increasing numbers of foreign diplomats, travelers, and missionaries relocated to the island. France launched several military incursions into Madagascar with varying goals and results. The campaign of 1883–85 ended with a treaty placing the Merina Kingdom/Madagascar under a French protectorate. From 1885, a French resident oversaw the terms of the peace deal and Madagascar’s payment of postconflict indemnities to France. In subsequent years, the Merina Kingdom faltered in its ability to maintain political continuity and hegemony over the island. French expeditionary forces arrived in the 1890s to improve social stability and enforce France’s formal domination of Madagascar. Military campaigns included seasoned tirailleurs sénégalais as well as West African laborers serving in auxiliary capacities.
West Africans performed a variety of functions in France’s colonization of Congo and Madagascar. The origins, identities, and titles of West African colonial employees and their conjugal partners multiplied as they circulated among imperial ports and military campaigns. Governor Louis Faidherbe recruited the original regiment of the tirailleurs sénégalais from the northern region of Senegambia. By the campaigns of the 1880s, recruitment expanded to incorporate more men from the Niger River basin—particularly Bamanakan—making tirailleurs sénégalais a misnomer within a generation of its inauguration. West Africans shipping out to Equatorial Africa and Madagascar served France as tirailleurs sénégalais, laptots, and miliciens—militiamen predominantly hired to accompany civilian exploration missions. In French African empire, Congolese and Madagascan communities transformed the terminology and monikers used to identify the foreign Africans accompanying conquest. The distinction between military and civilian colonial employees blurred as West Africans completed their labor contracts and remained in Congo or Madagascar to work in the industries accompanying colonialism. Irrespective of origin or employment status, once in Congo or Madagascar, local officials and populations often referred to these diverse West Africans as “sénégalais.” West African men working abroad took up and modified tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices and marital traditions.
West Africans’ conjugality appeared in debates concerning the articulation and future of French colonialism. Their conjugal practices traveled to new destinations and evolved alongside colonial conquest. In late nineteenth-century West Africa, tirailleurs sénégalais’ ability to establish and build households was an expected benefit affiliated with military service. In Congo and Madagascar, West African employees arrived with their West African wives and/or sought local conjugal partners. Tirailleurs sénégalais brought their conjugal practices to campaigns in foreign Africa. French officials condoned soldiers’ conjugal behaviors in West Africa, but hesitated to do so in Congo and Madagascar. Geographic and sociocultural differences gave military officials pause in ascribing marital legitimacy to soldiers’ inter-African households. In Congo and Madagascar, French officials recorded episodes of sexual violence, female abduction, and forced conjugal association perpetrated by West African colonial employees.
Race and other forms of sociocultural difference appeared in empire-wide debates concerning “sénégalais” conjugality and marital legitimacy. These discussions began among administrators in West Africa and Southeast Asia regarding the possibility of deploying tirailleurs sénégalais in Vietnam. These far-flung officials supported West African soldiers’ access to women’s domestic and sexual labor, but debated the ideal racial composition of their households—West African women and men or Vietnamese women and African men. These discussions also occurred in Congo and Madagascar, but relied on slightly different sociocultural taxonomies and fumbled through the broad racial categorizations that served to organize and distinguish populations in French Empire. Evidence from Congo and Madagascar suggests that local officials made more nuanced distinctions. They readily recognized the legitimacy of West African military households in Congo and Madagascar. Conversely, they struggled to legitimize conjugal relationships between “sénégalais” and congolaise (Congolese) or malgache (Madagascan) women. These households transgressed sociolinguistic and geographical boundaries in Africa, which prompted officials and local populations to question consensuality and legitimacy. The gendered violence affiliated with colonial militarism threw the distinctions among West Africans, Congolese, and Madagascans into stark relief. West African men’s relationships with congolaises and malgaches catalyzed new debates in the colonial administration about female slavery, forced conjugal association, and the colonial military’s tolerance of “sénégalais” exploitation of women in foreign colonial territories.
Historical actors and historians have struggled to locate the most accurate and appropriate terminology to identify sociocultural organization and its transgressions on the African continent. Race, tribe, ethnicity, clan, and lineage groups are popular and contested categories that fail to capture the dynamism of social organization and lived experiences in Africa and beyond. However, these differences have consequences—particularly in matters related to sex and social reproduction. Grand schemes of French colonial racial order lumped all sub-Saharan Africans into one category of blackness, or noir. Achille Mbembe has argued that “the racial unity of Africa has always been a myth.”3 Recent historical publications have qualified his assessment by examining interracial and multiracial communities that resulted from colonial encounters inside and outside of white settler colonies.4 The conjugal relationships between West African men and congolaises or malgaches challenge persistent misconceptions of Africa’s racial homogeny and demand that we employ concepts and terminology that accurately describe these heterogeneous African colonial military households. In the introduction, I argued for the application of “interraciality” beyond the colonizer/colonized divide. In this chapter, I use “inter-African” for mixed African military families to highlight the deep cultural divides between women and men from different regions of Africa who formed households on the frontiers of French Empire.
GOING THE DISTANCE: WEST AFRICANS IN FRENCH EMPIRE
West African soldiers’ conjugality played a prominent role in determining where they deployed in nineteenth-century French Empire. Household composition and tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices featured in administrative discussions about the effectiveness of West African troops in other regions of French Empire—French Indochina (contemporary Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), French Congo (contemporary Republic of Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic, and Chad), and Madagascar. Discussions about tirailleurs sénégalais’ utility in empire began in Southeast Asia, but they did not deploy to Vietnam until 1948. Mesdames tirailleurs were consequential to these deferred actions. Military officials believed that tirailleurs sénégalais’ West African households were sacrosanct to French colonial military campaigns and Indochinese officials did not. Officials disagreed about whether tirailleurs sénégalais should serve en famille (with their West African households) in Vietnam or should deploy as single men who could participate in prolonged conjugal unions or temporary marriages with Indochinese female colonial subjects. Household migration and local conditions in Vietnam, Congo, and Madagascar influenced the degree to which West African women and/or local women became legitimate members of “sénégalais” households.
A decade after the creation of the tirailleurs sénégalais, administrative officials in southern Vietnam broached the possibility of employing tirailleurs sénégalais as part of a permanent security force in French Indochina. Vietnamese officials specified that a small percentage of soldiers could bring their West African wives and recommended that most soldiers locate temporary local wives.5 The initial request in 1867 went unmet. Conversations regarding the use of West African soldiers
