Introduction
French African Soldiers and Female Conjugal Partners in Colonial Militarism
IN DECEMBER 1887, A CONTINGENT OF TIRAILLEURS SÉNÉGALAIS captured Mamadou Lamine Drame. The tirailleurs sénégalais were West Africans serving in the French colonial army. Mamadou Lamine Drame was a revolutionary West African jihadist leader whose campaigns to create a Muslim state based in Bundu occurred at a time in which the French colonial government, based in Saint-Louis, sought to bring the Senegal River valley under its formal rule. These incompatible visions of West African expansion led French military leaders to cast Drame as a religious zealot and enemy of the state. After his dramatic capture and murder, French military officials oversaw the distribution of Drame’s conjugal partners—wives and concubines—to tirailleurs sénégalais.1 These women became the “wives” of West African colonial soldiers because French officials believed that the transfer of women from the vanquished to the victors followed local martial and marital customs, as well as assuring these women’s welfare in a politically unstable environment.2 As soldiers’ wives, these women became members of a large civilian contingent supporting African troops participating in France’s conquest of inland West Africa. Some likely traveled with tirailleurs sénégalais to overseas deployments in French Congo and Madagascar in the following decade.
Seventy years later and 7,500 miles to the east in Hanoi, Abdou Karim Bâ, a French West African soldier, adopted Vuti Chat. Vuti Chat was a hospitalized eleven-year-old Vietnamese female war orphan of the French Indochina War (1945–54). When the war concluded with Vietnam’s independence, Abdou Karim Bâ was one of roughly twenty thousand West African soldiers deployed in the region. In 1956, Abdou Bâ moved Vuti Chat from Hanoi to Kaolack, Senegal. The French colonial military facilitated the relocation of members of tirailleurs sénégalais’ Afro-Vietnamese households from Southeast Asia to their colonies of origin. Chat was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Vietnamese women and children who relocated to West Africa in the 1950s. Bâ’s mother and sisters raised Chat and, at age seventeen, she became Bâ’s wife.3 Chat and Bâ married in 1962, when the French Empire that had once connected West Africa and Southeast Asia no longer existed. Senegal became Chat’s home and her foster family became her only kin. In 2008, Asstou Bâ, née Vuti Chat, was a childless widow, a socially marginal member of her husband’s extended kin, and an infrequent participant in the diasporic Vietnamese community in Dakar. Due to Asstou Bâ’s connection to the French military, she secured French citizenship during Senegal’s decolonization and continued to collect a widow’s pension.
These two examples of militarized conjugality bookend the imperial career of tirailleurs sénégalais. The first French governor of colonial Senegal, Louis Faidherbe, inaugurated the tirailleurs sénégalais in 1857. This locally recruited fighting force paralleled transformations in French colonialism’s form and function in West Africa and French Empire over the subsequent century. West African soldiers served in the expansion, maintenance, and defense of France’s empire in West Africa, Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, North Africa, the Levant, and French Indochina from the 1880s to 1962. Across the history and geography of modern French Empire, tirailleurs sénégalais advanced conjugal strategies and engaged in marital relationships with women at home and abroad. The coexistence of manifold marital practices and “customs” in French colonial militarized spaces influenced the processes through which civilian women and girls became the wives of West African soldiers. The French military managed African soldiers’ sexuality, conjugality, and marital legitimacy in a range of consensual and nonconsensual war-front (and homefront) interactions with female civilians because soldiers’ sexuality and their households were crucial to the operation of French colonialism. The French colonial military played a significant role in shaping masculinity, femininity, domesticity, patriarchy, and sexual behaviors among members of African military households in West Africa and across French Empire.
MAP 0.1. Modern French Empire. Map by Isaac Barry
Vuti Chat and the former conjugal partners of Mamadou Lamine Drame evidence an evolution in tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal and marital practices. In the 1880s, French military officials witnessed the distribution of captured women to their local military employees—providing tacit sanction to a purported indigenous custom that shared characteristics with female domestic slavery. By the 1950s, military and civilian administrations coordinated their management of soldiers’ marriages, soldiers’ adoption of foreign children, and long-distance travel accommodations for members of their cross-colonial households. Over the decades, the French colonial military and state gradually took jurisdiction over the processes through which African soldiers’ female conjugal partners and households acquired legitimacy. The French colonial military developed martial traditions emphasizing masculinity and celebrating family men. Gender, wives, and households were vital components of these ideals. Military officials progressively policed the boundaries of propriety related to tirailleurs sénégalais’ sexual practices and partners.
Cynthia Enloe has noted that “women’s myriad relationships to militaristic practices and to the military are far less the result of amorphous tradition or culture than they are the product of particular—traceable—decisions.”4 Militarizing Marriage traces the evolution of women’s relationships with the tirailleurs sénégalais in order to demonstrate that sexuality, gender, and women were fundamental to violent colonial expansion and the everyday operation of colonial rule in West Africa and French Empire. To varying degrees, members of African military households and French colonial officials determined whether conjugal relationships were, or could become, legitimate marriages. Gender, heteronormativity, and racial order influenced processes of legitimation, and contestations over conjugal legitimacy shaped colonial welfare policies and military strategy. Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices and marital traditions evolved within nineteenth- and twentieth-century French colonialism. Vuti Chat and the former wives and concubines of Mamadou Lamine Drame illustrate that women were essential to the articulation of French militarism and colonialism.
MILITARISM, GENDER, AND TIRAILLEURS SÉNÉGALAIS
Mamadou Lamine Drame’s former conjugal partners and Vietnamese migrant wives demonstrate the importance of studying gender and militarism in African and French colonial history. Amina Mama and Margo Okazawa-Rey write that colonial militaries “relied on military force, deployed along with a formidable array of political, economic and cultural technologies of violence, thus militarising the societies they conquered
