West African soldiers’ participation in the expansion and maintenance of the French colonial state had extensive gendered effects in their home-front communities and in foreign war-front societies. Simultaneously, soldiers’ female conjugal partners (and their communities) influenced colonial military practice and policy. Tirailleurs sénégalais’ households were at the center of diverse interests and stakeholders, which collectively illustrate the dynamic relationship between gender and militarism in the history of African colonial soldiers. According to Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, militarism “is the extension of war-related, war-preparatory, and war-based meanings and activities outside of ‘war proper’ and into social and political life.”6 Gender, or perceptions of sexualized and embodied difference, has a dynamic relationship with militarism. In multivalent and concerted ways, gender and militarism inform military and civilian norms and practices. Alicia Decker and Patricia McFadden have each pointed out that in postcolonial African examples, state militarism often involved, in Decker’s words, a “reassertion of manhood undermined by colonial rule.”7 Colonial rule may have undermined the feminine and masculine authority of colonized civilians, but it certainly could bolster the masculine authority of African men enlisted in colonial militaries. Militarizing Marriage tracks soldiers’ sexuality and conjugality to illustrate how African servicemen and the colonial military contributed to new iterations of gendered relations in West Africa and French Empire.
This book builds on an extensive historical literature dealing with African colonial soldiers that has gradually taken up the concerns of gender, sexuality, and militarism. Early publications concerning African colonial soldiers tended to glorify European officers, African enlistees, or important battles. In doing so, these older works reproduced narrow visions of what militaries were and what they did in colonial Africa.8 “New” military histories, which deal with wide-ranging themes of war and society, portray the lived experiences of colonial soldiers. Many of these works include women, but they have a tendency to relegate them to the domestic realm or cast them as minor characters in soldiers’ social worlds.9 A number of studies have focused on soldiers’ wives and households in order to understand how colonial statecraft and African housecraft operated in tandem.10 Africanist military historians query how masculinity, patriarchy, and soldiering work together to produce discourses concerning African and colonial “martial races.”11 With an eye toward gender, Gregory Mann’s Native Sons captures the complexity of active and retired tirailleurs sénégalais’ navigation of shifting social, political, and economic forces in West Africa and French Empire.12 Michelle Moyd’s Violent Intermediaries illustrates that women and gender were integral to Askari ways of war and soldiers’ participation in the everyday violence of German colonialism.13 Militarizing Marriage joins a small field of works that address forced conjugal association, sexual violence, and female subjugation in colonial and postcolonial military histories of Africa.14 In doing so, this book follows their lead and incorporates the concepts prevalent among studies of gendered violence in colonial and postcolonial conflicts.15 West African soldiers’ conjugal and marital traditions serve as the unit of analysis through which to understand how “war making . . . relies on gendered constructions and images of the state, state militaries, and their role in the international system” over the course of decades and across diverse geographies of French colonialism.16
Militarized women have long born the title “civilian.” Civilian is a deceptive term which often reinforces false gendered distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, as well as trivializing the degree to which women are involved in war.17 West African “civilian” women were auxiliary combatants, sutlers, and domestic laborers while accompanying their husbands to colonial conquest in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, and Morocco through the First World War. The inclusion of African women in these colonial campaigns contradicts common narratives about the masculinization of nineteenth-century Western European armed forces. Historians have shown that women commonly provided essential services to land-based armies prior to the 1850s.18 Afterward, the nationalization and professionalization of North Atlantic militaries led to the erasure of female civilians from state-funded armies.19 These trends paralleled the modernization of the industrial-military complex and the emergence of the male citizen-soldier as an ideal model for civic membership in North Atlantic countries.20 Dominant moral discourses concerning feminine propriety compelled state armies to progressively displace civilian women from military spaces. By the late nineteenth century, North American and western European armies were predominantly devoid of wives and female camp followers.21 These symbiotic male soldier/female civilian relationships continued to exist in the European armed forces on the “fringes of empire.”22 Contrary to this narrative, Militarizing Marriage locates the colonial frontier at the center of late nineteenth-century European military practices. French military officials condoned tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal traditions, which indicates the existence of paradoxes at the heart of military policy and colonial militarization in West Africa. Colonized African women and men lived these paradoxes as they became new members of an expanding French army.
Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices and marital traditions produced African military households. The contravention of premarital heterosexual practices and gender-based violence were among the constitutive processes that produced military households in West Africa and French Empire. The literature concerning forced conjugal association and gender-based violence in contemporary African conflicts offers historians theoretical and methodological tools to reexamine the intersection of warfare, gender-based violence, and conjugality in the African colonial past.23 Contemporary feminist concerns with the globalization of militarism provide models for interrogating French imperial militarism and how the colonial army managed sexual violence and conjugality in war-front interactions.24 Military officers seldom viewed tirailleurs sénégalais’ sexual exploits as transgressing normative sexual behaviors affiliated with the colonial military. In rare, egregious cases, French officers took disciplinary action against West African soldiers for gender-based violence, but those measures did little to protect female colonial subjects from future transgressions. Militarization increased the vulnerability of women and their communities in French Empire. Combined with colonialism, militarization circumscribed female colonial subjects’ and/or their guardians’ ability to hold colonial soldiers accountable for violating local marital customs or normative sexual practices.
The presence of the French colonial army compromised the ability of traditional authorities—relatives and community leaders—to manage sexual relationships between tirailleurs sénégalais and civilian women. This had many consequences. Some communities and individuals encouraged women to enter into conjugal relationships with West African soldiers in order to mitigate the effects of conflict and conquest. Vulnerable and enterprising women could have seen military marriage as a strategy to leave previous marriages or domestic slavery, or to provide some stability in the upheavals accompanying colonial conquest and conflict.25 Military officials became de facto authority figures in regulating the conjugal affairs of local women and tirailleurs sénégalais. Significantly, the military established and maintained state-funded brothels for their troops. In these spaces of transactional sex, they monitored troops’ sexual behavior and discouraged conjugal or romantic inclinations.26 In official correspondence related to soldiers’ conjugality, military officials avoided terms like sexual enslavement or forced marriage to describe tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships. To do so would have opened the colonial army up to civilian, metropolitan, and international criticism.
Throughout much of the colonial period, the French military operated outside international, French, and colonial laws aiming to improve the conditions of women. Antislavery acts in 1848 and 1905, the 1926 Slavery Convention, as well as the French Family Code, the Mandel Decree of 1939, and the Jacquinot Decree of 1951 all aimed to shore up women’s rights—the latter pieces of legislation setting minimum marriageable ages and requiring future brides’ consent to marriage. French military officials often lacked the political will to enforce international and colonial statutes in relation to tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships with female colonial subjects. Instead, they operated
