was an explicitly patriarchal institution and a violently coercive force that managed soldiers’ customs related to sexuality, conjugality, and marriage. Colonial soldiers and their families were on the front line of what Emily Burrill has identified as the colonial state’s marriage legibility project. African soldiers sought the military’s sanction for marital legitimacy in order to acquire state-allocated benefits for their households. However, as the military narrowed and fixed definitions of military marriages through policy and decree, these marriages diverged from civilian West Africans’ conjugal traditions.38
African military households sat at the convergence of West African, French, and military traditions of marriage within spaces of colonial conflict. African soldiers, their conjugal partners, and French officials had different ideas about prenuptial rites and what constituted legitimate marriage. In West Africa, marital rites differed according to community and were influenced by local and global religious beliefs—predominantly Islam. West African communities practiced polygyny and monogamy. Family organization occurred along matrilineal and patrilineal lines and extended beyond the nuclear family. Prenuptial customs for legitimate marriages could include the exchange of gifts, labor, or marriage payments. The socioeconomic rank, caste, or slave status/ancestry of prospective conjugal partners altered the ways in which individuals and communities observed premarital rites.39
The French colonial army made overtures toward codifying West African marital practices before the civilian colonial state made marital custom its prerogative. The military’s goal was to recognize a limited set of practices that would make tirailleurs sénégalais’ marriages more legible to military officials. The exchange of bridewealth was an early, favored standard for recognizing legitimate marriages in West Africa. As the colonial state and its military officials wedged diverse West African marital practices into French colonial and military traditions, they stripped them of value and complexity. Officials measured African marital traditions against definitions of marriage culled from French tradition and civil code. In late nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, marriage was often celebrated through Christian religious ceremonies and registered with a “secular” state. French marriage fell within the realm of civil affairs, which the state presided over in order to maintain its own authority and patriarchal power over women, primogeniture inheritance, and parents’ authority over their children.40 Marriages registered with the French state were monogamous, and, as a consequence, the French military rarely recognized or financially supported West African soldiers’ second or subsequent wives. French military officials narrowed and rigidified “marital legitimacy” but stopped short of static definition. Their efforts steadily nudged tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital practices away from West African and French civil customs toward marital traditions evolving within the French colonial military.
Military officials referred to an older French Atlantic marital tradition—mariage à la mode du pays—in order to describe tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal behaviors when deployed in colonial frontiers of Africa and Madagascar. Mariage à la mode du pays was a conjugal tradition typified by African women forming temporary, though often protracted, sexual and domestic relationships with European merchants, administrators, and military officials.41 Governor Louis Faidherbe infamously participated in a relationship of this nature with Dioucounda Sidibe, a fifteen-year-old Khassonké woman.42 Sidibe lived with him in the governor’s mansion in Saint-Louis and gave birth to their son, Louis Léon Faidherbe, the same year that Governor Faidherbe created the tirailleurs sénégalais in 1857. Temporary interracial conjugal unions continued into the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly with colonial officials serving in the interior of West Africa. However, the practice decreased in the more visible quarters of colonial society during the twentieth century.43 French military officials used mariage à la mode du pays to describe tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal unions, which condoned male soldiers’ prerogatives in accessing conjugal labor and indicated the temporary nature of these unions. Further, these observers assumed that the sexual behavior of young soldiers, who lacked their elders’ supervision, was representative of conjugal norms in West Africa.44 Within military convention, the phrase mariage à la mode du pays became a rhetorical means through which to debase African soldiers’ marital practices and their sexual moral economy in West Africa and in French Empire.
Paradoxically, military officials also believed that tirailleurs sénégalais were natural “family men.”45 African soldiers’ ability to create families and shape colonial and local ideas about marriage were paramount to normalizing the manifestation of colonial power in intimate spheres. Embedded in this presumption were tirailleurs sénégalais’ heteronormativity and preference for matrimony, which stand in contrast to French metropolitan concerns about the carnal desires of African soldiers in France during and after the world wars.46 Despite counterexamples, colonial officials were convinced that tirailleurs sénégalais preferred conjugal relationships over transactional sexual experiences in military-maintained brothels or single-occurrence (often nonconsensual) sexual encounters. The “family man” ideology was powerful in its ability to transform nonconsensual, coercive sexual encounters into legitimate marriages and characterize tirailleurs sénégalais as male heads of household.
The French colonial military employed another patriarchal concept, the male-breadwinner model, to direct allocations and benefits to the members of tirailleurs sénégalais’ nuclear households.47 French military officials refused to recognize West Africans’ households as nodes within extended networks of biological and fictive kin. During the Great War, the military began to require formal documentation of soldiers’ marital status and members of their nuclear households—whether their marriages occurred prior to or during their service. Wartime legislation ushered in new forms of state welfare for active-duty soldiers, veterans, and their families. In the 1920s and 1930s, metropolitan France expanded its welfare state and initiated a veritable boom in benefits for heteronormative, racialized, and gendered citizens in metropolitan France.48 This trend extended into empire and was most conspicuous in tax abatements and familial benefits promised to tirailleurs sénégalais’ households. Colonial soldiers achieved basic benefits and tax relief decades before other colonial laborers and employees.49 With the extension of formal state assistance to West African military households, the French army awarded legitimate status to soldiers’ first wives, while divesting itself of responsibilities for subsequent wives—even though African soldiers’ legal status allowed them to practice polygyny. In limited cases, tirailleurs sénégalais’ children, irrespective of their mothers’ wife order, could access state funds before reaching puberty. These measures created bureaucratic and fiscal relationships between soldiers’ wives and children that flowed through African soldiers, which reinforced the male-breadwinner household model. This patriarchal construct cast military wives as nonearning household members and endowed soldiers with authority over their wives’ interactions with the military or colonial state.
The extension of benefits to West African households occurred at a time when the French colonial military reduced the number of West African wives traveling within empire. As a result, the interwar period witnessed an uptick in tirailleurs sénégalais’ cross-colonial relationships and requests to relocate foreign wives to West Africa. West African soldiers initiated these conjugal relationships without the approval of their families and/or often without the input of their future in-laws. In the absence of family oversight of these unions, the military was the primary entity capable of legitimating cross-colonial conjugal relationships. Even with the military’s formal recognition of marital legitimacy and the funding of foreign wives’ long-distance relocation to West Africa, cross-colonial couples faced the discerning scrutiny of West African communities. Foreign women experienced gendered and racialized discrimination in their new homes. Tirailleurs sénégalais’ extended kin contested foreign war brides’ legitimacy.
“War bride” was a commonly used term to describe the foreign wives accompanying repatriating American soldiers who served in twentieth-century conflicts—particularly from theaters of war affiliated with World War II and Vietnam.50 War brides in the United States were defined by their relationship
