Militarizing Marriage. Sarah J. Zimmerman
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.
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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
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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. Around the same time, West African laborers in Congo shifted from being primarily carpenters and porters to serving as soldiers. 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