Militarizing Marriage. Sarah J. Zimmerman
Marriage draws upon a wide range of sources to foreground women, as well as recovering lived experiences and institutional traditions connected to tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal households. Early chapters rely on archival documents and French officers’ memoirs found in twenty archival institutions located in six countries. I read these texts across ministerial and geographical divides to better understand how tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugality broadly influenced the daily operation of colonial militarism. The prevailing ontologies of the colonial era marginalized women and households from the “high politics of governments and states,” even though female actors and their conjugal unions are crucial to the colonial state’s most “masculine” and violent institution—the French colonial army.74 Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal unions, marital legitimacy, and sexuality, rare as they appear in the colonial archive, were important to imperial statecraft.
The voices of female and male colonial subjects at the center of this study rarely appear in military and colonial documents, and, when they do, are often distorted. Members of tirailleurs sénégalais households were the stakeholders most invested in, and vulnerable to, the decisions recorded in the archives. The discriminating and ambivalent power of the French colonial and postcolonial state is evident in archival materials. Once assembled in the archives, military documents conveyed “authority and set rules for credibility and interdependence; they help select the stories that matter.”75 African military households were minor concerns in military policy and fiscal expenditures, whereas military policies regulating marital legitimacy and family allocations had great import on the integrity and prosperity of these households. Inherent biases in the representation of women and colonial subjects typified the “grain” of the archive.76 Gaps in information and the silences surrounding soldiers’ conjugal practices and the quotidian domestic activities of their families were profound. Reading the archives “against the grain,” or thinking comprehensively about contexts, individual and collective motivations, as well as risks taken to achieve optimal futures, allows for a more comprehensive representation of military families’ lived experiences of war, separation, and migration.
Memoirs authored by French military officers, soldiers, adventurers, and entrepreneurs contain anecdotes concerning tirailleurs sénégalais households that offer sociocultural information that lies beyond the purview of officialdom. Imperial discourses on race and gender influenced how these colonial authors produced African military households in texts aimed at European audiences. African soldiers, veterans, military wives, and widows seldom published memoirs, though there are important exceptions.77 Memoirs opened wider portals of observation into the intimate worlds of African military households. They collapsed public and private spheres, which affords opportunities to understand how households, the state, and the states’ employees mutually influenced each other.78
Tirailleurs sénégalais’ and their conjugal partners’ life histories inestimably enriched this study. I accessed life histories via unpublished master’s theses at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Dakar, which were the result of a state-funded oral history project aimed at recovering the experiences of Senegalese veterans.79 The majority of the master’s theses were organized around formulaic questions and served the particular interests of the ENS History Department, the Senegalese archives, and governmental efforts to make veterans of the tirailleurs sénégalais more visible in a postcolonial world. Nevertheless, ENS master’s theses contained valuable lines of inquiry that extended the scope of my research. Master’s students interviewed veterans in languages other than Wolof or French in familial and rural contexts. I also collected life histories via sixty interviews with veterans, widows, and their adult children in Senegalese cities, Conakry, and Paris. Interview formats varied. I asked a wide range of questions about military service, interactions with civilians, and conjugal behaviors. Informants organized their historical experiences of war and marriage into personal narratives and global processes that continue to have bearing upon their lives. Their experiences of militarization and conjugality in French Empire were much more dynamic than the ways in which military records portrayed them.
The majority of my informants served in, or had conjugal partners who deployed to, French Indochina or French Algeria. I met veterans and widows through associational networks linked to regional veterans’ bureaus. As a result, veteran or military widow status were integral components of their identities. When I conducted interviews between 2006 and 2011, the international scandals surrounding African veterans’ frozen pensions reached a series of crescendos in France and its former empire.80 Journalists, authors, and other historians preceded me into the courtyards and private homes of West African veterans. This media and academic attention predetermined aspects of the interviews that I later conducted with veterans and their families. Women and men were primed to speak about the injustices of paltry pensions, widows’ allocations, and the negative legacies of colonial rule. Through conversation, I came to understand that their underlying concerns about pensions were less about historical injustices and more about maximizing resources for their families—past and present.
I interviewed veterans in public and domestic spaces. Other veterans, family members, and neighbors moved through or lingered in interview spaces, and their presence modified my interview questions and shaped the types of memories shared by veterans, widows, and their children. Irrespective of venue or community, veterans rarely framed their cross-colonial conjugal relationships as nonconsensual, initiated through violence, or transactional. Normative moral standards, and the erasure of historical excesses, prevented veterans from speaking candidly of military brothels and overseas sex workers. My gender, as well as my status as a foreigner and guest in veterans’ homes, influenced how veterans recalled and reassembled the sexual relationships of their past. How they conveyed the past was directly influenced by the contemporary cultural prescriptions that maintain social decency between people of different ages, genders, and nationalities.81 Contrary to sociocultural dictates regarding discretion about sharing others’ private information, or sutura in Wolof, some interviewees divulged details about themselves and other veterans that were not part of public discourse in their communities.82 Individuals circulated gossip and rumor to damage the reputation or diminish the credibility of other informants.
Oral sources did not prove to be a panacea for the biases of the colonial archives.83 Historians have warned us about the ability of statist narratives to “suppress alternative narratives and challenges,” as well as to shape the production of a counternarrative to the colonial state’s archives.84 Inadvertently, the “statist” narratives influenced how I identified informants, how I formulated my research questions, and how my informants organized and shared information.85 Veterans’ and widows’ memories relied on the tangible reminders and external props generated by the state during their military service in order to recall and reconstruct their life histories.86 Military decorations and official papers were the hooks upon which veterans hung their military careers. When describing courtship, conjugal relationships, and marriage that occurred during their military service, veterans built their affective histories upon the tours of duty listed in military passports—fished out of the deep pockets of their boubous or pulled from precariously balanced stacks of aging documents. Corporeal scars were also evidence built into chronologies of sacrifice, romance, and survival. Despite these personalized and intimate means of recalling the past, veterans often defaulted to tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions to refer to former female conjugal partners as wives—whether they achieved legitimate status or not.
Historians once believed that Africans’ life histories could lead to the recovery of an “authentic” African past distinct from the colonial histories that subjugated them.87 Militarizing Marriage demonstrates that African and colonial epistemologies are mutually constitutive.88 These arguments echo historical concerns regarding the recuperation of African customs and traditions across the colonial divide. West African colonial soldiers’ conjugal traditions portray that continuities accompanied the great ruptures once affiliated with the onset of colonialism. Scholars now understand that colonial rule could not destroy precolonial African traditions, nor alter them beyond recognition, due to the limits imposed on evolutions in African traditions.89 Tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions extended beyond the precolonial/colonial/postcolonial