The epilogue appraises African military households’ experiences in the final decades of the tirailleurs sénégalais and the legacies of this military institution in the twenty-first century. The French military introduced measures to professionalize the tirailleurs sénégalais in step with the restructuring of empire at the beginning of the French Fourth Republic in 1946 and the Fifth Republic in 1958. The French-Algerian War (1954–62) created the context for this constitutional transition, which altered the civil status of people residing in French Empire. In 1958, West African soldiers integrated into the French marine corps. In the same year, French Guinea became independent, which had great consequence for Guinean tirailleurs sénégalais serving France in Algeria. The life history of Guinean career soldier Koly Kourouma provides a harrowing tale of negotiating the decolonization of French West Africa. West African independence catalyzed discussions concerning the legal status of veterans and their benefits, which impacted West African widows and military households. After a half-century of political independence, the legacies of war and colonialism continue to affect veterans’ households. West African veterans have become living symbols of the injustices and legacies of French colonialism, yet their families continue to look to postcolonial France for financial support.
1
Marrying into the Military
Colonization, Emancipation, and Martial Community in West Africa, 1880–1900
TIRAILLEURS SÉNÉGALAIS’ CONJUGAL TRADITIONS COHERED AT A TIME in which France intensified and expanded its military presence in West Africa. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, locally recruited troops across the African continent played important roles in the escalation of everyday violence, social destabilization, and the operation of colonialism. Their presence in the ranks of the European-commanded armies influenced local expressions of militarization and colonial rule. In West Africa, soldiers participated in France’s violent conquest of regions extending from the Senegal River basin to the shoreline of Lake Chad and along the coasts of what would become Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Dahomey. French colonization coincided with, and exacerbated, regional conflicts led by politicized Muslim leaders in the West African savannah and Sahel. Tirailleurs sénégalais fought in pitched battles with the adherents of Mamadou Lamine Drame in Bundu, Samory Touré across his Wassulu Empire, and Ahmadu Seku Tall in Segu—the capital of the Tukulor Empire. The French military eliminated opposition to colonial rule with superior military technology and tirailleurs sénégalais. Via tirailleurs sénégalais, France incorporated West African territories into the nascent colonial state. Subsequently, these soldiers assisted in initiating processes and introducing institutions meant to foster postconflict stability. Empowered by the colonial state, African soldiers influenced changes in important sociocultural traditions, including slavery and marriage. They simultaneously engaged in conjugal practices that would serve as the foundation for tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions.
The earliest manifestations of the French colonial state and military depended on West African women and the households they created with tirailleurs sénégalais.1 The importance of women in these institutions has not been adequately addressed in the historical literature on colonial armies in Africa. Early publications focused on military technology, battles, and political power, as well as relying on the troublesome dichotomies of colonizer versus colonized and/or narratives of collaboration versus resistance.2 Unintentionally, these works produced political histories of conquest that disregarded the subtle (and not so subtle) effects of militarization across African sociocultural landscapes. In the past decade, Africanist military historians have begun to locate women’s experiences in Europe’s conquest of the continent, as well as to map gendered results of colonial and postcolonial militarism.3 This chapter examines how women and gender were consequential to the early iterations of the French colonial military and state. Women participated in military campaigns stretching from Atlantic coastlines into southern Saharan towns. West African communities experienced the tragedies of war and profound transformations in gerontocratic and gendered authority. Colonial militarization altered local institutions that gave social order to West African societies—armies, slavery, and marriage. With conquest, the colonial military and its African soldiers brought heteronormative marriage and slave emancipation under their jurisdiction, which had wide-ranging effects on conjugal behavior and marital legitimacy within the tirailleurs sénégalais. Military records concerning tirailleurs sénégalais’ households during colonial conquest allow historians to track changes and continuities in West African marital traditions before civilian administrators set up indigenous court systems in the early twentieth century. West African women, soldiers, and the French colonial military contested marital customs within military spaces, where masculinity and paternalism weighed on decisions concerning legitimate marriage and divorce. Tirailleurs sénégalais’ emergent conjugal traditions would later inform civilian administrators about West African marital rites.4
Warfare, slave emancipation, and marriage were processes that influenced how African women became tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal partners and/or auxiliary members of the French colonial army. Conjugal traditions cohered in military contexts, but were informed by precolonial West African and French marital and martial customs. In order to track their origins and transformations, this chapter pays careful attention to the relationship between slavery, emancipation, and military service. Precolonial states and the French colonial state relied heavily on enslaved and/or formerly enslaved men to fill the ranks of their armed forces. Relatedly, the dynamic relationship among female slavery, emancipation, and marriage informs our understanding of how West African women, across the colonial divide, came to be affiliated with military men. The trial of Ciraïa Aminata, detailed below, illustrates how colonial agents obscured the distinction between female slave and wife in colonial African military households. Militarization increased women’s vulnerability and reduced their social ties and status within their natal communities. When colonial soldiers were involved, nineteenth-century West African communities lost their authority over the marital rites and traditions that provided legitimacy to conjugal relationships in West Africa.
MAP 1.1. French West Africa. Map by Isaac Barry
French conquest introduced new mechanisms and institutions that provided displaced West African women and men with gendered pathways toward emancipation and marriage. Military officers created Liberty Villages, which tripled as safe havens, spaces of emancipation, and sites of labor recruitment for the colonial state. Men became soldiers and women became their wives. Similar to Mamadou Lamine Drame’s conjugal partners (described in the introduction), West African women experienced “emancipation” from slavery and “marriage” to tirailleurs sénégalais as analogous or coterminous processes. Military marriages, when