Liberty Villages were another colonial institution involved in the production of emancipated slaves, tirailleurs sénégalais, and their conjugal households. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph-Simon Gallieni established the first Liberty Villages in Kayes and Siguiri in the 1880s. These villages sheltered West African refugees—displaced people, prisoners of war, and fugitive slaves—following regional conflicts triggered by French conquest as well as conflicts initiated by local religious and political leaders.30 Samory Touré’s sofas razed conquered villages in his expansionist wars south of the Niger River. Ahmadu Seku Tall and Mamadou Lamine Drame attempted to maintain and expand their influence in Segu and Bundu, respectively. Colonel Henri Frey’s overzealous punitive actions against the Soninke villages allied with Mamadou Lamine Drame resulted in large numbers of Soninke (some of whom were former laptots and tirailleurs sénégalais) seeking sanctuary in the Liberty Villages.31
The French colonial military established Liberty Villages adjacent to military posts in the Senegal and Niger River watersheds. This proximity to the state provided residents with limited protections and provided a space in which French military officials could recruit soldiers and reward veterans for previous service. French military officials and their West African military and civilian employees regulated access and residency in these villages. Liberty Village inhabitants acquired certificates of liberty through a protracted process that began when they registered with the village’s administrator on the day of their arrival. Within ninety days, villagers could obtain their liberty certificate, which protected them from enslavement or reenslavement.32 Liberty certificates, and the record of their receipt, were admissible evidence in the ad hoc colonial tribunals formed in military posts, Liberty Villages, and recently conquered towns. Military officials, village chiefs, and other colonial personnel presided over these tribunals, which had jurisdiction over civil suits concerning individuals’ slave status. During the three-month period of liminal emancipation, refugees worked for the local administration in order to pay for the rations and resources supplied to them by the colonial state. Men predominantly provided manual labor in construction and farming. Women gathered firewood, fetched water, cooked, and participated in other domestic services. During the ninety-day waiting period, masters could reclaim runaway slaves residing in the Liberty Villages. This clause upheld slave owners’ rights to their slaves, as well as contravening the abolitionist imperatives of the French Third Republic. However, the French established themselves as the ultimate authority that adjudicated slave ownership in their conquered territories. Tribunal officials required masters to present witnesses and testimony in order to verify their ownership of Liberty Village residents. If a master successfully reclaimed a runaway slave at a Liberty Village, they were required to reimburse the local administrator for the resources consumed by their slave, at a rate of fifty centimes per day.33
Male residents in Liberty Villages had greater opportunity than female residents to shield themselves from former masters. If they joined the tirailleurs sénégalais, former masters could only reclaim them within thirty days of their enlistment. This option could have been attractive to fugitive slaves, but it came with some of the same conditions as rachat. Men enlisting in the tirailleurs sénégalais in Liberty Villages were expected to serve for ten to fourteen years in order to guarantee their freedom.34 If they survived the length of their service, the French colonial state offered veterans employment opportunities that ameliorated their socioeconomic status. Some tirailleurs sénégalais veterans returned to their ancestral villages, some reenlisted, and others took administrative positions in the expanding colonial state.35 Former tirailleurs sénégalais also secured chieftaincies in newly established Liberty Villages. In this way, former slaves-turned-soldiers gained authority and responsibilities that would have been inaccessible to them as slaves or low-status individuals. Liberty Village chiefs assigned new arrivals usufruct rights to land for farming, allotted them materials to build homesteads, and presided over marriage ceremonies.36 To potential recruits, these colonial soldiers-turned-chiefs were paragons of the social and political mobility that could result from colonial military service. Liberty Village headmen also acted as recruitment agents who encouraged newly incorporated male villagers to enlist in the tirailleurs sénégalais. Liberty Village chiefs performed many of the same tasks as other West African headmen, but their authority depended on their relationship with the colonial state—not on claims of traditional legitimacy or community sanction.
EMANCIPATING MESDAMES TIRAILLEURS: FORMER FEMALE SLAVES AND THE BONDS OF MARRIAGE
Colonial labor schemes and Liberty Villages provided refugee, enslaved, and formerly enslaved women with fewer postemancipation possibilities than men. The French did not protect former female slaves’ liberty by offering them employment in the colonial state. Instead, military administrators encouraged women to marry West African colonial employees, predominantly tirailleurs sénégalais, in order to protect them from enslavement or reenslavement. Marriage was also thought to stabilize the colonial military’s labor force and increase stability in postconflict areas.37 Enslaved women were emancipated into the bonds of marriage and many became mesdames tirailleurs. From the perspective of the French military, African military households provided hierarchical and gendered organization to biological and social reproduction within the military and along the colonial frontier. Tirailleurs sénégalais could absorb and channel French colonial authority into their households. Marriage provided a platform through which the nascent colonial state could reinforce patriarchal authority and male prerogatives, as well as efface women’s and men’s slave origins.38 An administrator in Siguiri argued that male slaves could not attain liberty until they had taken a wife and begun a family.39 Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships initiated new forms of female subjugation and dependency in the nascent French colonial era. In doing so, the colonial army maintained and altered gendered aspects of domestic slavery within African military households in a postemancipation landscape.40 The emancipation of male slaves did not automatically extend their newfound liberty to wives and children. Female household members could not attain the same degree of liberty as their husbands.41 Their “free” status was not protected outside of the domestic households and their limited liberties were further constrained by their husband’s authority. The gendered effects of militarization and emancipation were bound up in tirailleurs sénégalais’ nineteenth-century conjugal traditions.
African military households perpetuated female domestic slavery. The majority of domestic slaves in nineteenth-century West Africa were women.42 For many French observers of that time, being female in West Africa connoted subservient status. If women were not slaves, they were the wards or dependents of their husbands or other male relatives.43 Like many other former female slaves in early colonial Africa, mesdames tirailleurs often became “political minors in the postslavery landscape.”44 Military officials viewed mesdames tirailleurs as the responsibility of soldiers. The sanctity of marriage and the presumed patriarchal authority operating