Some tirailleurs sénégalais and mesdames tirailleurs grew up in matrilineal societies. They confronted and conformed to new iterations of gendered familial authority in the army. Administrators upheld patriarchal and patrilineal claims to wives and daughters in the interest of maintaining regional political stability.46 In the 1880s, tirailleurs sénégalais households accompanied troops on campaign. This mobility isolated mesdames tirailleurs from broader West African kin networks, which increased their responsibilities in the conjugal home and increased husbands’ authority over them. These women lacked nearby kin who could compel husbands to comply with the expectations and obligations typical to legitimate marriages. Mesdames tirailleurs also lacked familial networks necessary for access to agricultural land, assistance in childrearing, and other necessities normally fulfilled by reciprocal kin-based relationships. Their ability to acquire resources hinged upon the rank and/or status of their husbands within the French colonial military.
French colonial administrators imagined tirailleurs sénégalais households as nuclear-family households that conformed to male-breadwinner models of economic distribution. Both had little precedent in nineteenth-century West Africa.47 The male-breadwinner economic model assumed that senior male family members were the unique wage earners within a household made up of their heteronormative partners and offspring. The wages and other resources that male heads of household acquired were subsequently redistributed to other household members.48 Most West Africans, irrespective of gender, consumed what they produced and used local and long-distance trade networks for scarce or luxury goods.49 French military officials believed that women’s labor contributed to an economy circumscribed by the needs of their households and extended families. These private spheres of economic domesticity were ostensibly discrete from the public sphere, where the colonial economy existed. To the contrary, women across West Africa participated in the production of crops and artisanal goods as well as selling their wares in daily or weekly rotating markets. Extensive and overlapping modes of resource redistribution existed among extended matrilineal and patrilineal kin. Foodstuffs, goods, and gifts moved through and around conjugal households. Despite some familiarity with the complex web of familial relations and the ubiquity of market women, French colonial observers characterized their African soldiers as the conduits through which the colonial economy reached the members of their households.50
The French military sanctioned tirailleurs sénégalais’ acquisition of wives through means that paralleled concubinage and enslavement. In order to avoid the language of slavery, French military observers deployed the language of matrimony and legitimacy in describing vulnerable women’s incorporation into the tirailleurs sénégalais community. One of the most striking examples of this process, referenced in the introduction, occurred after the capture of seventeen of Mamadou Lamine Drame’s conjugal partners. Lieutenant Colonel Gallieni oversaw the redistribution of these women to his most distinguished tirailleurs sénégalais. Gallieni made the exceptional violence involved in forced conjugal association mundane by depicting the transfer of women from one man to another as a West African “tradition.” He blurred the distinctions between slavery and marriage by equating husbands, in this case tirailleurs sénégalais, with masters.51 French colonial military historical documents are replete with examples of code switching between the language used to describe gendered roles in African military households and the language used to describe the gendered dynamics between enslaved women and male slave owners.
Mainland French abolitionists and journalists became aware of the gendered paradoxes of emancipation in West Africa in June 1887. They scandalized metropolitan France by accusing the French colonial military of trafficking female sex slaves among the tirailleurs sénégalais. Colonel Henri Frey defended the allocation of liberated women to tirailleurs sénégalais as a necessary step in protecting their freedom.52 The different vocabularies used in the reporting and defense of these practices reveal the degree to which the French military believed in tirailleurs sénégalais’ entitlement to family life, irrespective of whether or not their marriages perpetuated forms of domestic slavery. The processes through which vulnerable women wed tirailleurs sénégalais were less than ideal. Mesdames tirailleurs located on campaign often suffered brutality and humiliation during their incorporation into soldiers’ households. When Gallieni distributed Drame’s conjugal partners to his most distinguished tirailleurs sénégalais, he labeled the last woman to be chosen as the “ugliest” of the seventeen women. Gallieni later granted a divorce to the tirailleur sénégalais who had lived a brief, disagreeable marriage with her.53
French administrators believed that, despite the perfunctory nature of African military nuptials, former slave women would be better off once they “adjusted” to living with tirailleurs sénégalais.54 Mesdames tirailleurs habituated themselves to the duties of military wives, while tirailleurs sénégalais obtained the status of married men, fathers, and patrons. The French colonial military protected soldiers’ rights to wives acquired through forced conjugal association. Once married, the colonial state reinforced soldiers’ authority over women made vulnerable by militarization across West Africa. As emancipated men and household heads, tirailleurs sénégalais engaged in strategies that improved their social status.55 In the early years of the colonial era, male members of African military households had greater opportunity to reinvent themselves; some even took European names while in the military.56 Marriage and making households were crucial to their reinvention.
FEMALE SLAVERY, PRENUPTIAL IDEALS, AND MARITAL TRADITIONS IN WEST AFRICA
Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices followed and diverged from legitimate marital customs in West Africa. Marital practices in West Africa encompassed rites and rituals that conferred legitimacy on conjugal unions and their offspring. Legitimate marriage had great significance in organizing many spheres of the human experience. Marriage provided a mechanism through which to extend and monitor kinship networks, forge or maintain economic connections, and encourage social and physical reproduction. Marital traditions varied from community to community in West Africa. Social status, spiritual beliefs, family dynamics, and a host of other factors influenced processes of betrothal, marriage, and the community’s ongoing support of a marriage throughout its duration. In ideal circumstances, West Africans aspired to marry with the consent and approval of their parents and guardians. Public celebrations of weddings aimed to acquire the support of the broader community, which brought honor to newlyweds’ unions and legitimated their future children. West African communities expected postpubescent individuals to marry and procreate. Youth often could not meet all cultural expectations or obey socially imposed constraints on premarital intimate interactions. Community elders superintended the heterosexual relations of youth and exercised gerontocratic authority over prenuptial rites. Young women were subject to greater surveillance and moral sanction than male youth because of proscriptions against pregnancy out of wedlock. Elders’ supervision protected the virtuousness of pubescent women, which further preserved the honor of families and future generations. Various household and lineage members participated in the marital unions of individuals and pressured youth to accept arranged marriages. Young men had greater flexibility regarding when and whom they married. They also had greater autonomy in choosing their second or third wives. Aside from the rare exception, women could not marry more than one spouse at a time, but often had greater authority over choosing new husbands after divorce or the death of their first spouses.57
Many West African communities practiced polygyny. Family constellations extended beyond nuclear families through matrilineal and patrilineal hereditary lines. Households could consist of a husband, several wives, and their immediate descendants, as well as extended relations. Senior women in multiwife households organized shared domestic work among wives. Women gained prestige among their peers and within their families with live births and children that survived infancy. Marriage was a conduit through which lineage members could access the labor of their descendants. Children provided predominantly agricultural and pastoral communities with labor.58 Marriage enhanced economic stability because it was crucial in determining who could farm arable land