The accumulation of dependents and resources enabled extended families to acquire greater economic, social, and political status. In some regions of West Africa, the accumulation of resources led to the development of socioeconomic classes and lineage-based castes that specialized in specific trades and the production of artisanal goods. Marriage figured prominently in maintaining these social distinctions, as well as ensuring that elite lineages retained prestige and economic resources. Through marriage, already powerful elite families reinforced their social and political power and also shored up sociocultural status through the exclusion of other classes and castes. Economic elites and noble lineages developed symbiotic relationships with their lower-class counterparts through patron-client relationships. Marriage and concubinage served as vehicles to incorporate foreigners, slaves, or members of other castes and classes into prominent families. Powerful elite families maintained their status through intermarriage and the redistribution of their wealth through the customary exchange of gifts surrounding marital ceremonies.59 The value and abundance of these gifts publicly displayed these families’ wealth and prestige, as well as the degree to which they esteemed their future in-laws.
French colonial documents tend to portray bridewealth as the mobilization of valued goods or labor from the groom’s kin to the family of the bride. Bridewealth symbolized the sociocultural value of a bride and the groom’s family’s respect for and admiration of their future in-laws. The absence of bridewealth exchange often indicated an individual’s low social status or community disapproval of the union. Prolonged conjugal affiliation without marriage—concubinage—signaled the low social position of one or both unmarried romantic partners. Concubinage resided at the intersection of slavery and marriage and occurred between free men and slave women or among enslaved people.60 Communities condoned these romantic relationships in order to incorporate low-status women and their children into kin groups. Concubines also bolstered the prestige of important men by increasing their responsibilities and dependents. The social status of individual marital partners influenced their obligations and responsibilities to each other and the conjugal home. Concubines performed the same duties as wives, but they lacked the rights and privileges that accompanied legitimate marriage.61
French colonial authorities regarded bridewealth as the most salient feature of legitimate marriage in West Africa. Simultaneously and contrarily, they also associated bridewealth with female slave trafficking. In either interpretation, French colonial observers stripped bridewealth of its profound sociocultural meaning and reduced it all too often to a transactional value. French officials’ position toward bridewealth grew ever more paradoxical in their sanction of romantic unions between tirailleurs sénégalais and female slaves or prisoners of war. Military observers labeled these conjugal unions “marriages,” despite their consummation without the exchange of bride-wealth. Concubinage was an integral component of early tirailleurs sénégalais marital traditions. The French sanctioned these unions for many of the same reasons that West African communities accepted concubinage—greater social stability, bolstering the prestige of men, and the incorporation of vulnerable women into the protection of the community and/or state.62
Militarization and French colonization altered the ways in which West Africans achieved marital legitimacy. Tirailleurs sénégalais had elevated status and power because of their employment in the colonial military. The expansion of colonial authority across West Africa enabled these men to assert their conjugal prerogatives and simultaneously dodge local social prescriptions pertaining to marriage. Military officials—French and West African—acted as powerful lineage members who backed tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal behaviors. Military authority also constrained the ability of female spouses’ kin to consent to the union or ensure that tirailleurs sénégalais observed appropriate premarital rites. Without the participation of extended communities in prenuptial rites, bridewealth became increasingly transactional. Unlike extended relatives in West Africa, the military did little to ensure that tirailleurs sénégalais’ marriages were enduring or successful. Nineteenth-century military officials viewed West African soldiers’ marriages as temporary arrangements that benefited soldiers and the army. Commanding officers supported soldiers’ polygynous and polyamorous conjugal behaviors because they paralleled other colonial conjugal arrangements in West Africa.
French Atlantic forms of conjugal cohabitation and concubinage evolved in the nineteenth century. As France’s colonial presence expanded beyond the West African Atlantic littoral, the term mariage à la mode du pays traveled with the colonial military—retaining some of its former meaning as well as acquiring new significance as military officials applied the term broadly to encompass relationships between military personnel and civilian women.63 Significant changes in the term’s usage included an emphasis on the temporary nature of sexual relationships, which no longer included an investment in shared domestic living or recognizing paternity of children. Within the military’s usage at the end of the nineteenth century, mariage à la mode du pays no longer uniquely referred to conjugal relationships between European men and African women. Officials came to refer to tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal and sexual relationships with female prisoners of war and former female slaves as mariage à la mode du pays, which simultaneously and ambivalently portrayed these heteronormative relationships as marriage and not marriage. This questionable legitimacy remained a dominant feature of tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions into the interwar years.
THE AFFAIR OF CIRAÏA AMINATA
The affair of Ciraïa Aminata provides a snapshot of the dynamic confluence of militarization, colonization, emancipation, and marriage in nineteenth-century West Africa. Aminata’s brief appearance in the historical record illustrates the ways in which French conquest destabilized West African communities and how early institutions of the colonial state opened and closed gendered pathways toward emancipation and prosperity. The military asserted its political and juridical authority over West Africans’ sociocultural practices and traditional institutions in newly colonized spaces. There are many excellent historical studies that examine the operation of the colonial state’s juridical power over slavery and marriage in West African colonial court records.64 Ciraïa Aminata’s day in the ad hoc military tribunal exemplifies how military officials’ intervention into the conjugal affairs of tirailleurs sénégalais households inscribed paternalism and masculine authority into the institutions of the nascent colonial state. Militarization coincided with the articulation of juridical authority over African women’s liberty and marital status.
Ciraïa Aminata appeared before a hastily assembled tribunal in Siguiri’s Liberty Village in March 1888. Three different men brought forward competing claims of ownership and/or spousal authority over Ciraïa Aminata. Her day in court provides intimate details of one woman’s survival in the volatile borderlands of Samory’s Wassulu Empire and French Empire in contemporary northeastern Guinea-Conakry. In the years preceding the trial, Aminata’s lived experiences demonstrate how militarization of the region caused the rise of masculine authority over women and increased women’s vulnerability to male authority.65 Emboldened men, particularly men affiliated with armed forces, took advantage of sociopolitical instability to advance their household strategies outside of normative conjugal traditions. Ciraïa Aminata became affiliated with three different men through processes that blurred the distinctions between enslavement, forced conjugal association, and marriage. In court, military officials wielded the colonial state’s new juridical power and provided the ultimate authority over the marital status of Ciraïa Aminata. The colonial state shored up the power of tirailleurs sénégalais over vulnerable women, while condoning conjugal practices that contravened colonial imperatives to eradicate slavery. Military officials blurred the discrete categories of slave women and wives, which created an ambiguity about the status, rights, and obligations of female members of tirailleurs sénégalais’ households.66
Gallieni recorded the trial concerning Ciraïa Aminata’s matrimonial and slave status in 1888.67 Aminata’s story began with an abduction while she collected water from a stream near Baté in the Milo River valley. According to Gallieni, Ciraïa Aminata’s captor subsequently married her by force. Gallieni referred to her captor as a “ravisher,” which indicated that the conjugal relationship began with an act of nonconsensual sex. Gallieni