Ciraïa Aminata’s captor, referred to by Gallieni as her first husband (premier mari), was captured by a sofa serving in Samory Touré’s army. The sofa sold Ciraïa Aminata’s first husband into slavery in Kaarta to a Tukulor from Kouniakry and then replaced the original captor as Ciraïa Aminata’s second husband (deuxième mari). The sofa, who was an active member of Samory Touré’s army, participated in battles against the French near Bamako. Ciraïa Aminata followed her new husband on these campaigns and likely provided domestic and auxiliary military support to her husband and his fellow soldiers. Afterward, the second husband left Samory’s army in order to set the couple up in a small village in Wassulu. Fearing forced reenlistment in Samory’s armies, the couple left Wassulu and relocated to Siguiri. In Siguiri’s Liberty Village, the demilitarized sofa and Ciraïa Aminata could expect a degree of French protection from Samory’s recruitment agents.
By seeking refuge in the Liberty Village, the couple surrendered some of their sovereignty to the legal and bureaucratic authority of the colonial state. Their temporary sanctuary provided the setting for the unraveling of their union. The disintegration of their marriage resulted from the intervening authority of the colonial state. Liberty Village chiefs and French administrators presided over the processes of marriage and divorce among inhabitants of Liberty Villages. In Siguiri, two different men used Gallieni’s tribunal to challenge the retired sofa’s matrimonial claims to Ciraïa Aminata. The first was her captor from Baté, who Gallieni labeled her first husband. After his enslavement in Kaarta, he had eventually manumitted himself and enlisted in the Seventh Company of the tirailleurs sénégalais. The Seventh Company was under the command of Gallieni and encamped in Siguiri in March 1888. He caught sight of Ciraïa Aminata in the adjacent Liberty Village when he returned to Siguiri from campaigning in Manding. The second plaintiff was Ciraïa Aminata’s original master. This man, referred to by Gallieni as her premier maître (first master), claimed to have proprietary rights to Aminata that predated her abduction near Baté. This original master had come to Siguiri, fleeing Samory, in order to access arable land in the Liberty Village. By happenstance, he had crossed paths with Ciraïa Aminata in the village and attempted to seize her. Gallieni’s interpreter brought Ciraïa Aminata and the three men with matrimonial and/or ownership claims to her before the tribunal.
In the late nineteenth century, French administrators and their local interlocutors possessed a great deal of latitude in adjudicating cases according to their interpretation of local custom, the applicability of French legal norms, and restorative justice. As demonstrated above, members of the colonial state had conflictual and deeply ambivalent ideas about marital legitimacy and female slavery in West Africa. Gallieni used maître (master) and mari (husband) synonymously to describe Ciraïa Aminata’s ostensible husbands. His conflation of these two terms was symptomatic of an extensive belief held by French colonial officials regarding the interchangeability of these terms. Each of the men making claims on Ciraïa Aminata had experienced displacement and had become a client of the colonial state. Any one of these men could have successfully argued their entitlement to Ciraïa Aminata’s conjugal labor. If Ciraïa Aminata had resided in the Liberty Village for less than ninety days, the original master would have had the right to reclaim his former slave. The retired sofa, or second husband, could have argued that his marriage to Ciraïa had occurred along the same principles and processes central to tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions. However, it was the first captor from Baté, turned tirailleur sénégalais, who walked out of the tribunal with Ciraïa Aminata on his arm.
Gallieni presided over the tribunal. In newly colonized spaces in West Africa, military authorities asserted their jurisdiction over civil affairs and tipped the scales toward their soldiers. The original master would have likely had the strongest claim over Ciraïa Aminata in terms of ownership. In his description of Ciraïa Aminata’s history, Gallieni delegitimized the process through which the first husband/ravisher had acquired Ciraïa Aminata as a wife. This abductor-turned-tirailleur sénégalais may have also had the weakest case when viewed through local understandings of slave ownership and marital tradition. Yet the first husband’s transformation from abductor to tirailleur sénégalais positively influenced his case in the eyes of the colonial state. The retired sofa, or second husband, may have had the most viable claim over Aminata as a wife because they had set up homesteads in Wassulu and in Siguiri’s Liberty Village. The presence of children could have influenced the outcome of the tribunal, but there were no details concerning paternity in the account.
Ciraïa Aminata’s ability to determine her possible future was circumscribed by the colonial state’s narrow vision of emancipated women’s destiny as wives. Gallieni claimed that Ciraïa Aminata’s status as a resident of Siguiri’s Liberty Village gave her the freedom to choose her husband from among the three successive masters/husbands. By framing her act as one of choice, Gallieni perpetuated the myth that West African women obtained liberties through the emancipatory processes on offer in Liberty Villages, when, in fact, Ciraïa Aminata’s only “choice” was marriage. Ciraïa Aminata “chose” the tirailleur sénégalais who was her first abductor/ravisher and first husband. She elected to become a madame tirailleur as opposed to the wife of a civilian. Upon leaving the tribunal with Ciraïa Aminata, her tirailleur sénégalais husband purportedly commented, “women always prefer handsome tirailleurs sénégalais to civilians.”68 Captured for posterity in Gallieni’s Deux campagnes, the words of a gloating braggart signal several assumptions made by colonial soldiers and their commanders: martiality, affiliation with the colonial state’s authority, and access to its resources made African colonial soldiers ideal spouses. For Gallieni, the affair of Ciraïa Aminata was an allegory for the “benevolent” power of military colonization.
There are other reasons that may explain why Ciraïa Aminata chose the tirailleur sénégalais over the other men. The possibility of economic and social stability would have been appealing to her, having recently experienced a rapid succession of life-altering events and intimate affiliations. She may have recognized that the tirailleur sénégalais’s gainful employment held more promise than the other men, who were refugees in an increasingly crowded Liberty Village. Marriage to a tirailleur sénégalais could safeguard against future reenslavement because the colonial military protected soldiers and their conjugal partners from former and potential future masters. Ciraïa Aminata may have also been aware of the fact that Gallieni donated domesticated animals and grains to new military households. Membership in an African military household made mesdames tirailleurs eligible for regular rations and gave them preferential access to land.69 Ciraïa Aminata’s choice of husband corresponds with the historical arguments regarding the “strategies of slaves and women” in politically tumultuous regions. Marriage to important men or colonial employees was an avenue through which women could reduce their vulnerability to reenslavement or forced conjugal association.70 However, marriages between West African women and tirailleurs sénégalais were not simply the result of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of vulnerable women. Physical and emotional attraction certainly influenced how women maneuvered through the postslavery landscape of militarism and colonialism. Remarkably, Ciraïa Aminata chose a husband that Gallieni had labeled an abductor and a sexual assailant. Her “choice” may indicate that Gallieni misunderstood that day near the stream in Baté. If Ciraïa Aminata was a slave when she was collecting water near the Milo River, she could not marry without the authority of her master.71 The task of gathering water would have given her brief reprieve from the mindful and authoritative eyes of her master and his household. In those precious unescorted moments, she may have absconded with her abductor—who could have been her liberator and lover. Abduction, or perhaps elopement in this case, would have been a means for two people of low social status