Militarizing Marriage. Sarah J. Zimmerman

portrayed Ciraïa Aminata as a woman capable of making choices within the constraints of war, colonization, and emancipation. He used her story to illustrate the success of the tirailleurs sénégalais and Liberty Villages as colonial institutions that facilitated processes of slave emancipation and postconflict social stability. Yet Ciraïa Aminata’s experience at the Siguiri tribunal was exceptional when compared with other women who became mesdames tirailleurs in nineteenth-century West Africa. Historical evidence suggests that West African women partnering with tirailleurs sénégalais “had little choice” in the matter and that freed slave women needed the protection of colonial soldiers because they “would be enslaved again by the first man who came along.”⁷³ However, Ciraïa Aminata broadens our understanding of the complex processes that preceded mesdames tirailleurs’ partnerships with colonial soldiers. Love and emotional investment are difficult to historicize in the gendered silences of the nineteenth-century French colonial historical record. However, the absence of evidence portraying emotional attachment does not eliminate it as a motivating factor for women to join African military households.⁷⁴ These households became part of a tirailleurs sénégalais military community that cultivated its own marital traditions where West African and colonial societies overlapped.

      MEMBERS ONLY: EXPLORING FAMILY LIFE IN TIRAILLEURS’ MILITARY COMMUNITIES

      Someone sent them reinforcements: ten tirailleurs flanked by their families, wives, children, captives, monkeys, cats, chickens, parakeets, each dragging behind him Noah’s Ark.

      —Paul Vigné d’Octon, Journal d’un marin⁷⁵

      A curious spectacle to some, tirailleurs sénégalais households became a common feature of the French West African military landscape at the end of the nineteenth century.⁷⁶ Mesdames tirailleurs lived as wives and military auxiliaries in the violent swirl of French colonial conquest. From the 1880s, household migration was an important feature of colonial soldiers’ conjugal traditions. Once in the French military community, mesdames tirailleurs and tirailleurs sénégalais adjusted their domestic responsibilities to the daily rhythms of camp life and military campaign. The military promoted its own hierarchical organization, but it did not replace West African social organization—caste, slave ancestry, ethnicity—with meritocracy. West African military households conformed their traditions of familial reciprocity and patron-client relationships to the ranks and divisions of the colonial military. The French colonial military became an extended family, or kinship network, that provided newlyweds with basic resources and social security. African military households depended on each other and created fictive kin relationships within their regiments. The military allocated resources to them, which fueled these relationships and made these households reliant on the colonial state. Unlike French soldiers serving in the army, tirailleurs sénégalais brought wives and children with them on campaign and in their frequent garrison changes.⁷⁷ These practices untethered tirailleurs sénégalais households from specific geographies, communities, and familial kin, while strengthening their ties to the French colonial military.

      Above, I highlighted how civilian women became soldiers’ wives through conflict and emancipation. Civilian women living near tirailleurs sénégalais encampments were also incorporated into the military community without the violence affiliated with war. The French colonial military did not enforce boundaries between soldiers and civilians. Sometimes, with little formality, civilian women became soldiers’ wives. West African campaigns depended on the continual incorporation of civilians into the military community. Campaigning regiments relied on local villages to provide spaces for bivouacking and basic foodstuffs. Villages supplied female laborers, often enslaved women, to perform domestic tasks for campaigning soldiers that ranged from pounding millet to sexual services.⁷⁸ Military encampments constructed near urban centers were busy sites of commerce and exchange. Local female and male merchants found ready consumers for basic and luxury goods among tirailleurs sénégalais households. Military encampments were also sites of civilian labor recruitment. French officers and West African infantrymen hired women and men to supply their regiments as they crossed West Africa.⁷⁹ Market women and hired women’s protracted presence in tirailleurs sénégalais’ encampments could make them members of the African military community and/or specific households.

      Mesdames tirailleurs acutely experienced the structural transformation of West African households in the colonial military. These women followed regiments with the disassembled components of their homesteads and their husbands’ effects (excluding rifles and bullets) loaded on their heads, while bearing young children on their backs.⁸⁰ They made temporary homes among the piles of equipment and provisions on the decks of French military river barges.⁸¹ On campaign, mesdames tirailleurs constructed temporary and semipermanent homes in open-air bivouacs. Where possible, mesdames tirailleurs constructed their households on the margins of military and administrative spaces in order to create a distance between their households and French officialdom.⁸² From this distance, these women raised children, pounded millet, prepared rationed food, and laundered their husbands’ uniforms.⁸³ Mesdames tirailleurs’ innumerable responsibilities were central to the functioning of this mobile colonial military community. They participated in the refashioning of ancestral social, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies within the context of the French military community.

      The rank of individual tirailleurs sénégalais could influence their households’ social status among their peers, but ethnolinguistic tensions and caste hierarchies influenced intra- and inter-household relations.⁸⁴ The continuing salience of slave ancestry in the military community curbed former slaves’ aspirations for social mobility in the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais. French officials avoided promoting former slaves because they believed these men had “an innate mentality for servitude,” which made them ineligible for leadership roles in the military.⁸⁵ African soldiers of free status would not obey the command of petty officers who had slave ancestry. They also refused to serve under men who were slaves—for example, the men serving in the tirailleurs sénégalais through the engagé à temps system.⁸⁶ The colonial military did not foster meritocratic advancement in the tirailleurs sénégalais and former slaves rarely achieved the stripes of a corporal or a sergeant.

      African military households’ ethnolinguistic groups and lineage affiliations affected social relationships among members of the military community. France’s conquest of Bundu occasioned the liberation of many Bamana and Malinké female slaves. These captives were subsequently integrated into the tirailleurs sénégalais serving in the region. According to military observers, these liberated women fortuitously found their countrymen among the tirailleurs sénégalais, some of whom had grown up in the same villages. These common geographical and ancestral ties facilitated a number of conjugal relationships within the tirailleurs sénégalais.⁸⁷ Ethnic diversity and tensions within the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais also hampered troops’ discipline and confidence. The history of El Hajj Umar Tall’s Tukulor conquest of the Bamana states of Kaarta and Segu embittered Bamanakan toward Tukulors serving side by side in ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais. These feelings also incited quarrels between Bamana and Tukulor mesdames tirailleurs. In Bafoulabé (contemporary southwestern Mali), a French commander incarcerated two particularly bellicose women at the police station for a twenty-four-hour period in order to set an example for the “feminine world” in the military community.⁸⁸ This was a rare example of French officials directly disciplining mesdames tirailleurs.

      As with many West African households, senior infantrymen and African officers displayed their status and wealth through their belongings and the comportment of their wives. Some tirailleurs sénégalais had multiwife households that included numerous other dependents—orderlies, slaves, and children. Larger households evidenced the greater prosperity of tirailleurs sénégalais and their wives. Military wives exhibited their household’s wealth with their clothing, accessories, and comportment. On a steamer traveling up the Senegal River, Aïssata, the wife of sergeant N’gor Faye, posed for a photo displaying a remarkable quantity of jewelry and other ornaments.⁸⁹ Outside of Koulikoro (northeast of Bamako), mesdames tirailleurs accessorized themselves picturesquely, wearing beautiful wraparound skirts (pagnes) and long flowing dresses (boubous), with their hair tucked