Men’s and women’s gendered roles in the maintenance of the military community complied with military exigencies while cherry-picking from and conforming to gendered expectations affiliated with West African village life. In the bivouacs shaded by enormous baobabs or in the military camps adjacent to arid Agadez, gendered work and leisure organized the activities of African military households.92 Mesdames tirailleurs were responsible for maintaining households, preparing meals, and raising children. They also provided sexual services to their soldiering husbands. Many tirailleurs sénégalais spoke of their wives while away on campaign and anticipating returning to them.93 The pull of domestic life led many married tirailleurs sénégalais to spend their leisure time with their households, which provided a site to entertain guests and maintain families.94 Married soldiers’ leisure differed from that of unmarried tirailleurs sénégalais, who engaged in homosocial male activities like consuming dolo (a fermented beverage made from sorghum), smoking pipe tobacco, engaging in convivial conversations, and seeking romantic partners in nearby civilian populations.95
Tirailleurs sénégalais and mesdames tirailleurs wanted their conjugal unions to map onto local traditions so that their marriages gained a semblance of legitimacy. In the absence of the tirailleurs sénégalais’ lineage elders, military officials provided the authority to welcome newlyweds into the extended family of the tirailleurs sénégalais community. By the end of the nineteenth century, the French military offered potential recruits enlistment bonuses in order to supply soldiers with the means to pay bridewealth for their future wives.96 Ranking officers provided infantrymen with opportunities to locate new wives on campaign and in camp. French military officers acted as officiators in Christian marriage ceremonies.97 Officers supplied domesticated animals for sacrifice and consumption in Muslim and pagan marital celebrations occurring near military camps.98 Brides of indigenous officers and favored infantrymen could expect gifts of cloth or other household items that would assist newlyweds in establishing households. The French colonial military accommodated the increasing number of tirailleurs sénégalais families residing near posts by establishing separate married housing by the end of the 1890s.99
In some exceptional instances, French officials acted as intermediaries or extended kin in their soldiers’ conjugal affairs in life and death. Their power to shape the contours and sanctity of marriage buoyed the prerogative of their soldiers over local tradition and against traditional authorities. In one case, Samba, a marabout and a military interpreter for the tirailleurs sénégalais, married a woman of noble lineage in Manding.100 The interpreter had not completed bridewealth payments to his father-in-law. After the death of the couple’s first child, the father-in-law threatened to dissolve the marriage. French officer Marie Étienne Péroz intervened on the behalf of his interpreter and sent an expedited message to the father-in-law saying that he would regulate the affair in person.101 In addition to intervening in family affairs, military officials made limited efforts to support widowed mesdames tirailleurs. French officials liberated female slaves who were the wives of fallen tirailleurs sénégalais in acts of emancipation that followed local and Muslim practice.102 Family allowances and widow’s pay were not standardized in the nineteenth century, but the military awarded limited and inconsistent benefits to tirailleurs sénégalais’ widows and orphans. Some widowed women remarried within the military community, which became an accepted practice that shared characteristics with “levirate” marriage. This marital tradition encouraged widows to marry male relatives of their deceased husbands in order to maintain lineage connections and familial wealth.
The relationship between the French colonial state and mesdames tirailleurs was ill-defined. Mesdames tirailleurs were not official employees of the French colonial army. As members of the tirailleurs sénégalais community, they were expected to withstand hardship without complaint and obey military discipline.103 In an extreme example of the degree to which mesdames tirailleurs complied with military discipline and authority, the wife of soldier Moussa Traoré gave birth while marching on campaign. She went into labor while following a regiment from Sikasso to the Mossi region. The commanding French officer left two tirailleurs sénégalais with her while the rest of the regiment continued to their destination. The new mother arrived a couple of hours later. In order to maintain her affiliation with her husband and the military, she had walked the final stage of the march with her newborn in her arms.104
As accepted and recognized members of a growing military community, wives acquired food rations, housing, and a degree of social security. In the vein of the breadwinner model, the colonial military transmitted orders and disciplinary measures to mesdames tirailleurs via their husbands. They also channeled rations and resources into military households via soldiers. When husbands were away on lengthy assignments, these women lacked the resources normally allocated to them via their husbands. A group of mesdames tirailleurs protested before Colonel Combes because they lacked the basic means of survival. Colonel Combes threatened to whip them if they did not disperse. The mesdames tirailleurs fled, then regrouped and brought their grievances before Gallieni. Eventually, the gendarmerie broke up the protesters and military officers dispatched couriers to their campaigning husbands.105
French military officials rarely intervened in the domestic affairs of African military households. One official claimed that “conjugal correction” was the responsibility of tirailleurs sénégalais.106 Patriarchal prerogatives could transgress the bounds of proper decorum, but the line between domestic discipline and abuse was hard to locate. French observers wrote about the extreme lengths that tirailleurs sénégalais took to ensure the fidelity of their conjugal partners. One group of tirailleurs sénégalais built a small earthen enclosure with chest-high walls, where they left their wives guarded while they were away on campaign. Suspicious of the guard, tirailleurs sénégalais supplied their wives with chastity belts. Another group of West African soldiers stationed in Zinder kept their conjugal partners hidden in a house, guarded by an old blind man, in an unfrequented part of the city. These efforts shielded conjugal partners from the sexual advances of French officers and other tirailleurs sénégalais. Read another way, soldiers’ female conjugal partners were prisoners. By physically restricting their mobility, tirailleurs sénégalais prevented newly acquired conjugal partners from returning to their home communities. In his memoir, French sergeant Charles Guilleux recounted these activities and cited a Nigerien male civilian who believed that “Senegalese and Soudanese soldiers are liars and thieves, who take our women from us.”107 French observers witnessed these behaviors and in condoning them made them part of African colonial soldiers’ conjugal practices.
Gender-based violence was an accepted component of tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions. French observers generally overlooked soldiers’ mistreatment of civilian women because forced conjugal association did not contravene military order and corresponded with the paternalistic authority accompanying colonial rule. French commanding officers interfered in conjugal abuse when the women were known members of the military community. Abusive behaviors needed to reach egregious levels—like attempted murder—before commanding officers reprimanded and disciplined tirailleurs sénégalais. Indigenous corporal Hannah Ramata, stationed in Matam (present-day Senegal), stabbed his wife below her right breast in a fit of jealousy. Ramata’s superiors sentenced him to fifteen days of imprisonment in irons. His commanders reduced his diet to biscuits and water.108 French commanders took responsibility for the families of imprisoned soldiers and ensured that they continued to receive rations while the “head” of family served his sentence.109
French commanding officers were poor substitutes for familial, village, or community leaders. The French military’s distribution of justice and social welfare was insufficient for maintaining a moral economy. They were not invested in curating the reproduction of their military community. Nevertheless, the community affiliated with the tirailleurs sénégalais had the potential to become an extended family united by uniform, common resources, and trials faced on campaign. Once in African military households, women and men could build communal