Historical actors and historians have struggled to locate the most accurate and appropriate terminology to identify sociocultural organization and its transgressions on the African continent. Race, tribe, ethnicity, clan, and lineage groups are popular and contested categories that fail to capture the dynamism of social organization and lived experiences in Africa and beyond. However, these differences have consequences—particularly in matters related to sex and social reproduction. Grand schemes of French colonial racial order lumped all sub-Saharan Africans into one category of blackness, or noir. Achille Mbembe has argued that “the racial unity of Africa has always been a myth.”3 Recent historical publications have qualified his assessment by examining interracial and multiracial communities that resulted from colonial encounters inside and outside of white settler colonies.4 The conjugal relationships between West African men and congolaises or malgaches challenge persistent misconceptions of Africa’s racial homogeny and demand that we employ concepts and terminology that accurately describe these heterogeneous African colonial military households. In the introduction, I argued for the application of “interraciality” beyond the colonizer/colonized divide. In this chapter, I use “inter-African” for mixed African military families to highlight the deep cultural divides between women and men from different regions of Africa who formed households on the frontiers of French Empire.
GOING THE DISTANCE: WEST AFRICANS IN FRENCH EMPIRE
West African soldiers’ conjugality played a prominent role in determining where they deployed in nineteenth-century French Empire. Household composition and tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices featured in administrative discussions about the effectiveness of West African troops in other regions of French Empire—French Indochina (contemporary Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), French Congo (contemporary Republic of Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic, and Chad), and Madagascar. Discussions about tirailleurs sénégalais’ utility in empire began in Southeast Asia, but they did not deploy to Vietnam until 1948. Mesdames tirailleurs were consequential to these deferred actions. Military officials believed that tirailleurs sénégalais’ West African households were sacrosanct to French colonial military campaigns and Indochinese officials did not. Officials disagreed about whether tirailleurs sénégalais should serve en famille (with their West African households) in Vietnam or should deploy as single men who could participate in prolonged conjugal unions or temporary marriages with Indochinese female colonial subjects. Household migration and local conditions in Vietnam, Congo, and Madagascar influenced the degree to which West African women and/or local women became legitimate members of “sénégalais” households.
A decade after the creation of the tirailleurs sénégalais, administrative officials in southern Vietnam broached the possibility of employing tirailleurs sénégalais as part of a permanent security force in French Indochina. Vietnamese officials specified that a small percentage of soldiers could bring their West African wives and recommended that most soldiers locate temporary local wives.5 The initial request in 1867 went unmet. Conversations regarding the use of West African soldiers in Southeast Asia periodically resurfaced over the next forty years. French officials in Indochina explicitly connected West African soldiers’ martial utility with their sexuality and conjugal practices. Officials wrote of West African men’s carnal desires and paternalism as if these were inveterate qualities. Indochinese officials queried tirailleurs sénégalais’ preferences for West African women and their desire to maintain racially homogenous households. These officials regarded the presence of West African women in Vietnam as a potential threat to the conjugal conventions that French colonial occupation had created in Southeast Asia. Since colonization in 1862, French soldiers stationed in Vietnam developed traditions of temporary conjugal and/or transactional sexual relationships with local women.6 If West African soldiers deployed to French Indochina, officials expected them to abandon aspects of their conjugal and marital practices to conform to local precedent.
Administrators in Indochina and West Africa agreed that West African soldiers required access to women’s conjugal and domestic labor, but disagreed on the importance of shared racial origins and nuclear household models for tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices. These debates continued into the 1890s, when it became clear that Indochinese officials no longer considered the presence of mesdames tirailleurs in their colony viable. By the turn of the twentieth century, an official requesting one hundred Senegalese or Soudanese tirailleurs for policing purposes in Laos unambiguously stated that these soldiers “must come to Laos without their families” and should “take one or several wives in-country.”7 In this proposed scheme, married tirailleurs sénégalais could leave their households in West Africa and engage in polygynous, extramarital, and polyamorous relationships with local women while deployed in Southeast Asia. Officials predicted that these soldiers would repatriate to West Africa after two or three years of service in Laos. There was no mention of their Laotian conjugal partners or potential children accompanying them home. This Indochinese official thought little of West African soldiers’ fidelity to their conjugal households on the home front. French soldiers’ widespread practice of temporary conjugality in Vietnam may have led administrators in Southeast Asia to assume that tirailleurs sénégalais could adapt to the same sexual practices. Following, there is a sense in the documents that these officials were unconvinced that mesdames tirailleurs were legitimate wives. Therefore, mesdames tirailleurs could be replaced with local Indochinese women who could perform similar conjugal labors without committing adultery. Indochinese military officials endorsed conjugal strategies in which tirailleurs sénégalais entered into temporary conjugal relationships at a time when West African military officials encouraged soldiers’ domestic stability in the form of racially homogenous mobile African military households.
Administrators across empire differed in how they viewed soldiers’ household integrity and the role of West African women in colonial conquest. They were unable to agree on how to define these conjugal unions—marriage, casual romantic liaison, temporary marriage, or concubinage—because of disagreements over where West African troops should locate romantic partners and how the military would support them. West African administrators lauded mesdames tirailleurs as essential to troop retention and stabilization on colonial campaigns. A West African administrator described tirailleurs sénégalais’ households as monogamous strongholds held together by enduring bonds. Another argued that prolonged separation would adversely affect tirailleurs sénégalais’ households.8 There was overwhelming West African–based administrative support for mesdames tirailleurs’ participation in the military expansion and maintenance of empire. These strong beliefs defeated a proposal to create a local committee in Senegal to maintain West African wives during their husbands’ active service in Indochina. The rejection of this proposal buttressed an implicit nineteenth-century belief—the military was not obligated to support tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal partners if they did not live within mobile military units. Despite these extensive imperial debates, tirailleurs sénégalais and their military households did not deploy to French Indochina until the mid-twentieth century. However, these debates illustrate how the French colonial military transformed a “tacit” understanding into a defensible privilege—tirailleurs sénégalais became entitled to wives while they served in French Empire.9
CONGO
Beginning in 1875, French