Militarizing Marriage. Sarah J. Zimmerman

modest presence on the right bank of the Congo River. By the turn of the twentieth century, French Congo encompassed a territory that includes the contemporary countries of Gabon, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic, as well as regions of Cameroon and Chad. Beginning in 1875, Savorgnan de Brazza, a French-Italian aristocrat with an elite military school pedigree, led several West African missions into Equatorial Africa. These missions explored the Ogowe, Congo, Sangha, and Ubangi River basins with the intention of acquiring trading rights and increasing French entrepreneurs’ access to land and locally produced resources. Twelve laptots from coastal Senegal were members of the first mission, which explored the Ogowe River basin from 1875 to 1878. West Africans’ presence in Congo increased with each subsequent mission led by de Brazza (1879–82 and 1883–85). At the height of European conquest of Africa, de Brazza became the general commissioner of Gabon and Congo in 1886. A dozen years later, France carved Equatorial Africa into enormous parcels of land and awarded them as concessions to private commercial investors.¹⁰ West African military laborers were integral to these processes.

      MAP 2.1. French Congo / French Equatorial Africa. Map by Isaac Barry

      State-sponsored and privately hired agents recruited West African men for security forces and other skilled professions needed in de Brazza’s missions and other commercial enterprises in Congo. By the third West African mission, de Brazza had recognized the incomparable and irreplaceable talents of West Africans serving in Congo. Sergeant Malamine Camara was celebrated above all others. The only indigenous sergeant in the laptots corps, he single-handedly defended France’s territorial claims on the right bank of the Congo in 1881. Camara stared down Belgium’s hired hand, Henry Morton Stanley.¹¹ Sergeant Camara was also instrumental in recruiting 169 West African laptots for de Brazza’s third mission in March of 1883. This expedition included a panoply of West Africans, including former tirailleurs sénégalais and Krumen recruited from coastal areas spanning contemporary Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire.¹² In addition to tirailleurs sénégalais regiments and laptots corps, West African men signed up to serve in Congo as miliciens (militiamen), muleteers, porters, construction workers, and railway men. Despite these diverse origins and titles among these recruited laborers, once in Congo, French colonial employees and autochthonous populations referred to this heterogeneous group as “sénégalais.”¹³

      The “sénégalais” in nineteenth-century Congo were a diverse and mobile population managed by a variety of authorities. These West Africans blurred distinctions between military employee and civil contractor. They changed employment frequently, swapping state-funded contracts for private enterprise. West African laptots and tirailleurs sénégalais were institutionally distinct, yet in Congo these titles could refer broadly to armed West Africans affiliated with French and other European agents.¹⁴ Some of these men were military employees, but many were civilians recruited specifically for exploration and infrastructure projects. At the conclusion of their contracts, laptots, tirailleurs sénégalais, and miliciens transitioned into noncombatant employment in Congo. They deployed myriad strategies to remain in Congo. These men integrated into local communities through marriage, hired themselves out as guides to foreign merchants, and became successful traders in their own right.¹⁵ Due to budgetary shortfalls, a ministerial decree disbanded the garrison housing laptots and tirailleurs sénégalais in 1891. Decommissioned soldiers became an integral part of local militias recruited by private enterprises in the Congo basin.¹⁶ West African military and civilian employees in French Congo traversed colonial boundaries in search of better-compensated work. Men abandoned their contracts with the French and sought higher-paying work across the river in the Belgian Congo Free State.¹⁷ The Congo Free State also recruited “sénégalais” directly from French territories in West Africa—with and without the approval of French colonial authorities.¹⁸ Once they arrived in Belgian Congo, these laborers, hired for road building and rail laying, found themselves press-ganged into military service.¹⁹ Deserters fled west across the Congo River in search of French administrative assistance and return passage to West Africa. Others sought work within the French colonial state or as security forces for concessionary companies.²⁰

      Soldiers, civilians, and colonial officials from West Africa had a heavy hand in the colonization of Congo. They brought tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal traditions with them. At different moments in conquest, French officials encouraged their West African employees to travel en famille and/or to seek local conjugal partners. West African women were not listed in the inventories of employees in the first three West African missions.²¹ Colonial records rarely included soldiers’ female conjugal partners as official members of military campaigns and scientific missions. Their absence in the official record does not indicate that West African women were not present in these colonial endeavors. However, occasional references to West African men poorly executing domestic chores, which would have otherwise been allocated to their female domestic partners, suggest that mesdames tirailleurs did not have a large presence in Congo during the 1870s and 1880s. Biran Fall, a “sénégalais” serving in de Brazza’s second West African mission, was removed from kitchen duty because he washed dishes with spit, then wiped them dry with soiled socks.²² West African servicemen’s families began traveling with them to Equatorial Africa in the mid-1890s.²³ In June 1894, the wives of a tirailleurs sénégalais battalion sent to Congo were erroneously left behind in Saint-Louis. In order to remedy the situation, a local official proposed that the military earmark a portion of their husbands’ pay in order to support their abandoned families in Saint-Louis.²⁴ This proposal came at a time in which administrators across French Empire debated the conjugal and marital proclivities of tirailleurs sénégalais. Despite West African officials’ overwhelming support for the mobility and integrity of African military households, the majority of West African female conjugal partners remained on the home front. Most of the “sénégalais” serving in Equatorial Africa at the end of the nineteenth century sought female conjugal partners among local populations. French officials encouraged and supported their West African employees’ access to and unions with Congolese women.

      West African and inter-African military families coexisted in Congo. There is evidence from the twentieth century that speaks to their durable presence. West Africans and congolaises set up their domestic households adjacent to military posts and colonial trading centers. Some West Africans chose to remain in Equatorial Africa after the conclusion of their contracts and established family compounds in growing colonial towns like Libreville, Franceville, and Brazzaville. By 1905, African military households had established their own village at the edge of Brazzaville.²⁵ At the beginning of the First World War, urban colonial officials channeled most West Africans into Poto-Poto, the “African” neighborhood of Brazzaville. Poto-Poto has an avenue named for Sergeant Malamine Camara and continues to serve as a locus for West African migrants today.²⁶ The West Africa populations residing in contemporary Poto-Poto are seldom the descendants of tirailleurs sénégalais and mesdames tirailleurs households. An official decree in 1905 withdrew government assistance for the relocation of mesdames tirailleurs to Congo. Even so, there was an inquiry from Kayes in 1906 regarding whether locally recruited miliciens could bring all, or some, members of their families to Congo.²⁷ By 1909, the prohibition on mesdames tirailleurs’ travel to Equatorial Africa influenced some potential male labor recruits to remain in West Africa and seek work locally.²⁸ West African men continued to travel to Congo as independent entrepreneurs and contractors. If so inclined, they would have sought conjugal partnership among local populations.

      MADAGASCAR

      French colonization of Madagascar brought significant numbers of West Africans to the Indian Ocean island. Formal colonization in Madagascar occurred gradually in the early nineteenth century and came to challenge the dominion of the Merina and Sakalava kingdoms in the latter half of the century.²⁹ In the 1890s, France accelerated its conquest of Madagascar and brought military forces to the island, which included a variety of mainland Africans whose origins extended from Saint-Louis to Brazzaville. Some of these tirailleurs arrived with their families. Troop and household composition reflected France’s military conquest of West and Equatorial