Militarizing Marriage. Sarah J. Zimmerman

Soudan, to Madagascar to assume military and civilian leadership of France’s newest colony. Gallieni relied on West African women and men to impose military order and then encouraged them to remain as civilians on Madagascar. “Sénégalais” gained a reputation on the island as violent colonial intermediaries. Senegalese soldiers serving in Madagascar were rumored to kill men, reduce women to slavery, and pull the hearts out of children.³⁰ It is not clear whether tirailleurs sénégalais were exceptionally violent in Madagascar in comparison with their previous exploits in West Africa and Congo. These rumors could indicate widespread disapproval of foreign Africans participating in the violence accompanying French colonial conquest.

      MAP 2.2. French Madagascar. Map by Isaac Barry

      In December 1894, the French landed expeditionary forces at the strategic ports of Toamasina and Mahajanga. From these coastal enclaves, French troops marched into the highlands toward the Merina capital to enforce France’s prerogative over the island. Ten percent of the fifteen thousand French troops entering Antananarivo on 30 September 1894 were West and North African soldiers.³¹ The West African troops serving in this campaign were labeled haoussa tirailleurs. Haoussa soldiers were a motley crew that had been recruited from disbanded tirailleurs sénégalais battalions and new recruits from contemporary Benin/Nigeria borderlands. Some had served as tirailleurs sénégalais in Congo in the early 1890s.³² In 1891, two companies of tirailleurs sénégalais left Congo for Dahomey in order to participate in France’s conquest of the kingdom.³³ Behanzin, the leader of Dahomey, surrendered in 1894 to a French African colonial army that included troops recruited from the Senegal and Niger River basins, West and Central Africans previously residing in Congo, and a potpourri of troops recruited from Dahomey and its environs. The French had begun recruiting this final group in 1893 and labeled them haoussa soldiers. The traditional homeland of Hausa speakers is located north of the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers. The French recruited haoussa soldiers from across the border in Yoruba-speaking areas under British colonial control in neighboring Nigeria. There were likely a minority of Hausa speakers among the haoussa troops and the French military’s use of the term is misleading and misrepresents the ethnolinguistic origins of their soldiers. These mislabeled haoussa servicemen from the Dahomeyan campaign were among the first troops to serve France in Madagascar.³⁴ Evidence from the Madagascan campaign suggests that conjugal partners were with these haoussa soldiers, but it is unclear whether these women traveled with West African tirailleurs to Madagascar or were malgache women whom soldiers had incorporated into colonial regiments during their march from coastal ports to Antananarivo.³⁵ Hundreds of porters and muleteers from the Senegal and Niger River basins were also among these forces, but these militarized civilian employees rarely brought their households into French Empire.³⁶

      After the initial French troop buildup in Madagascar, leaders of the Merina Kingdom—Queen Ranavalona III and Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony—signed a treaty with France on 1 October 1895. This treaty unambiguously made Madagascar a French protectorate state. France faced a range of thorny social and political issues on the island. Merina state control over low-status men had faltered as their system of forced labor, the fanompoana, devolved in the 1890s. The fanompoana had channeled these men into state infrastructure projects and the Merina military. The destabilization of the monarchy prompted many imperial Merina subjects to flee conscription and engage in banditry on the margins of Merina’s empire.³⁷ The capitulation of the royal family weakened the state military and strengthened marauding bands whose membership began to include defecting soldiers and former slaves. In a context of increasing instability, the Menalamba uprising began in earnest during November 1895. Menalamba refers to the red shawls that the participants wore. These women and men sought to violently remove foreigners and foreign influence from Madagascar.

      The French inadvertently bolstered the number of Madagascans participating in the Menalamba uprising by abolishing slavery in August 1896. This decree occurred in tandem with the formal designation of Madagascar as a French colony. The estimated number of slaves in Madagascar at the moment of emancipation varies from five hundred thousand to one million slaves—on an island with a population of two and a half million.³⁸ The French fueled social chaos in Madagascar by untethering at least 20 percent of the islands’ residents from their former masters and the Merina state. Former slaves joined the ongoing uprising in order to survive without their former patrons.³⁹ As the numbers of Menalamba participants grew, the nascent French colony responded by consolidating military and civilian power in the hands of recently promoted General Joseph-Simon Gallieni.