The use of the term “wife” to refer to tirailleurs sénégalais’ female sexual partners is deceiving due to the manifold meanings embedded in the French word femme. Femme directly translates to both “wife” and “woman.” Written sources and informants predominantly employed femme over épouse (female spouse) to refer to tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal partners, which masked the degree to which state agents, women, or soldiers assigned legitimacy to the marital status of women. Depending on context, the word femme was an umbrella term for any number of the following meanings: official or unofficial wife, girlfriend, concubine, female slave, sex worker, or domestic partner. Military officials used femme to refer to women maintaining monogamous relationships with soldiers, as well as to cast aspersions on West African soldiers’ extramarital, polyamorous, and polygynous romantic partners. As a result, throughout this book, the word “wife” remains imprecise, contested, and ambiguous—even when lacking scare quotes. I use “conjugal partner” throughout this book because the conditions of colonialism and militarism undermined the ability of tirailleurs sénégalais and female colonial subjects to consent to practices affiliated with matrimony. These conditions also prevented willing partners from legitimizing their conjugal unions with the state, or according to their own conventions.
The subjugation of women was essential to the manifestation and articulation of military power and colonial rule. Tirailleurs sénégalais’ households, when considered as part of a longer tradition of martial matrimony, illustrate the ways in which gendered power operated through institutions of the colonial military, the civilian state, and individual actors in diverse geographic contexts. The conjugal relationships that tirailleurs sénégalais sought while serving in empire are comparable to Susan Zeiger’s observation of twentieth-century American soldiers’ overseas conjugal behaviors, which “existed in a matrix of warfront interaction between American soldiers and local women that encompassed courtship and dating, consensual and coerced sexual intercourse, informal and commercial prostitution, and sexual assault.”30 Tirailleurs sénégalais introduced new forms of marriage to French Empire because conquest and foreign rule altered local tradition around women’s sexuality and conjugality. Tirailleurs sénégalais represented a particular kind of racialized, masculine power harnessed to French colonial order. West African soldiers’ conjugal practices and marital traditions illustrate that ideologies of militarism and sexuality shaped social order from the nineteenth-century frontiers of French colonial conquest to wars of decolonization.31
MARRIAGE AT THE CONVERGENCE OF MILITARIZATION AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
The women distributed to tirailleurs sénégalais as wives in Bundu and Vuti Chat’s journey from war orphan to expatriate to wife collectively demonstrate that establishing households and legitimizing conjugal relationships were significant life events during West African soldiers’ military service. Households and marriage were integral components of political history in West Africa and French Empire, just as they were sites of intimate and emotional exchange.32 Tirailleurs sénégalais households’ domestic economy was bound up in France’s imperial and military political economy. Instead of shoring up boundaries between the public and the private, African military households transcended these categories. They also eroded distinctions between military and civilian populations. Across eighty years, the French colonial military and state increased their direct involvement in soldiers’ conjugal and marital relationships. Members of tirailleurs sénégalais households and the French colonial military modified prenuptial rites, altered pathways to marital legitimacy, and ultimately formed their own marital traditions. These traditions permit historians to take stock of continuity and change in multiple fields of inquiry because marriage is a multifaceted site of historical production.
Marriage became a key site of contestation where stakeholders—wives and husbands—disputed their obligations to their spouses and to the state. Individuals and states, via marriage, struggle over social reproduction and the articulation of state authority in the most intimate spheres of the human experience.33 Marriage is a means to extend kinship networks, build new economic and social connections, and encourage social and biological reproduction. Religious rites, cultural practices, and legal obligations affiliated with marriage are geographically specific and historically contingent. In the case of tirailleurs sénégalais and female colonial subjects, marriage could secure legal status, provide access to military resources, and legitimize their children. Efforts to legitimate and/or invalidate these intimate encounters encompassed challenges to colonial power and complex contestations concerning marital traditions and rights. The military allocated resources to soldiers’ wives and dependents when their relationships conformed to heteronormative, gendered, and racialized ideals of marriage. The colonial state approached West African soldiers’ conjugal unions as important sites of moral order, which could normalize tirailleurs sénégalais’ war-front sexual behavior. There were great risks and consequences for couples seeking to make their conjugal relationships legible to the French colonial army and/or state.
West African soldiers’ conjugal practices and the gendered power relationships within African military households were part of colonial martial custom. Martin Chanock’s seminal work notes that custom is a crucial index of identity.34 Historians have used this point to debate the teleological traps and specious fixity affiliated with tribal identities.35 The tirailleurs sénégalais was a military institution with a corporate identity historically tethered to French West Africa. The tirailleurs sénégalais was also a global institution, whose members reacted to and incorporated conjugal practices and marital customs from other regions of French Empire. Chanock’s work also demonstrates that marriage was a key site to witness the codification of marital customs during the colonial period, a codification that shored up male authority and extended control over women.36 Colonial courts and administrators took center stage in subsequent debates concerning the gendered power surrounding the transformation of marital traditions.37 Few historians have interrogated colonial militaries’ contribution to customary law. The tirailleurs sénégalais was an explicitly patriarchal institution and a violently coercive force that managed soldiers’ customs related to sexuality, conjugality, and marriage. Colonial soldiers and their families were on the front line of what Emily Burrill has identified as the colonial state’s marriage legibility project. African soldiers sought the military’s sanction for marital legitimacy in order to acquire state-allocated benefits for their households. However, as the military narrowed and fixed definitions of military marriages through policy and decree, these marriages diverged from civilian West Africans’ conjugal traditions.38
African military households sat at the convergence of West African, French, and military traditions of marriage within spaces of colonial conflict. African soldiers, their conjugal partners, and French officials had different ideas about prenuptial rites and what constituted legitimate marriage. In West Africa, marital rites differed according to community and were influenced by local and global religious beliefs—predominantly Islam. West African communities practiced polygyny and monogamy. Family organization occurred along matrilineal and patrilineal lines and extended beyond the nuclear family. Prenuptial customs for legitimate marriages could include the exchange of gifts, labor, or marriage payments. The socioeconomic rank, caste, or slave status/ancestry of prospective conjugal partners altered the ways in which individuals and communities observed premarital rites.39
The French colonial army made overtures toward codifying West African marital practices before the civilian colonial state made marital custom its prerogative. The military’s goal was to recognize a limited set of practices that would make tirailleurs sénégalais’ marriages more legible to military officials. The exchange of bridewealth was an early, favored standard for recognizing legitimate marriages in West Africa. As the colonial state and its military officials wedged diverse West African marital practices into French colonial and military traditions, they stripped