Militarizing Marriage. Sarah J. Zimmerman

households, we can query the theoretical constructions of colonial binaries, intermediaries, and the boundaries of subjecthood. Historians have identified indigenous African employees as social actors and colonial intermediaries in order to complicate interpretations of imperial power that rely on dichotomies like colonized/colonizer, subject/citizen, or African/European. Scholarship on intermediary concepts and actors has tended toward the historicization of men due to the gendered nature of colonial education and employment. The female conjugal partners of tirailleurs sénégalais provide an opportunity to examine women’s contribution to the articulation of colonial governance, economies, and traditions. Military wives and households offer historians a means to address the ambiguous and inconsistent manifestations of gendered colonial power.⁵⁶ Colonial rule’s daily operations would not have been possible without female and male colonial subjects who took advantage of the “new opportunities created by colonial conquest and colonial rule to pursue their own agendas even as they served their employers.”⁵⁷ Tirailleurs sénégalais’ motivations to become members of the French colonial army were innumerable and complicated by individuals’ history and social context.⁵⁸ Tirailleurs sénégalais could have been seeking autonomy from their elders, resources to build households, or the ability to defy the constraints of communal authority. The means through which female colonial subjects became soldiers’ wives were equally complex, with varying degrees of volition and consent. These women could have sought conjugal relationships with tirailleurs sénégalais in order to liberate themselves from the authority of their community, leave previous husbands, or for wanderlust.⁵⁹ The social and material interests of colonized women and men making up military households influenced the articulation of French colonialism for a century.

      Tirailleurs sénégalais and their wives challenge the traditional chronologies affiliated with the onset, conclusion, and legacies of colonialism. For the former wives of Mamadou Lamine Drame, colonialism began with perfunctory nuptials and forced labor as military auxiliaries prior to the formalization of colonial rule in the upper reaches of the Senegal River. For women like Vuti Chat, colonialism ended not with Vietnam’s independence in 1954, but in 1960 in Senegal—though she continued to collect a widow’s pension from the postcolonial French state into the twenty-first century. Some tirailleurs sénégalais experienced decolonization three times—in Indochina, in Algeria, and in their home colonies. Their pensions served as a cause célèbre in postcolonial criticism in the 2000s. For many participating in these debates, French colonialism was an ongoing and palpable twenty-first-century experience.

      The tirailleurs sénégalais and their marital traditions occurred within the Third, Fourth, and Fifth French Republics. The heralded universalism of French Republican law did not extend into tirailleurs sénégalais’ households.⁶⁰ The majority of women and men in African military households were colonial subjects. The legacies of colonial exploitation were bound to the historical status of colonial subjecthood. Tirailleurs sénégalais and their conjugal partners lived in and traversed colonial contexts where they were beholden to ambiguous and shifting legal statuses and regimes. Cross-colonial households demonstrate that the ad hoc interpretation and application of colonial law—related to marriage—in West Africa could inform legal practices in other regions of French Empire. Legal practice or its exception was not tethered to a particular colony. For example, West African marital customs, which were in constant revision in order to accommodate local colonial rule, also informed soldiers’ marital practices in Madagascar or Vietnam.

      Via tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships, Militarizing Marriage expands the geographic horizons of West Africans’ colonial history and places emphasis on the migration of female colonial subjects across empire. Women are often cast as “passive” migrants, which results from misrepresentations of women’s (especially African women’s) agency in initiating conjugal relationships or long-distance migrations.⁶¹ Migrant female conjugal partners and tirailleurs sénégalais were part of elaborate systems of imperial labor migration involving the blunt manifestation of colonial power. Their imperial “presence and activities performed the crucial and complicated race-work and sex-work that contributed to racially hierarchizing and engendering ‘free’ labor” in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Empire.⁶² West African colonial soldiers and their female conjugal partners sought to fulfill their own desires and sociocultural traditions while performing the work of colonialism. Concerns for the domestic realm were often central to the ways in which active soldiers labored for the colonial state and maintained conjugal relationships in and across empire.⁶³ Interests in maintaining shared household responsibilities and fulfilling domestic labor obligations motivated colonized women to do the same.

      African military households participated in south-south migration. These trans-imperial movements challenge the core-periphery model of colonial history, where information and historical causality flow unidirectionally from the French metropole into its colonies. Studies of imperial migrant households tend to focus on the circulation of Europeans in empire.⁶⁴ The historical cross-colonial movements of West African soldiers and their female conjugal partners reveals connections and exchanges among radically different people brought together by war and colonialism. During the period covered by the first half of this study, migration “en famille” was a mechanism that provided official recognition of soldiers’ conjugal relationships. After World War I, cross-colonial migration became a consequence of, not a precursor to, legitimate marriage. The long-distance migrations of soldiers’ foreign wives demonstrated their independence, adventurousness, and willingness to transgress traditional expectations as much as it demonstrated their subjugation, victimization, and vulnerability in French colonial empire.

      Trans-imperial relocation was a constitutive element of women’s transformation from conjugal partner to legitimate wife. Militarizing Marriage follows female and male colonial subjects who traversed the terrains of imperial “bourgeois culture” and left their footprints in the drying concrete of colonial marital policy and imperial ideas related to racial order.⁶⁵ West African, inter-African, and interracial/cross-colonial military households relied on the colonial state for legitimacy because their marriages occurred within imperial labor schemes and outside the bounds of their own marital traditions. By financing the cross-colonial migration of African military households, colonial officials bound them to state power and authority.⁶⁶ Similarly, soldiers’ households were crucial to state security and military strategy in the international/imperial sphere.⁶⁷ This colonial history of long-distance marital relationships and mobile conjugal partners antedates, but is informed by, literature on contemporary West African migrants and their transnational households.⁶⁸

      The diverse racial, ethnic, and geographic origins of tirailleurs sénégalais’ wives challenged imperial racial order and influenced how the military determined West African soldiers’ household legitimacy. Conjugal unions between European men and colonized women have received scholarly attention due to a growing interest in the confluence of race, sexuality, and power in colonial history.⁶⁹ The product of these unions, métis, “mixed” race, or interracial children are the focus of a number of recent publications historicizing colonial policy and the social integration of these minority colonial populations.⁷⁰ The interracial relationships between West African soldiers and colonized women from other parts of French Empire have received less attention, even though their conjugal relationships unfolded in arenas where dense and dangerous transfers of colonial power transpired.⁷¹ This may have much to do with how contemporary historians have inherited the racial, “ethnic,” and national constructs that the Europeans produced to organize their empire.⁷² According to colonial logic, West African soldiers’ cross-colonial conjugal relationships with Malagasy or Congolese women did not result in interracial children because French officials lumped all sub-Saharan Africans into the same race. Militarizing Marriage makes plain that tirailleurs sénégalais’ inter-African, interracial, and cross-colonial relationships with women from the African continent and other parts of French Empire merit the same types of nuanced examination typical to studies of race and sexuality in colonial history.

      SOURCES AND METHODS

      Women and households were crucial to military and political expansion in French Empire, yet the women affiliated with tirailleurs sénégalais seemed to