Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire by Sarah J. Zimmerman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire by Sarah J. Zimmerman Dahlia El Zein Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire By Sarah J. Zimmerman. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2020. "African and colonial epistemologies are mutually constitutive" (22), Sarah J. Zimmerman argues in the tour de force that is her book, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire. Although this is not a new formulation, as scholars of colonial history have long understood (and debated) the messiness of colonialism and its various proxies and intermediaries render useless, rigid binaries of colonized/colonizer, colony/metropole, and the like. What is novel in her argument is the foregrounding of women—wives, conjugal partners, and families of West African soldiers as essential interlocutors in the expansion of French empire, and the vulnerabilities, violence, discrimination, and sometimes benefits that came with that. Today, the families of West African soldiers are still fighting for pensions and adequate recognition for their service from the French state. West African soldiers, known by their misnomer tirailleurs sénégalais were recruited or conscripted into the French colonial army from 1857 until the last tour of duty in French Algeria before the dissolution of France's empire in 1962. In the scholarly literature, historians have written a fair amount about the presence of African soldiers in the French army during the world wars, the discrimination they faced in the metropole, and the intense efforts by the French to prevent miscegenation and whitewash their armies on European battlefields. This was not specific to France either. African-American soldiers faced similar experiences in the United States army, Germany also recruited and conscripted African soldiers from their colonies in East Africa, and the British army did the same with soldiers from their South Asian and African colonies. The experiences of tirailleurs sénégalais in colonial settings across the French empire is less studied and particularly absent in the literature is the role of conjugal partners. Filling this lacuna, Zimmerman's book spans six countries, twenty archival units, and oral histories conducted in the homes of fifty West African veterans. This rich, multi-sited transnational work follows tirailleurs sénégalais and their conjugal relationships, emphasizing the gendered aspects of colonial rule layered on top of its racialized and classist hierarchies. In an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue, Zimmerman tracks the continuities and changes in West African soldiers' conjugal traditions over time and space, across the French empire from the 1880s in the initial conquests of West African hinterlands to the violent expansion of French colonial rule into Congo and Madagascar to North Africa and Southeast Asia into the mid-twentieth century. The book is organized chronologically and regionally, spanning from 1857 to 1962. Zimmerman uses "conjugal partner" to refer to the women in West African soldiers' heteronormative households because the French word "femme" could mean wife, sex worker, domestic partner, enslaved female or concubine also denoting a range of consent and violence enacted on, and experienced by these women's bodies. At the core of her argument is how West African soldiers and their households were instrumental in shaping colonial law, inventing new traditions of French empire through their cross-colonial encounters that located military households at the intersection of West African, French and military traditions of marriage. In Chapter 1, "Marrying into the Military: Colonization, Emancipation and Martial Community in West Africa: 1880–1900," Zimmerman shows how precolonial African states and the French colonial state relied on enslaved and/or formerly enslaved men for their armed forces. For women this meant that "colonial agents obscured the distinction between female slave and wife in colonial African military households" (30). The presence of tirailleurs sénégalais and their ability to successfully expand France's colonial holdings into West Africa and acquire households on campaign (read: forced conjugal attachment) set the stage for their expansion as a violent colonizing force into further desirable territories for French empire. Chapter 2, "Colonial Conquest 'en famille'" takes us to Congo and Madagascar where we see the instrumentalization of the tirailleurs sénégalais as transnational agents of empire and what...