Our New Husbands Are Here

5: Conquest: Warfare, Marriage, and French Statecraft

115 5 w Conquest Warfare, Marriage, and French Statecraft In 1891, Colonel Louis Archinard, a French military officer, sought to increase France’s territorial holdings in the interior of West Africa by launching an aggressive military campaign against Samori Touré. He explained his motives for advancing into the Milo River Valley by declaring, “I have come to return to Daye the country of Baté.”1 French forces did occupy Kankan and restore the Kaba family to the chieftaincy in the spring of that year. But Archinard did not succeed in his effort to capture Samori and destroy his state. Instead, the arrival of the French in the Milo River Valley brought into confrontation two warring forms of statecraft, one French and one Samorian. In this context, men with guns continued to act as the ultimate arbiters of power, and whether they wore a French uniform or served as a sofa, these armed men meted out victory and defeat in slaves and spoils. Although Samori eventually retreated from the Milo River Valley and left it to the French, the upheaval that followed the early years of French rule indicates that the colonial occupation unfolded tenuously and unsteadily, and that the colonizers did not arrive in the interior savannas of West Africa with a clearly articulated, fully crystallized system of colonial statecraft. Although the French colonizers may not have been as organized or as omniscient in conquest as they claimed at the time—and as historians have often mistakenly assumed—they did manifest a key difference from previous state-makers who had established themselves in the Milo River Valley. This difference is one that the scholarly literature on colonialism has tended to implicitly recognize but not to critically analyze or treat as historically significant . That is, the colonizers divided the political sphere from the domestic sphere, for the French did not seek to anchor the colonial state by entering 116 w Conquest into marital alliances with women from prominent local families, nor did they view household-formation as a vehicle to articulate the power and wealth of the colonial state. French officials instead created a masculinist, territorial, bureaucratic system of rule that, in principle, separated white French officials, who embodied the colonial state, from black African women, who embodied the colonial domestic sphere. But, as this chapter shows, this racialized principle of gender segregation did not always translate into practice. Many French officials posted to “isolated” districts in the interior of West Africa refused to sacrifice the pleasures and comforts of intimacy with African women to the cultural and political ideals of colonization. But French officials treated their locally made households and their relationships with African women as private, clandestine affairs, not as a tool of statecraft. French colonial elites considered their personal lives as politically insignificant, and the progeny that resulted from their “temporary marriages” as one of the undesirable, if inevitable, consequences of colonization. This chapter uses documentary and oral sources to illuminate the protracted French conquest and occupation of Kankan and the Milo River Valley in the 1890s. In many ways, the initial phase of the colonial conquest bore close resemblance to the period of warfare that Samori had brought to new heights in the 1870s and 1880s, for the French incursion emboldened and empowered young men in search of captives and booty. But as the first decade of the occupation reveals, the French had difficulties bringing under control patterns of predation and enslavement to which their own conquest contributed , and both local and archival records confirm that the establishment of colonial rule proceeded fitfully in the Milo River Valley. Although the French colonizers shared many attributes with previous military state-makers, analysis of the households that they built in West Africa shows important divergences from their predecessors—and helps explain why no enduring familial ties emerged between the old and new political elites now resident in the Milo River Valley. This investigation shows that the relationship between statecraft and household formation continues to offer an illuminating perspective onto the organization and logic of a given political regime—even when the elites in question sought to depoliticize their personal lives and disconnect altogether their own households from the making and the maintenance of the state. the french conquest and oc c u pati on of the milo river valley When the French colonial military launched its campaign against Samori in 1891, it entered into an already violent and volatile political landscape. Contrary to common assumptions, however, superior technology and...