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"In his lucid new study of Malian veterans of the French colonial army, Gregory Mann raises provocative new themes for writing conjoined local, colonial, and postcolonial histories. He has elegantly captured the dense web of human relations, discourses of obligation, and reconfigured social ties that link the dusty town of San (Mali) to the many other outposts of the republican imperial state as well as the postcolonial capitals of Paris and Bamako."--Alice L. Conklin, author of "A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930"

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NATIVE SONS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................viiINTRODUCTION.............................................................................................11 SOLDIER FAMILIES AND SLAVERY'S ECHOES..................................................................292 EX-SOLDIERS AS UNRULY CLIENTS, 1914-40.................................................................633 VETERANS AND THE POLITICAL WARS OF 1940-60.............................................................1084 A MILITARY CULTURE ON THE MOVE: TIRAILLEURS SNGALAIS IN FRANCE, AFRICA, AND ASIA.....................1465 BLOOD DEBT, IMMIGRANTS, AND ARGUMENTS..................................................................183CONCLUSION...............................................................................................210Appendix: Interviews.....................................................................................217Abbreviations............................................................................................221Notes....................................................................................................225References...............................................................................................295Index....................................................................................................321

Chapter One

IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY MALI, colonial military service was a crucial component of the dynamism of social life, and it opened up radical possibilities to soldiers' families, particularly for their sons. What held for short-term conscripts was all the more true for career soldiers. Yet since so many tirailleurs were of slave status, the practice and consequences of soldiering cannot easily be disentangled from the social aftermath of slavery and subordination. In the Sahel, the repercussions of widespread slavery affected social relations throughout the colonial period and well after independence. Indeed, like many of its neighbors, contemporary Mali is as much a post-slavery society as it is a postcolonial one. By honing in on one particular family of soldiers, this chapter listens to slavery's echoes and attempts to interpret their meaning in colonial and postcolonial contexts, as well as for veterans' politics. It locates social struggles and state policies, clumsy politics and savvy clientage in the history of two brothers and of a father and a son. Finally, it introduces the reader unfamiliar with Sudanic West Africa to a certain perspective on the region's recent history, from the nineteenth century through the 1960s.

Slavery and Post-slavery

In the decades before the colonial conquest, neighboring slave and free villages dotted the rolling plains between Segu and San. The rulers of the expanding empire of Segu had installed slave (vassal) villages to act as both military outposts and farming settlements. Those villages offered support for the kingdom's campaigning armies, helped secure and cultivate productive agricultural land, and acted as a potential buffer against invasion. Many such villages were occupied by former tonjonw, as the slave soldiers of Segu's army were known, and they benefited from the protection of Segu even as they endured its demands. However, after al-Hajj Umar Tal's invading jihadist army broke the back of that kingdom and its vassal states in the early 1860s, insecurity grew. Tal and his successors destroyed Segu, but they could neither replace it nor entirely subdue the surviving elements of its army, even as they sought to incorporate these men into their own ranks. Vicious cycles of raiding and small-scale warfare that had begun under Bamana Segu were merely interrupted by the passage of Tal's forces. For armed bandits and tonjon, kidnapping became a very lucrative enterprise, and their violent skills grew ever more valuable. Inhabitants of some of the villages west of San recount their ancestors' ordeals with a clarity born of dread.

Although these raids were novel in their intensity, slavery as an institution had a long and complex history in the Western Sudan. The commercial and ritual exchange of people was ancient, if uncommon, before the seventeenth century, when, as Paul Lovejoy has argued, Euro-American and Maghrebian demand and African economic strategies began to transform slavery into a key political, social, and economic institution in much of West Africa. The spread of firearms and stronger horses accompanied and enabled the escalation of slave raiding and trading in the savannah and the Sahel. By the eighteenth century, the economies of such states as Bamana Segu relied largely on slave labor, regional trade in slaves, and various forms of debt bondage. In a region undergoing a rapid and intense commercial transition as the trans-Atlantic trade declined from early in the nineteenth century, merchants and rulers sought ever more slaves to produce agricultural commodities such as grain and to satisfy the Senegambian, desert-edge, and trans-Saharan trades.

Even in the context of the commercial transition, a logic of gradual incorporation of slaves-rather than their continued alienation-continued to dominate. It had long been common for slaves and slaveholders to live together and share many of the same tasks, but in the nineteenth-century Western Sudan, owners began to live and work apart from their slaves, whose chances of emancipation or integration decreased accordingly. Yet where slaves and masters did live together, women and (less frequently) men often entered slowly into the domestic life of slave-holding families. The gradual consumption of slaves and their children by slave-holding families was neither as benevolent nor as benign as has been suggested. The children of female slaves were generally considered to belong to the owner and his or her family, regardless of who the father was. Such children and adults composed the category of servants known as wolosow, or those born in the house. They were commonly understood not to be subject to sale on the open market. Across much of Sudanic Africa, a sharp distinction existed between such wolosow and slaves obtained by trade or capture (jonw), on whom the most onerous demands were made. The commercial transition on which the conquering French armies would eventually rely for grain and other agricultural commodities largely took place on the backs of the jonw, while the French themselves depended on the labor of runaways and captives.

French military men like Captain Monteil were portrayed as agents of mercy for imposing French rule and bringing an end to slavery and raiding, but talk of abolition was meant for metropolitan and civilian consumption. It was not a directive for action on the ground. Slavery continued under French military rule, even if the commercial trade in slaves may have declined considerably. Only under a civilian administration in the first years of the twentieth century did the government of the newly formed federation of French West Africa (AOF) formally instruct its agents to cease recognizing the legal category of slaves and to reject all claims for compensation by owners. In 1905, a presidential decree "abolished enslavement and...